USA > Pennsylvania > Luzerne County > Wilkes-Barre > A history of Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania : from its first beginnings to the present time, including chapters of newly-discovered early Wyoming Valley history, together with many biographical sketches and much genealogical material. Volume V > Part 10
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The "stone" coal which, in the first disastrous days of trying to market it, was thought to be fit only for use as gravel, in driveways and garden pathways, is now so necessary to winter comfort in the average American home, so vital a heating means in large cities-because of its smokelessness-that a labor dispute which stops mining is looked upon as a National calamity, affecting not only capital and labor, but the American public in general. The enterprise and persistence of a few sturdy men of the Wyoming Valley more than a century ago, therefore, had an important bearing upon American prosperity and life of the present. In the truest sense, those early coal miners of the Wyoming Valley were not only industrial pioneers of Luzerne, but of America -- at least, so far as anthracite coal mining comes into the National industrial effort. That it does come, and importantly, has already been shown.
Anthracite coal measures lie in the counties of Wayne, Susquehanna,
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Lackawanna, Luzerne, Carbon, Schuylkill, Columbia, Northumberland, Dau- phin, and Sullivan counties. They are divided into three principal fields : known as the Northern or Wyoming; the Middle or Lehigh, and the South- ern or Schuylkill. There is a fourth field, the Bernice basin, in Sullivan County, but this, for statistical purposes is put into the Northern. The great Northern coalfield crosses Luzerne County, and the so-called Eastern Middle coalfield runs along the southern border of the county. Subdivided into twenty-five local districts, the Northern or Wyoming field includes the Car- bondale, Scranton, Pittston, Wilkes-Barre, Plymouth and Kingston districts, also the Bernice district; the Eastern Middle or Lehigh field includes the Green Mountain, Black Creek, Hazleton, Beaver Meadow and Panther Creek districts ; while the Western Middle field of three districts (East Mahanoy, West Mahanoy and Shamokin) is grouped with the Southern District in the Schuylkill trade region. The chief districts of the Southern coalfield are East Schuylkill, West Schuylkill, Lorberry and Lykens Valley.
Between the Northern and Middle fields in Luzerne County runs "the great Montour's Ridge rock-arch, bringing to the surface an anticlinal belt of Mar- cellus, Hamilton, and Chemung rocks," and although Wilkes-Barre and Hazle- ton are twenty miles apart, "the same coal beds can be recognized at the two places, showing that they once spanned the wide rock-arch of the Wapwal- lopen valley," indeed, "that all the coalfields were once united; and that the slow erosion of ages has spared to the people of Pennsylvania but a small fraction of the mineral which once covered the entire area of the State."
"The Wyoming coal basin," reads the Report of Progress X of the Second Geological Survey of Pennsylvania (1885), "enclosed between the Shick- shinny Mountain on the north and the Wyoming Mountain on the south, with their terraces of Conglomerate, is (as to its coal area ) 4 miles wide at Pittston, 51/2 at Wilkes-Barre, 21/2 at Nescopec and comes to a point at Hartville, a length in the county of about 25 miles. Its floor, being crumpled into many diagonal rolls, it is sub-divided into as many small basins, which run out east- ward against the side of the Wyoming Mountain. The deepest of these basins near Wilkes-Barre holds about 900 feet of coal measures, and 16 coal beds, mined at 59 collieries (in the Wyoming Mine Inspector's District), producing in 1883 7.400,096 tons. The Pittston Mine Inspector's District ( three-fourths of which is in this county ) supports 39 collieries, producing in 1883 2.173.144 tons. . . . The Eastern Middle coalfield in the southern townships is sub- divided into fourteen coal basins, lying side by side on an elevated