Pittston and the Anthracite Era
Near Scranton, Pennsylvania
The Wyoming Valley of northeastern Pennsylvania sits atop one of the richest deposits of anthracite coal on earth, and the city of Pittston spent nearly a hundred years at the center of an industry that heated American homes, powered American industry, and consumed human lives at a rate the nation largely chose not to notice.
Anthracite, hard coal, burns hotter and cleaner than bituminous coal, and the seams running under this valley were thick and close to the surface. By the mid-eighteen hundreds, a dozen major coal companies operated in and around Pittston, and waves of immigrants, first Welsh and Irish, then Polish, Italian, and Slovak, poured into the valley to work the shafts. The work was dark, wet, cold, and lethal.
On the morning of June twenty-eighth, eighteen ninety-six, ninety miners were working the night shift in the Red Ash Vein at the Newton Coal Company's Twin Shaft Colliery when the roof caved in. The concussion shook buildings across Pittston and rattled windows for miles. Fifty-eight miners were killed. Most of the bodies were never recovered.
The industry survived Twin Shaft and dozens of smaller disasters until January twenty-second, nineteen fifty-nine, when the Susquehanna River itself broke through the roof of the River Slope Mine in nearby Port Griffith. A whirlpool nearly two hundred feet wide opened in the riverbed. Billions of gallons of river water flooded the interconnected mines beneath the valley. Twelve miners drowned. The interconnected tunnel system beneath the valley was so thoroughly inundated that within months, mines across the entire middle portion of the region were permanently idled.
The Knox Mine Disaster, as it became known, effectively ended the anthracite era in the Wyoming Valley. Pittston, which had once been a prosperous industrial city, spent the following decades in slow economic decline, part of a pattern that reshaped nearly every coal town in northeastern Pennsylvania. The mines are silent now, and the river flows undisturbed above them.
