Greene County: America's Last Deep-Mine Coal County

Greene County, Pennsylvania sits in the southwestern corner of the state, hemmed in by West Virginia to the south and west and the Monongahela River to the north. It was established in seventeen ninety-six, the same year its county seat of Waynesburg was founded. For most of the nineteenth century it was farm country, wool, grain, and cattle, with a coal seam running through it that nobody had yet figured out how to mine profitably.

That changed in the eighteen nineties, when coal-land speculation swept through the county. Large parcels were purchased by outside investors, and large-scale commercial mining opened in nineteen oh two with the Dilworth Mine near Rices Landing. Within a generation, the economy of Greene County had reorganized entirely around underground coal extraction.

The Pittsburgh Seam, also called the Pittsburgh Coal Seam, runs beneath much of southwestern Pennsylvania and northern West Virginia. In Greene County it lies deep enough to require true underground longwall mining, a technique in which massive automated machines shear coal from a face that can stretch hundreds of yards and then allow the ground above to controlled-subside behind the working area. It recovers a larger share of the coal than room and pillar mining, and Greene County mines mastered it.

At its peak, Greene County was among the largest coal-producing counties in the United States. As surface mining and strip operations expanded across Appalachia, Greene County remained a deep-mine county, the geology gave it no other option. In an era when most American coal production has shifted to surface mines in Wyoming and the West, Greene County stands as one of the leading places in the country where large-scale underground longwall mining still operates.

The county has paid a price. Longwall subsidence has cracked hundreds of homes, disrupted water wells, and altered stream courses above the mines. The argument about what coal gave Greene County and what it took away is not settled.