plateau of the Conglomerate . ... , some of them deep enough only to hold the lowest workable coal bed: others, the Buck Mountain Mammoth and several higher beds. Of these, the Black Creek Basin has an east and west length of 23 miles (in this county ) by a width of 1 to 114 miles; the Hazleton Basin a length of 12 miles and a width of one mile. In the Green Mountain Mine District are 5 collieries, producing, in 1883, 429.555 tons ; in the Black Creek District, 24 collieries, producing 2,455,091 tons; in the Hazleton District, 15 collieries, producing 1,443,448 tons; and in the Beaver Meadow District (partly in Schuylkill County) 12 collieries, producing 1,236,006 tons; total (for Eastern Middle coalfield), 56 collieries and 5,564,100 tons. While in the Wilkes-Barre Basin there remain about 900 feet of coal measures, with a total thickness of 90 feet of coal, more or less, there remain in the Black Creek Basin only 558' of measures, with 38 feet of coal ; and at Hazleton 528' of measures, with 81
feet of coal. . . . . The Carbondale main coal is 7' thick; the Baltimore bed at Wilkes-Barre 15', and the Red Ash bed 17'; the Buck Mountain bed at Nanticoke 10'. In the Black Creek Basin the Buck Mountain bed is 13' and the Mammoth bed 27'. At Hazleton the Twin bed is 12' (with a 3' parting ) ; another 158' below it is 9'; a third 42' lower is 412'; a fourth 6' lower is
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61/2': the Mammoth 124' lower is 33'; the Wharton bed, 44' lower is 9'; and the Buck Mountain bed 88' lower is 8' thick."
According to the statistics of the Fourteenth Census of the United States, 63.4% of the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania operated in 1919 were in the Wyoming (Northern) coalfield, and only 13.6% of Pennsylvania's total were in the Lehigh (or Middle) coalfield. Of the 374 active anthracite mines of Pennsylvania in 1919, 237 are in the Wyoming field and 51 in the Lehigh field. Of the 245 coal breakers, 135 are in the Wyoming coalfield and 29 in the Lehigh. Of the 261,355 acres of coal land operated, 120,168 (or 46.0%) are in the Wyoming and 26,746 acres (10.2%) in the Lehigh coalfield. Of 147,372 wage-earners, 83,959 were in the Wyoming field (or 57.0%) and 19,472 (or 13.2%) in the Lehigh. Of $433,868,039 invested in the 254 anthracite mining enterprises of Pennsylvania, $233,977,334 (or 53.9%) is the proportion of Wyoming coalfield properties and $64,057,110 (or 14.8%) is the Lehigh coal- field investment. Of $210,289,473 expended in wages during 1919, $118,765,340 (or 56.5%) was earned in the Wyoming coalfield, and $27,964,063 (or 13.3%) in the Lehigh. Of $364,084,142 worth of coal produced in 1919, $208,738,489 worth was produced in the Wyoming field (or 57.3%) and $54,376,559 worth in the Lehigh field (or 14.9%). Of 78,723,668 tons of anthracite produced in 1919, 43,016,303 tons were mined and 298,807 tons washed in the Wyoming coalfield (or 55%), and 11,881,375 tons were mined and 176,846 tons were washed in the Lehigh coalfield (15.3%), all figures given being of "long" tons (2,240 pounds). It is thus seen that the Northern, or Wyoming, coalfield, the greater part of which is in Luzerne County, yields more than one-half of the anthracite coal mined in America.
Although Abijah Smith and his brother are looked upon, and rightly, as the pioneers of the anthracite coal industry, they were not the discoverers of the coalfield. Neither were they the first operators. The Smith brothers come into place as the pioneers because they were the first to steadily apply them- selves to shipping coal out of the Wyoming region and to finding markets for it. The discoverers of the "stone" coal were undoubtedly the Indians, who were first in the region. The outcrop of the coal measures was exposed and visible to the eye of any passer-by. John Jenkins, who surveyed a part of the Wyoming Valley for the Connecticut proprietors, the Susquehanna Company, in 1762, reported "finding coal outcropping at two points." The company, on April 17, 1763, voted "to reserve for the use of the company all beds and mines of iron and coal that may be within the towns or ordered for settlement."
