WILKES-BARRE — The painting depicts a coal breaker that stood a short distance from the artwork’s new home, the children and adults almost floating hauntingly in the foreground, some based on photos of real people who worked at the Dorrance Colliery.
The new acquisition done by Sue Hand and purchased and donated to King’s College marked the opening of a night celebrating Anthracite Heritage month Thursday, but more compelling imagery awaited.
Penn State University Scranton Professor Emeritus Philip Mosley projected photos and illustration during a wide-ranging lecture on how the Anthracite Industry infused the region — and continues to do so — ever since most of the booming mines closed and the remnant breaker behemoths disappeared. There were pictures of children smudged in the black stuff from a day at the mines, of a statue depicting a hooded member of the Molly Maguires about to be hanged, of “dark tourists” spray painting an abandoned road in Centralia, the town that withered amid fumes from an underground coal fire gone amok.
“In the ’60s and ’70s there was something of a collective amnesia about anthracite history,” Mosley said as he discussed his new book “Telling of the Anthracite: A Pennsylvania Posthistory.”
Hard coal brought the region to a crest as it fed the nation’s industrial revolution, then to its knees after the 1959 Knox mine disaster and Centralia exposed the high hazards of an already ailing business engine.
“It was those two terrible events that really put the nail in the coffin,” he added.
Mosley served as speaker for the Annual Msgr. John J. Curran Lecture at King’s, named after a Catholic priest who proved instrumental in fighting for miner labor rights and resolving strikes, most famously one in 1902 that pitted charismatic union leader John Mitchell against increasingly impatient President Theodore Roosevelt. Stationed in Wilkes-Barre, Curran earned the trust of both.
Before the lecture, current King’s President The Rev. Thomas Looney spoke briefly about the school’s origins as a place to educate the children of coal miners, and of the relatively new Miner’s Memorial just outside the building where the events were held. It includes the etched names of many local miners that, he said “call out to us today, to make the world a better place.”
Local artist Sue Hand then joined in unveiling the painting, bought for King’s by the Anthracite Heritage Foundation. She noted it is one of about 130 breakers she has recreated from photos and old drawings, always working to paint faces of people who actually lived when the places were working. This one, she pointed out, prominently included a man who had worked the Dorrance operation.
The crowd retreated to a nearby classroom for Mosley’s lecture about the book, which he said attempted to review the many ways Anthracite history has morphed since the ’60s. When anthracite faded as a home heating fuel, businesses embraced the fact that coal-fired plants generated electricity. “Coal keeps the light on” one large pipe-like structure read as it spanned a road in one projected photo. “America’s black diamond,” another business sign read. “Lou digs coal” a sign outside a coal operation boasted in support of former U.S. Congressman Lou Barletta’s bid for office — an example of “politicizing the boosterism of coal.”
He showed memorials, murals and other works tied to the coal industry, a photo of the orange/yellow acid mine drainage water spewing from a bore hole near Old Forge, the graffiti-smeared, long-abandoned “Concrete City” remains near Nanticoke, an “Anthracite provisions” van for meat vendor in Shamokin, and the modern “Anthracite Cafe” in Wilkes-Barre,
There was an original bus shelter for miners recently restored with an actual slogan from the prime of coal time asking “Did you produce a car more today?” And a photo of the weathered, glass-shattered Huber Breaker — eventually razed despite a huge effort to preserve it.
“That was the last one,” Mosley said. “One by one, they all went. And that’s a crying shame.”