Scranton's Silk Mills: The Second Industry

Coal gets all the headlines, but Scranton built a second major industry that employed thousands of workers and made the city one of the largest textile centers in the world. Silk manufacturing arrived in Scranton in eighteen seventy-three, when Pennsylvania's first silk mill opened here. By the early twentieth century, Scranton had thirty silk mills employing roughly five thousand workers, and its annual output of thrown silk amounted to two and a half million pounds. Scranton was ranked the second silk-making city in the world.

The Scranton Lace Company became the largest producer of Nottingham lace in the world. This was not a secondary enterprise. The silk mills ran simultaneously with the coal mines, and they drew from the same pool of immigrant labor, particularly women and children who could work the looms.

The labor conditions in the silk mills were not significantly better than those in the mines. Children worked in the mills throughout the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundreds. The silk industry's reliance on young female workers at very low wages drew the attention of reformers and eventually became part of the broader national campaign against child labor. Strike actions in Scranton's silk mills between nineteen hundred and nineteen ten became landmark episodes in early twentieth century labor history.

The silk industry in Scranton declined through the mid-twentieth century as synthetic fabrics and overseas competition undercut American manufacturers. The mills closed one by one. But for roughly fifty years, this city was a world center of silk production, a fact almost entirely eclipsed in popular memory by the drama of the coal mines that ran beneath the same streets.