This followed the usual procedure of colonization companies of colonial days. Penn's colonization plans hinged importantly upon the possibility of finding mineral deposits, in the exploitation of which the Penns would benefit, by reserving a proprietary interest. But Penn's agents were not looking for coal. William Penn, and his early governors and advisers, were ever hope- ful of discovering the more precious mineral deposits, gold, silver, copper. In 1708. when Penn first had an inkling that "the King of the Shawnee Indians was quietly working mines for Mitchel" and his own lieutenant-governor, John Evans, he was jubilant and optimistic. In a letter to James Logan, sec- retary of the province, William Penn indicated what the news augured for him. He wrote: "I am glad . . . that mines so rich are so certainly found, for that will clear the country and me of all other encumbrances." William Penn was an ironmaster, and iron ore might interest him, but he was, in fact, in desperate straits for money and was pinning his faith on the discovery and exploitation of higher minerals, which alone could bring him quickly the money he needed. The operations of the "King of the Shawnee Indians" in 1708 are believed to have been in Lancaster County, far from the Wyoming Valley, but had Indians of the latter region taken pieces of the outcropping "black diamonds" to Penn's mining experts of that period, it is doubtful
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whether they would have viewed the pieces of "stone coal" as anything more than interesting geological specimens. Penn went to his grave, with hope deferred-as so many other pioneers have-and his sons and grandsons had little better fortunes. The lieutenant-governor, in 1720, sank some of the proprietor's money in trying to operate the copper mines, and Thomas Penn. in 1730, had a one-sixth interest in another copper mining company, which failed. In 1766, James Filghman, of Philadelphia, wrote to Thomas and Rich- ard Penn, informing them of a "very great fund of coal in the hills" of the Wyoming region ; but all the response was a polite note from Penn to Filgh- man, informing the latter that his specimens had been handed over to "some persons skilled in that article."
A few years later, in 1768, one of the settlers in the Wyoming Valley was using anthracite (or "black stones") in his smithy. In blacksmiths' forges it was used in the Wyoming Valley quite successfully during the next decade ; and, during the Revolution coal mined near Wilkes-Barre was shipped to Carlisle, and there used in the making of guns for the Continental Army. In 1788, Jesse Fell, of Wilkes-Barre, was forging nails, with anthracite as his fuel.
By this time, therefore, it was recognized, at least in the Wyoming region, that "stone" coal had a definite industrial value. In 1790, the statement was made that coal existed, in abundance, in the Schuylkill region, but was not much used. In 1791, Philip Ginter, while hunting, discovered a bed of coal in Carbon County-on the Mauch Chunk Mountain. A century later a move- ment was initiated in the Pennsylvania Senate to erect a monument to Philip Ginter "as the discoverer on anthracite coal in Pennsylvania." The move- ment died an early death, for it was soon apparent that although important developments might, justly, be attributed to the finding of coal by Ginter, he should not be lauded as the "discoverer." No white man has the right to that distinctive place. Ginter took his samples to Fort Allen, and, for some recom- pense, showed Colonel Jacob Weiss and some associates where the coal bed outcropped, or at least where it clung to the roots of a fallen tree. The Lehigh Coal Mining Company was the outcome-the first group of men associated to undertake an anthracite operation. Its successor eventually was the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, a corporate name prominent for more than a century in anthracite mining history.
The Lehigh Coal Mining Company did not carry their exploitation very far for some years. In the Wyoming Valley, blacksmiths generally used the coal in their smithy forges, but the Lehigh Company could not find even such a market, and for domestic use the coal was not yet thought well suited. Coal was found in Carbondale in 1799, and in the first year of the new century, Robert Morris, the great financier of the Revolution, made the first shipment of coal from the Schuylkill region. In 1802-03, the Lehigh Coal Mining Com- pany shipped two arks of coal to Philadelphia. The operators hoped to develop a domestic trade, as well as a municipal demand, for the hard coal, but they seemed doomed to disappointment and failure. The trials were unsatisfac- tory and the broken coal was not a very acceptable substitute for the gravel used in driveways and garden paths.
