Eckley Miners' Village

Eckley began in eighteen fifty-four as a company town called Fillmore, built from scratch to house the anthracite coal miners and their immigrant families who worked the seams beneath Luzerne County. It was later renamed for the prominent mining engineer Eckley Coxe. Dozens of identical patch towns like it once dotted northeastern Pennsylvania, row houses and a company store clustered around the colliery.

Coal production here eventually wound down. Then Hollywood arrived. The village was restored for the nineteen seventy film The Molly Maguires, starring Richard Harris and Sean Connery, which dramatized the secret Irish miners' society that fought brutal working conditions in these same hills a century earlier. After filming the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission took over the site, and Eckley is now a living history park, one of the most intact coal patch towns left in the region.