road_less_trvled
Last stop on last weekends tour: Schuylkill County Couthouse and Jail
During the 1870s, powerful financial syndicates controlled the railroads and the coalfields. Coal companies had begun to recruit immigrants from overseas, luring them with "promises of fortune-making." Herded into freight trains by the hundreds, these workers often replaced English-speaking miners who, according to George Korson,
"...were compelled to give way in one coal field after another, either abandoning the industry altogether for other occupations or else retreating, like the vanishing American Indian, westward..."
Frequently unable to read safety instructions, the immigrant workers,
...faced constant hazards from violation of safety precautions, such as they were. Injuries and deaths in mine disasters, frequently reported in the newspapers, shocked the nation.
Twenty-two thousand coal miners worked in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. Fifty-five hundred of the mineworkers in the county were children between the ages of seven and sixteen years who earned between one and three dollars a week separating slate from the coal. Injured miners, or those too old to work at the face, were also assigned to picking slate at the "breakers" where the coal was crushed into a manageable size. Thus, many of the elderly miners finished their mining days as they'd begun in their youth.
The miners lived a life of "bitter, terrible struggle."
The daily routine of the miner was to crawl in the dim light of his lamp, in mud and trickling water, surrounded by coal dust and perhaps powder smoke... the struggle was a difficult one.
Last stop on last weekends tour: Schuylkill County Couthouse and Jail
During the 1870s, powerful financial syndicates controlled the railroads and the coalfields. Coal companies had begun to recruit immigrants from overseas, luring them with "promises of fortune-making." Herded into freight trains by the hundreds, these workers often replaced English-speaking miners who, according to George Korson,
"...were compelled to give way in one coal field after another, either abandoning the industry altogether for other occupations or else retreating, like the vanishing American Indian, westward..."
Frequently unable to read safety instructions, the immigrant workers,
...faced constant hazards from violation of safety precautions, such as they were. Injuries and deaths in mine disasters, frequently reported in the newspapers, shocked the nation.
Twenty-two thousand coal miners worked in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. Fifty-five hundred of the mineworkers in the county were children between the ages of seven and sixteen years who earned between one and three dollars a week separating slate from the coal. Injured miners, or those too old to work at the face, were also assigned to picking slate at the "breakers" where the coal was crushed into a manageable size. Thus, many of the elderly miners finished their mining days as they'd begun in their youth.
The miners lived a life of "bitter, terrible struggle."
The daily routine of the miner was to crawl in the dim light of his lamp, in mud and trickling water, surrounded by coal dust and perhaps powder smoke... the struggle was a difficult one.