However, at least some of the coal was put to good use. Oliver Evans, when requested to give his "opinion of the qualities of the Lehigh coals," certified, on February 15, 1803, that he had "experienced the use of them in a close stove and also in a fireplace," and that he had found the anthracite coal to give "a greater degree of heat than any other coal" he was "acquainted with." Further testimony was given in May, 1805, by Frederick Graff, clerk of the Philadelphia Waterworks. He said he had "made a trial of the Lehigh coal sometime in the year 1802 at the Pennsylvania Bank, in the large stove," and had found it "to answer .... exceedingly well." "They (the coals) give an excellent heat and burn lively," he said. Graff was of the opinion that
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"for the use of familys, the fireplaces can be so constituted with a small expense as to have the sufficient draft required."
A "newly-invented iron grate, calculated for coal," was on the market in Philadelphia in 1807. Evidently, thoughtful men were beginning to see that coal might come into place alongside wood as household fuel. Nevertheless, a shipment of anthracite to Philadelphia in 1806 met with no better fate than the first. The Lehigh Coal Mining Company's operations were not pursued with such persistence as that manifested during the next decade by a Wyom- ing Valley operator. In 1807 Abijah Smith and Company, of Plymouth, began to ship coal down the Susquehanna River. The Smiths were the first to acquire a tract of land in the Wyoming Valley expressly for coal mining. They had had enough confidence in the future of the coal industry to venture five hundred dollars-a by no means insignificant sum of money in those frugal days-in acquiring a tract of seventy-five acres of coal land; and they set to work, with pick and wedge, in the outcrop of the vein of coal on Curry Hill. Plymouth. The Reynolds, or Washington, mine, still operated by the Lehigh and Wilkes-Barre Coal Company, is the continuation of Abijah Smith's "drift" in 1807. In the autumn of 1807, having by hard quarrying wedged out quite a lot of coal. Abijah Smith did not sit idly by waiting for an ark owner to chance by and offer the use of his vessel (which, but for its arklike caboose, was little better than a raft) to carry the coal to market; Abijah Smith bought an ark for $24, brought it to Plymouth, loaded on to it fifty-five tons of coal, also himself, and the venturesome voyage down the Susquehanna, to market. was begun. In the early days of Plymouth, the coal taken from Abijah Smith's mine was hauled in ordinary wagons by horses or mules from Coal Street down to the river bank, near the present Flat Road, and there loaded on to the arks. But that was not the last responsibility of the pioneer shipper. The treacherous rocky bed of the shallow Susquehanna, it is estimated, ended the life of about two of every three arks that started down the Susquehanna waterway from the Wyoming Valley. However, had all the coal shipped reached the market. a glut might have resulted. Still, Abijah Smith's first loaded ark was safely navigated to Columbia, Lancaster County-a rendezvous for raftsmen and then an important ferry point on the route West-but that was all the satisfaction he got. The "stone" coal was unsalable; it had to be left for local men to find a market. It was necessary to educate the public ; and there was no better way of doing so than by demonstrations in the public houses, the taverns. Abijah Smith and Company were in the coal business to stay, and if their product was not salable in one way they must find another. If stoves and grates must be put into public houses, to prove the advantage that anthracite gave the consumer, then they, Abijah Smith and Company, must go that way to market.
