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Pennsylvania Coal Town
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Download or read book Coal Run written by Tawni O'Dell and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2005-06-07 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With her eagerly awaited second novel, Tawni O'Dell takes readers back to the coal-mining country of western Pennsylvania. Set in a town ravaged and haunted by a mine explosion that took the lives of 96 men, Coal Run explores the life of local deputy and erstwhile football legend, "The Great Ivan Z.," as he prepares for a former teammate's imminent release from prison. As the week unfolds and Ivan struggles to confront his demons, he reveals himself to be a man whose conscience is burdened by a long-held and shocking secret.
Download or read book Fire Underground written by David Dekok and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How a modern-day mine disaster has turned a Pennsylvania community into a ghost town * For much of its history, Centralia, Pennsylvania, had a population of around 2,000. By 1981, this had dwindled to just over 1,000—not unusual for a onetime mining town. But as of 2007, Centralia had the unwelcome distinction of being the state’s tiniest municipality, with a population of nine. The reason: an underground fire that began in 1962 has decimated the town with smoke and toxic gases, and has since made history. Fire Underground is the completely updated classic account of the fire that has been raging under Centralia for decades. David DeKok tells the story of how the fire actually began and how government officials failed to take effective action. By 1981 the fire was spewing deadly gases into homes. A twelve-year-old boy dropped into a steaming hole as a congressman toured nearby. DeKok describes how the people of Centralia banded together to finally win relocation funds—and he reveals what has happened to the few remaining residents as the fiftieth anniversary of the fire’s beginning nears.
Download or read book Slow Burn written by Renée Jacobs and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A pictorial chronicle of the Centralia, Pennsylvania, mine fire disaster in 1962, which led, decades later, to the destruction of the town. Includes interviews and historical background"--Provided by publisher.
Book Synopsis Lost Coal Country of Northeastern Pennsylvania by : Lorena Beniquez
Download or read book Lost Coal Country of Northeastern Pennsylvania written by Lorena Beniquez and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2017 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lost Coal Country of Northeastern Pennsylvania documents the region's disappearing anthracite history, which shaped the legacy of the United States of America and the industrial revolution. The coal mines, breakers, coal miners' homes, and railroads have all steadily disappeared. With only one coal breaker left in the entire state, it was time to record what would soon be lost. Unfortunately, one piece of history that persists is underground fires that ravage communities like Centralia. Blazing for over 50 years, the flames of Centralia will not be doused anytime soon. Images featured in the book include the St. Nicholas coal breaker, Huber coal breaker, Steamtown National Historic Site, Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour, Eckley Miners' Village, Centralia, and the Knox Mine disaster. A hybrid history book and travel guide, Lost Coal Country of Northeastern Pennsylvania is one final recounting of what is gone and what still remains.
Book Synopsis The Day the Earth Caved In by : Joan Quigley
Download or read book The Day the Earth Caved In written by Joan Quigley and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2009-04-14 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning on Valentine’s Day, 1981, when twelve-year-old Todd Domboski plunged through the earth in his grandmother’s backyard in Centralia, Pennsylvania, The Day the Earth Caved In is an unprecedented and riveting account of the nation’s worst mine fire. In astonishing detail, award-winning journalist Joan Quigley, the granddaughter of Centralia miners, ushers readers into the dramatic world of the underground blaze. Drawing on interviews with key participants and exclusive new research, Quigley paints unforgettable portraits of Centralia and its residents, from Tom Larkin, the short-order cook and ex-hippie who rallied the activists, to Helen Womer, the bank teller who galvanized the opposition, denying the fire’s existence even as toxic fumes invaded her home. Like Jonathan Harr’s A Civil Action, The Day the Earth Caved In is a seminal investigation of individual rights, corporate privilege, and governmental indifference to the powerless.
Download or read book Heat and Light written by Jennifer Haigh and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Haigh returns to the Pennsylvania town at the center of her iconic novel Baker Towers in this ambitious, achingly human story of modern America and the conflicting forces at its heart—a bold, moving drama of hope and desperation, greed and power, big business and small-town families. Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away like a bar of soap. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of natural gas. To drill or not to drill? Prison guard Rich Devlin leases his mineral rights to finance his dream of farming. He doesn’t count on the truck traffic and nonstop noise, his brother’s skepticism or the paranoia of his wife, Shelby, who insists the water smells strange and is poisoning their frail daughter. Meanwhile his neighbors, organic dairy farmers Mack and Rena, hold out against the drilling—until a passionate environmental activist disrupts their lives. Told through a cast of characters whose lives are increasingly bound by the opposing interests that underpin the national debate, Heat and Light depicts a community blessed and cursed by its natural resources. Soaring and ambitious, it zooms from drill rig to shareholders’ meeting to the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to the ruined landscape of the “strippins,” haunting reminders of Pennsylvania’s past energy booms. This is a dispatch from a forgotten America—a work of searing moral clarity from one of the finest writers of her generation, a courageous and necessary book.
