Down in the Mine: The Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour

A short drive from downtown Scranton, at the edge of McDade Park, you can descend into the earth and walk through an actual anthracite coal mine. The Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour takes visitors two hundred fifty feet underground, into the Clark Vein of coal, through shafts and chambers that were carved out of the mountain beginning in nineteen oh three and worked continuously until nineteen sixty-six.

The mine lay abandoned for twelve years after it closed. A two-and-a-half-million-dollar federal investment converted it into a museum, and it reopened in nineteen eighty-five. The guides who lead the tours are former miners or their children. They speak about the work from inside knowledge. They show you where the fire boss walked each morning before anyone else went down, checking for dangerous accumulations of gas. They show you the air doors that regulated ventilation through the tunnels, and they tell you about the door boys, children sometimes as young as eight or nine, who sat alone in the dark all day opening and closing those doors as coal cars passed through.

Inside the mine, the temperature holds at around fifty to fifty-four degrees year round. That is approximately the same temperature it was on the day the last miner came up and the shaft was sealed. Coal seams angle through the rock at the steep pitch of the original geological deposit. The walls are black and wet. The sound of dripping water is constant.

This is not a reconstruction. The chambers are original. The coal in the walls is real. Standing here, you understand something that photographs and history books cannot fully convey: the scale of what was asked of the people who did this work, every day, for wages that barely covered the rent on the company house.