In an earlier chapter, No. 40, the epoch-making experiments of Judge Jesse Fell, of Wilkes-Barre, have been given the extensive notice they deserve. In the grate that he fashioned and set up in his Wilkes-Barre tavern in 1808, Judge Fell demonstrated that anthracite coal could be used to advantage in the home. Thereafter. Abijah and John Smith had no doubt as to the future of the coal industry. From that year until 1826 the firm of Abijah Smith and Company sent several arks yearly to market. Columbia was not the only market : the arks ran to tidewater. "In 1811 and 1812," writes John B. Smith, "they ran 220 tons of coal to Havre-de-Grace, had it unloaded on the schooner 'Washington' and sold in New York, the bills for which were rendered by the commission merchant in 1813." In almost all cases during the first years, the operator almost invariably took the risk of sale. It was missionary effort. An instance is seen in the records of Marietta, just above Columbia, in Lancaster County. "In 1816 a raftsman from the north branch brought down some stone coal, as they called it. There being no sale for it, it was given to Henry
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Cassel (on to whose lumber wharf the coal had been dumped) for distribution. and for which he opened a market, and sold a few years later 455 tons at Sio a ton in one season." This is not surprising, for in the average small commu- nity, before the introduction of anthracite, an unsightly pile of wood was generally to be seen at every door in the fall of each year. If the stone coal could take the place of the unsightly mountain of wood, those who had any civic pride at all would, if not too costly, burn coal.
So the coal industry steadily found a footing in most of the communities on the seaboard and along the waterways. Of course, there were no railways at that time. The era of canals, indeed, had not yet come in Pennsylvania. Yet we find one far-sighted Wilkes-Barre citizen seriously advocating, as early as 1813, "the opening of a communication from the Susquehanna to Philadelphia by a road or railway from Wilkes-Barre to Lehigh, and thence by that river to the Delaware, and thence to Philadelphia." This well-informed Wilkes-Barrean, Charles Miner, editor of the "Gleaner," used his journal to broadcast the idea. Early in 1814. Mr. Miner wrote a long editorial on the subject of "Navigation on the Lehigh": the editorial ends in this way: "I hope our grandchildren may live to see a complete railway from this place to the Lehigh, and a canal from thence to Philadelphia." Probably not one in ten of his readers had more than a vague idea what a railway was ; certainly, they did not associate such a road or way with steam. Another fifteen years were to pass before the first locomotive brought to America was to turn its wheels on American soil. At best, the railway would be a tramway, along which the propelling force would be the horse, or mule, where gravity would not move the wheels. Nowadays, there are thousands of miles of tramways in the mines ; one mine alone, of the three hundred and sixty-four of the anthracite region, operates, in its underground workings, no less than eighty-five miles of tramways. We think of them as "tracks," but hardly as "railways." But this was in most cases the type of road that men who talked of railways one hundred and ten years ago pictured.
Mr. Miner was among the men of imagination and initiative who saw hope in the anthracite coal industry in 1813. A year before, Messrs. White & Hazard, ironmasters, had spent a whole morning trying to coax "stone" coal into a blaze, at their furnace plant at the Falls of the Schuykill. But it would not blaze. At mid-day they gave up the attempt as hopeless, and went to their mid-day meal. Upon their return, they fully expected to find the furnaces cold. Much to their astonishment, however, they discovered that the furnace was hot-very hot. The coal was not blazing, but was obviously burning. giving such fear, indeed, that the furnace "was in danger of melting."
Thus, an important industrial market had been opened for anthracite coal. ironmaking being at that time probably the principal manufacturing industry of Pennsylvania. The coal tried by White and Hazard had been part of nine wagon loads sent from Pottsville by Colonel Shoemaker, for trying to sell some of which the wagoners barely escaped arrest.
However, the success of the Hazard and White experiment resulted in a number of mining operations being begun in the Schuylkill region in 1813. In that year it occurred to Charles Miner and several other Wilkes-Barreans to lease the Lehigh Coal Mining Company's property. This was done, and coal from the "great coal bed near the Lehigh, commonly called the Weiss bed." was carried to Philadelphia, and there sold to Messrs. White and Hazard at $21 per ton ; but even this high price did not recompense the shippers for even the cost of transportation. So the leased property found its way back to the owners, and the Wilkes-Barre group of operators retired from the field sadder and poorer men.