Download or read book Unseen Danger written by David DeKok and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of the Centralia mine fire; a government's indecisiveness and a town's struggle for survival.
Book Synopsis Early Coal Mining in the Anthracite Region by : John Stuart Richards
Download or read book Early Coal Mining in the Anthracite Region written by John Stuart Richards and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four distinct anthracite coal fields encompass an area of 1,700 square miles in the northeastern portion of Pennsylvania. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, underground coal mining was at its zenith and the work of miners was more grueling and dangerous than it is today. Faces blackened by coal and helmet lamps lit by fire are no longer parts of the everyday lives of miners in the region. Early Coal Mining in the Anthracite Region is a journey into a world that was once very familiar. These vintage photographs of collieries, breakers, miners, drivers, and breaker boys illuminate the dark of the anthracite mines. The pictures of miners, roof falls, mules, and equipment deep underground tell the story of the hard lives lived around the hard coal. Above ground, breaker boys toiled in unbearable conditions inside the noisy, vibrating, soot-filled monsters known as coal breakers.
Book Synopsis Pennsylvania's Coal and Iron Police by : Spencer J. Sadler
Download or read book Pennsylvania's Coal and Iron Police written by Spencer J. Sadler and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pennsylvania's Coal and Iron Police ruled small patch towns and industrial cities for their coal and iron company bosses from 1865 to 1931. Armed with a gun and badge and backed by state legislation, the members of the private police force were granted power in a practically unspecified jurisdiction. Set in Pennsylvania's anthracite and bituminous regions, including Luzerne, Schuylkill, Westmoreland, Beaver, Somerset, and Indiana Counties, at a time when labor disputes were deadly, the officers are the story behind American labor history's high-profile events and attention-grabbing headlines. Paid to protect company property, their duties varied but unfortunately often resulted in strikebreaking, intimidation, and violence.
Book Synopsis Pennsylvania Ghost Towns by : Susan Tassin
Download or read book Pennsylvania Ghost Towns written by Susan Tassin and published by Stackpole Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: - Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia -- Ephrata Cloister, Lancaster County.
Download or read book St. Clair written by Anthony Wallace and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-09-19 with total page 780 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Located near the southern edge of the Pennsylvania anthracite, the town of St. Clair in the early half of the 19th century seemed to be perfectly situated to provide fuel to the iron and steel industry that was the heart of the Industrial Revolution in America. It was a time of unprecedented promise and possibility for the region, and yet, in the years between 1830 and 1880, only grandiose illusions flourished there. St. Clair itself succumbed early on to a devastating economic blight, one that would in time affect anthracite mining everywhere. In this dramatic work of social history, Anthony F. C. Wallace re-creates St. Clair in those years when expectations collided with reality, when the coal trade was in chronic distress, exacerbated by the epic battles between the forces of labor and capital. As he did in his Bancroft Prize-winning Rockdale, Wallace uses public records and private papers to reconstruct the operation of an anthracite colliery and the life of a working-man’s town totally dependent upon it. He describes the labor hierarchy of the collieries, the communal spirit that sprang up in the outlying mine patches, the polyglot immigrant life in the taverns and churchs, and the workingmen’s societies that provided identity to the miners and gave relief to families in distress. He examines the birth of the first effective miners’ union and documents the escalating antagonism between Irish immigrant workers—mostly Catholic—and the Protestant middle classes who owned the collieries. Wallace reveals the blindness, greed, and self-congratulation of the mine owners and operators. These “heroes” of the entrepreneurial wars disregarded geologists’ warnings that the coal seams south of St. Clair were virtually inaccessible and, at best, extremely costly to mine, and then blamed their economic woes on the lack of a high tariff on imported British iron. To cut costs, they ignored the most basic and safety engineering practices and then blamed “the careless miner” and “Irish hooligans” for the catastrophic accidents that resulted. In thrall to a great dream of wealth and power, they plunged ahead to bankruptcy while the miners paid with their lives. St. Clair is a rich and illuminating work of scholarship—an engrossing portrait of a disaster-prone industry (a portrait that stands as a sober warning to the nuclear-power industry) and of the tragic hubris of a ruling class that brough ruin upon a Pennsylvania coal town at a crucial moment in its history.
Download or read book Baker Towers written by Jennifer Haigh and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bakerton is a community of company houses and church festivals, of union squabbles and firemen's parades. Its neighborhoods include Little Italy, Swedetown, and Polish Hill. For its tight-knit citizens -- and the five children of the Novak family -- the 1940s will be a decade of excitement, tragedy, and stunning change. Baker Towers is a family saga and a love story, a hymn to a time and place long gone, to America's industrial past, and to the men and women we now call the Greatest Generation. It is a feat of imagination from an extraordinary voice in American fiction, a writer of enormous power and skill.
