PA No. 9 Coal Mine: Going Underground

We visited the No. 9 Coal Mine Museum and Tours in Lansford, PA, for one of the last mine tours of the season on a November day when snow flurries floated in the air. Environmental history underground. Anthracite coal helped put Pennsylvania on the international energy map from the 1800s until the 1970s and many of the folks who traveled with us had relatives who had worked in the PA coal industry. 

 I was remembering with much fondness my Uncle "Mac"(MacDonald) who spent fifteen years working various central PA mines in after the war. His stories remain some of my most treasured memories. The mine tour and a long visit to the small museum helped me animate his stories of working as a miner. 

Photo credit: No. 9 Coal Mine Museum Collection

Uncle Mac loved smoking a pipe. In the mines he more or less clamped it between his teeth and worked with it unlit.  Many of the men chewed tobacco but he "never acquired certain skills" (spitting) and instead sucked on the aroma of fresh Prince Albert leaf until he had the chance to light up when the shift was over. In his elder years I knew him always to be smoking his favorite pipe, fragrant smoke swirling around us on the porch. I still love the scent of pipe smoke. It was fitting that one of the artifacts recovered in the 1990s restoration of abandoned No. 9  Mine was a pipe. 

Gangway 

The slow-motion end to Big Coal in PA came with the end of WWII and the loss of major markets in home heating, transportation, and heavy wartime industry. Coal was an energy king from the 1970s through the early 2000s as it became the  #1 fuel for producing electricity. Coal production for electricity, however, faced added social, regulatory, and economic pressures as the 21t century got underway.  Replacement technologies have made much underground mining obsolete. Concerns about air pollution and climate change shuttered generating plants. 

Lift for moving miners up and down many levels.

The origins of coal come from the vast peatlands that once covered what is now Pennsylvania millions of years ago in warmer, wetter times. Where my ancestors came from, dried peat bricks were used for heating homes. I've visited peat mines in Scotland and Northeast England to see hundreds of years of harvesting patterns on the land made by peat collectors. I've walked the narrow raised levees built to hold the peat carts pulled by ponies. Peat has been in use since before the Dark Ages there, but here there is no widespread history of its use. 

No. 9 Coal Mine Museum director, Zach.

Left to geological processes of heat and pressure, peat becomes coal which is hundreds of times denser. It burns cleaner, longer, and hotter. Compared to peat, it produces less smoke and burns evenly. Here in the States, there is no tradition of burning peat but coal was been used for hundreds of years by Native Americans as kiln fuel and heating fuel. By the early 1800s, coal was fueling the American industrial revolution and served as the nation's primary fuel for over a century. 

A foreman's room - he was responsible for every man in the mines.

As we toured the mine deep in the hillside, it was easy to imagine how stories of the  underworld evolved from these places. For pure storytelling grit, natural caves and canyons have nothing on excavated mineshafts and gangways that contain the primal elements of extreme danger, human misery, and darkness of our own myth-making. It is not hard to suddenly be superstitious. From places like this came the Bwca, Knockers, and Kobold of our mining ancestors - beasts and semi-human monsters that bedeviled the Welsh, Irish, and German imaginations. We peered a hundred feet down into the flooded lift shaft where two and three levels of water-filled mines were below us. 

Plastic Rat of the Underworld!

Water and darkness birthed humankind, according to Hopi, Navajo, and Lakota. This was the place where man began his journey upwards into the Four Worlds. The dark recesses of the earth are where life goes to wait until it is safe to emerge again. Bison spirits ran to the crevices and caves of the red mountains when white people drove the herds to their ends and they wait there still to emerge after the time of man has passed. Bears and other beasts hibernate in dark dens and caverns to replenish their energy for the next cycle of life aboveground.  It wasn't hard to fill my mind with stories from the underworld, especially when Zach turned off the lights and we were standing in complete darkness.  

Walking below an air shaft where mines were vented.

The walls were patterned with the chiseled bits of air hammers and exposed half-tubes of blasting holes. No one has carved a name or defaced a wall or ceiling with spray paint. Zach told us of the years of cleaning this mine required to make it safe for visitors, how they found what the miners dropped, what they left behind. It is one of two mines open to public tours in Pennsylvania and this one is treated like a shrine, a sacred space. It is a place where men toiled, where they were injured, and where they died. According to Zach, the mine claimed over a hundred souls as documented by company accounts but he was sure there were more. We stopped at the mine's hospital station where miners were "stabilized until evacuation," which could take hours or days. 

Mine company hospital 

Safety protocols were often secondary to profits and some companies were downright abusive in their treatment of miners.  A real danger in 19th and 20th century coal mining came in part from the company cutting corners. Miners organized Unions formed. Demands for better working conditions were often met with company indifference or violence. Uncle Mac was sure that the coal bosses, the men who worked in management "on the surface," were some of the most hated people in a coal town. He hated on a few himself. He was sure, too, that some distant relative from Scotland or Ireland had been involved in the killing of a coal boss. "Somewhere in our family history there was a Molly," he told me, referring to the legendary Pennsylvania coalfields' secret society, the Molly Maguires. 

Reinforced powder house.

Mining gear and Old Company sign.

I wasn't sure how the Old Company managed its mines but we know there were dozens of languages spoken among the shift crews and the over the year its work force was ever more diverse. Men came from Eastern Europe, Germany, Western Europe, Poland, Italy, Spain and Portugal. From 1857 to 1972 the No. 9 Mine produced over 90,000 tons of coal and operated continuously from its opening to its closing, making it the longest operating anthracite mine in the world. Around it grew the mining towns of Lansford, Summit Hill, and Coaldale and each had its own hustle and bustle of main streets and social clubs and sports teams. These were good towns to be from. 

Re-emergence.

After an hour underground we loaded back onto the crew cars for a bumpy, loud ride up to the mine entrance. The light hurt our eyes and we squinted into a cold hazy sun that shone through a blasting north wind. I looked up to the top of the hill and saw the backyards of homes in Lansford and the old crisscross network of wagon roads still imbedded into  the wooded slope. The Panther Creek Valley yawned wide with a mix of woodland, stream, and surface mine still in use. Everything seemed so bold and open. 

Mule way.

People ran into the museum to escape the cold but we lingered and spoke with Zach a bit longer. He gave such a great tour and was keen to answer any question, share some stories, and spend that extra time afterwards even though our teeth were chattering! 

Notes:

Though the Museum and Mine Tours are closed for the season, there is this excellent website for the No. 9 Coal Mine: https://no9minemuseum.wixsite.com/museum