How the cost of transportation mounted may be imagined by the follow- ing "Recollection" made public fifty years later by James A. Gordon who, in
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1814, had helped to build arks for the Lehigh coal operators. "On the 17th July, 1814," writes Mr. Gordon in the Wilkes-Barre "Record of Times." Febru- ary, 1874, "with Abail Abbott" and others, I "shouldered knapsacks and tools for a march to the Lehigh to build arks for Messrs. Cist, Miner, and Millhouse. Four arks were ready for loading by the first freshet. The estimated cost of fifty tons, one ark load of coal, was : Mining, $50; hauling from summit, $4.50 per ton, $225 ; cost of ark, $125; loading ark, $15. Total, $415. Lehigh pilots were on hand. The fleet moved off with the rapid current, and in fifteen minutes brought up on a reef called 'Red Rocks,' half a mile below. One ark got through." That one ark represented a cost at shipping point of $1,660. Therefore, even $21 a ton for its fifty tons would leave the shippers much on the wrong side. Still, had the war continued, Mr. Miner and his associates might have risked another year of coal mining and ark-shooting, but the war ended in December, 1814, and the price of coal on the seaboard dropped to $6 a ton, a price at which no anthracite coal could be delivered at Philadelphia or New York. "Sea" coal, from Wales, could be shipped across the Atlantic at a lower cost than Pennsylvania anthracite could be transported to Philadelphia.
The slump in price did not long prevail, though no such price as that of 1814 ever again came to cheer the pioneer operators. Rather, the leanness of the possible profit caused the mining companies to look for ways in which their mining and transportation costs might be reduced. It did not seem that there was much chance of reduction in the cost of mining. Methods were very sim- ple. Mechanical devices were entirely absent. The steam engine had not yet come to the mines, so there was no mining below the water-line. Had it been necessary, the operators might have adopted methods somewhat like those followed by the Penns, in their copper mining of almost a century before ; in the Gap copper mines (Lancaster County, Pennsylvania), in 1730-40, eight pumps were going night and day, so that the miners might work in the pit ; but coal miners of 1814 had such an abundance of coal within sight above the water line, accessible without pit-sinking, that search for other mining methods than those of the drift would be folly. The pick and wedge, wielded by man- power, could produce all the coal they could market, so why search for more complicated systems, thought the pioneer operators. "Mining systems were hardly known," writes Dever C. Ashmead, "but such as were used were on the type of the room and pillar method of mining. There was no engineering and the easy coal only was taken. Only that coal in the bed which was bright and shiny and free from impurities was mined. The rest was considered worth- less, for there was no attempt at preparation. Only lump coal was shipped to market ; the rest, as far as possible, was left in the mine."
This, of course, was wasteful mining; but there was so much coal to be had, that it did not seem so to the operators, who found it difficult enough to market even the lump coal. When the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, in 1820, took over the coal measures found by Ginter in 1791 (and operated successively-but not successfully-by the Lehigh Coal Mining Company, Charles Miner and his Wilkes-Barre associates and by Smith and Hazard), the price obtainable for lump anthracite coal in Philadelphia was $8.40 a ton. Colonel Butler, who owned the wonderful Coalbrook property that later, in its magnitude, became known as the Baltimore mine, used to quarry lump coal and send it in to Wilkes-Barre consumers at $3 a ton. It yielded more profit, probably, than $8.40 a ton in Philadelphia would. In 1820. Colonel Washington Lee sent several hundreds of tons from his Hanover mine to Bal- timore, Maryland. There, the coal was sold at only $8 a ton. In 1823. Colonel Lee and an associate leased an operation in Newport. He contracted for the mining and delivery of 1,000 tons of coal in arks at Lee's Ferry at ȘI.Io a ton from this property, a contract which was carried out; yet, after the sale of the
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