Download or read book Bucket of Blood written by R. S. Sukle and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Bucket of Blood" is what a coal town was called when bloodshed occurred to establish a worker's union. During the 1927-1928 strike in the western Pennsylvania coalfields, Russellton became known as such a place. In an effort to break the strike, special Coal and Iron Police were brought into the area to evict the mine families from their company houses. These men imposed unconstitutional restrictions to harass the people and keep out relief workers and organizers. It was a time of brutal beatings, rape, and murder. Without union representation, the workers were constantly exploited. Because the company used many weapons to keep them enslaved, the miners' families were forced to live in abject poverty. The miner had only one weapon, the strike. Bucket of Blood: The Ragman's War chronicles the depravation and indignities suffered by the families in the Russellton camps during the strike. Author R.S. Sukle explores the glimmers of hope appearing through relief efforts by the sons of a local farmer who become union activists. Ragman, a mine mechanic, walks out with the other men. Against his intentions, he is drawn into the struggle by his brothers, and the abuse that is heaped on his family by the Coal and Iron Police. The killing of a state Coal and Iron Policeman in Russellton is a local legend. The killer was never identified. This story has been passed down in certain families, each with their own version. Each claims the killer as a relative. Bucket of Blood is one of those stories.
Book Synopsis The Hollow Ground by : Natalie S. Harnett
Download or read book The Hollow Ground written by Natalie S. Harnett and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We walk on fire or air, so Daddy liked to say. Basement floors too hot to touch. Steaming green lawns in the dead of winter. Sinkholes, quick and sudden, plunging open at your feet. The underground mine fires ravaging Pennsylvania coal country have forced eleven-year-old Brigid Howley and her family to seek refuge with her estranged grandparents, the formidable Gram and the black lung stricken Gramp. Tragedy is no stranger to the Howleys, a proud Irish-American clan who takes strange pleasure in the "curse" laid upon them generations earlier by a priest who ran afoul of the Molly Maguires. The weight of this legacy rests heavily on a new generation, when Brigid, already struggling to keep her family together, makes a grisly discovery in a long-abandoned bootleg mine shaft. In the aftermath, decades-old secrets threaten to prove just as dangerous to the Howleys as the burning, hollow ground beneath their feet. Inspired by real-life events in Centralia and Carbondale, where devastating coal mine fires irrevocably changed the lives of residents, The Hollow Ground is an extraordinary debut with an atmospheric, voice-driven narrative and an indelible sense of place. Lovers of literary fiction will find in Harnett's young, determined protagonist a character as heartbreakingly captivating as any in contemporary literature.
Book Synopsis The Real Disaster Is Above Ground by : J. Stephen Kroll-Smith
Download or read book The Real Disaster Is Above Ground written by J. Stephen Kroll-Smith and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1950s Centralia was a small town, like many others in the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. But since the 1960s, it has been consumed, outwardly and inwardly by a fire that has inexorably spread in the abandoned mines beneath it. The earth smokes, subsides, and breathes poisonous gases. No less destructive has been the spread of dissension and enmity among the townspeople. The Real Disaster Above Ground tells the story of the fire and the tragic failure of all efforts to counter it. This study of the Centralia fire represents the most thorough canvass of the documentary materials and the community that has appeared. The authors report on the futile efforts of residents to reach a common understanding of an underground threat that was not readily visible and invited multiple interpretations. They trace the hazard management strategies of government agencies that, ironically, all too often created additional threats to the welfare of Centralians. They report on the birth and demise of community organizations, each with its own solution to the problem and its diehard partisans. The final solution, now being put into effect, is to abandon the town and relocate its people. Centralia's environmental disaster, the authors argue, is not a local or isolated phenomenon. It warns of the danger lurking in our own technology when safeguards fail and disaster management policy is not in place to respond to failure, as the examples of Chernobyl and Bhopal have clearly demonstrated. The lessons in this study of the fate of a small town in Pennsylvania are indeed sobering. They should be pondered by a variety of social scientists and planners, by all those dealing with the behavior of people under stress and those responsible for the welfare of the public.
Book Synopsis We're Still Here by : Jennifer M. Silva
Download or read book We're Still Here written by Jennifer M. Silva and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2019 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jennifer M. Silva tellas a deep, multi-generational story of pain and politics that will endure long after the Trump administration. Drawing on over 100 interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a declining coal town in Pennsylvania, Silva reveals how the erosion of the American Dream is lived and felt.
Book Synopsis Pennsylvania in Public Memory by : Carolyn Kitch
Download or read book Pennsylvania in Public Memory written by Carolyn Kitch and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What stories do we tell about America’s once-great industries at a time when they are fading from the landscape? Pennsylvania in Public Memory attempts to answer that question, exploring the emergence of a heritage culture of industry and its loss through the lens of its most representative industrial state. Based on news coverage, interviews, and more than two hundred heritage sites, this book traces the narrative themes that shape modern public memory of coal, steel, railroading, lumber, oil, and agriculture, and that collectively tell a story about national as well as local identity in a changing social and economic world.
