Ashland Boys' Association
Pennsylvania
The Ashland Boys' Association grew out of one of the harder facts of Pennsylvania's anthracite coal country: when the mines slowed, the young men left. Widespread job loss in the late eighteen hundreds pushed Ashland's sons out to find work elsewhere. But affection for home ran deep.
Around nineteen hundred, former residents formed the Ashland Boys' Association to keep that bond alive, gathering back every Labor Day for decades of homecoming celebrations that turned the town into a reunion. During the Great Depression, the organization raised funds for a mothers' memorial built through the Works Progress Administration. The association carried on those Labor Day homecomings until nineteen seventy-six.
It stands as a quiet testament to the loyalty that industrial communities inspire, and to the way a town's children, even scattered, can reach back and hold something together.
