Anthracite Coal and the Molly Maguires

The coal seams of northeastern Pennsylvania are hard anthracite, the cleanest-burning form of coal, nearly pure carbon, formed over three hundred million years of geologic compression. By the eighteen fifties, those seams were driving American industrialization, heating cities up and down the eastern seaboard. The men who dug them out were largely Irish immigrants, many of them refugees from the Great Famine, doing work that killed them at a rate the industry did not consider remarkable.

In the collieries of Schuylkill, Luzerne, and Carbon counties, a miner's life was shaped entirely by the company that owned the seam. Company-owned housing, company-owned stores, company-owned doctors, and a wage structure in which a man could work a full month and receive almost nothing after deductions. Cave-ins, gas explosions, and black lung disease were common.

Injured workers received no compensation. Dead workers left families without support. Out of this environment emerged a secret organization known as the Molly Maguires.

Who they were exactly, what they organized, and who was responsible for which acts of violence remains disputed. What the historical record establishes is this: between roughly eighteen sixty-five and eighteen seventy-five, a wave of assaults and murders struck mine bosses, supervisors, and company officials across the anthracite region. The coal operators blamed the Molly Maguires.

In eighteen seventy-three, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad hired the Pinkerton Detective Agency to infiltrate the organization. An agent named James McParlan spent two years undercover. Twenty men were hanged in connection with the campaign, in executions carried out in eighteen seventy-seven and eighteen seventy-eight.

Historians debate how reliable that testimony was, how independent the trials were from the railroad's influence, and whether some of the executed men were guilty of the specific crimes charged. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court declined repeated appeals. The executions proceeded.

The Molly Maguires left no definitive written record. What they left was a debate about labor, law, and the limits of corporate power that Pennsylvania, and America, has been having ever since.