Recently I did something that I haven't done in a while. As I mentioned last week, the PHMC held a free admission day this past Saturday at all of the historical sites they personally superintend. Well, it happened to work out that nobody was available to go with me for one reason or another, so I ended up going all by myself to my destination of choice up in Luzerne County. I don't often go on quests alone, mostly for health reasons, but I had a great day with beautiful weather and was even able to make a couple side quests to collect additional markers.
My main objective was to pay a visit to Eckley Miners' Village Museum, which I have long wanted to see; and after carefully navigating some hairpin turns up into the mountains, I reached my destination in time to join the 11 a.m. walking tour. Our tour guide was a wonderful retired miner who has been doing research about the region for more than fifty years. He was lovely (I regret not getting his name) and I learned a lot from him. I apologize to my mobile readers, because I took so many pictures in Eckley that this post has more than the usual number.
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The marker sits in the parking lot of the visitors center
at 2 Eckley Main Street, Weatherly |
Eckley was, originally, a tiny settlement known as Shingletown, because the residents made roof shingles from the wood of the many trees. It was part of a large tract of land owned by Tench Coxe, who had been a delegate to the Continental Congress. When a group of prospectors visited the area in 1853, they discovered that the Tench Coxe Estate included a considerable deposit of coal, and the four men - Asa Lansford Foster, John Leisenring, Richard Sharpe, and Francis Weiss - formed a company (first Sharpe, Leisenring and Co., later Sharpe, Weiss and Co.) to mine it. They made arrangements with the Tench Coxe Estate to lease the land for 20 years and to establish and run a colliery on the site. Within a year the project had begun.
Shingletown was replaced with a small village of red and black houses where the mine workers would live. (Why red and black? Because they were the cheapest paint colors available.) The mining company dubbed their little community Fillmore, but when they applied for a post office in 1857, they learned that there already was a Fillmore out in Centre County. So instead they named the town Eckley, after Tench Coxe's teenage grandson. Eckley Coxe later became an engineer and was heavily involved in the town's operations. His namesake is about a mile long and chiefly consists of one street, which isn't paved, although there is a sort of back street where the slate pickers' shack is located; my tour didn't go there.
If you've ever heard about someone coming from "the wrong side of the tracks," this is literally true in a patch town like Eckley. Railroad tracks divide the town roughly in half, and to the east is the poorer end of town and to the west is the relatively wealthier end. On the poorer end are double houses, like the one at left, which were chiefly occupied by Irish immigrants; the wealthier side, with single-family homes, tended to belong to the Welsh, German, and English workers. They were Protestant, while the Irish were Catholic, so there was a lot of ethnic and religious divide with the tracks in the middle. There were also, later, immigrants from eastern European countries such as Poland, and these were usually given the lowest-paying jobs because they didn't speak English.
The tour begins at the poor end of town, near the visitors center, where the Irish were given permission to erect a Catholic church and rectory, seen at right. It was really only the Irish who worshiped in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, because while many of the eastern European immigrants were also Catholic, they preferred to walk the three miles to nearby Freeland in order to attend Orthodox services in their own languages. Today, the rectory serves as the gift shop for the museum, and is a really beautiful building; it still has the original floors and stained glass around the door, and the woman working there told me that when the priest was not in residence, the house was used by a family with 17 children. The church, meanwhile, was closed in the 1950s because the dwindling congregation could no longer support it. The building was desanctified and everything was removed except for the altar; this and a painting of the Virgin Mary on the ceiling are the only things inside which are original to the 1862 construction. Normally, there are replacement statuary and other decorations donated by a church in Berwick, all of which date to the 1920s, but during my tour the church was undergoing a ceiling renovation so these items had been placed in storage.
From the church we moved farther down the street and were shown the interior of one of the double houses. While residents of Eckley certainly had difficult lives, they were treated a little better than the residents of many patch towns owned by other mining companies. Miners in other places were often paid in scrip, a sort of unique currency which was only good at the company store; I mentioned this back in my post about the
Molly Maguires. Eckley residents were paid in actual United States dollars - they still suffered backlash for not shopping at the company store, but they had the means to save their money, and many of them did. Families took in boarders, did laundry, sold baked goods or eggs, and found other ways to supplement their mining income. This enabled them to later rent a better house from the company, or to even buy a piece of land elsewhere and move out of Eckley entirely. So one side of the double house (seen at left) showed what the living conditions were like for a newer family - sparse, with whitewashed walls, no curtains, metal dinnerware, wood stove, and so forth.
The other side was the home of a mining family that had been able to improve their situation - blue painted walls, curtains, real dishes, frames on their artwork, even a treadle sewing machine. The guide told us that a miner's wife frequently had two dreams, to own a coal stove (rare because coal was so much more expensive than wood) and to have her own real dishes. Later in their operations, the mining company took less interest in maintaining the residences, so the people who lived there were responsible for the upkeep. Some of them built summer kitchens behind their houses, where they cooked and did laundry in the summer to reduce the heat in the main house.
The railroad tracks which divide the town lead to the breaker, part of the mining operations. The breaker seen at right is not real; the real one was much bigger, and didn't stand quite so close to the town. This one is actually a prop, left over from the filming of the movie
The Molly Maguires. I mentioned it briefly in my post about the
Carbon County marker, but in the 1960s, Paramount Pictures rented the village of Eckley to serve as a set for their movie about the ill-fated miners; the breaker was part of the movie. The company store sitting in the middle of Eckley today is also a leftover prop, as the real store was torn down long ago. Also in the movie is a location called the Emerald Saloon, which didn't really exist; the building used for that is the Eckley social club, which was erected in the early 20th century as a gesture of appreciation to the miners returning from serving in the World Wars. It's still a social club today.
Oh yeah, that was - to me - the most surprising fact about Eckley. People still live there. The entire village is a museum, but it's a living museum and some of the homes are still occupied, often by descendants of the original residents. The PHMC now owns the property, as it has done since not too long after filming wrapped on The Molly Maguires, and the residents rent their homes from the organization. Despite the look of the place, they have all the modern amenities one can expect, like indoor plumbing and electricity; things like fire hydrants and cable boxes have been carefully concealed, so as not to disrupt the aesthetic of the village. If you visit Eckley, you might see some of the residents sitting on their porches or mowing their lawns. The rule of thumb is that if a house has a mailbox in front of it, someone lives there, so don't try to open the door or peer through the windows. Houses without mailboxes are unoccupied, although as of this writing only one is available for visitors to enter. (That will be changing... keep reading.)
Walking past the breaker leads to the wealthier end of town. There were once two churches there, St. James's Episcopal and a Presbyterian church, the latter of which was relocated to Freeland in the 1930s. The plot where it stood is now a green space for the exclusive use of residents and museum staff. St. James's also no longer stands, but has been replaced with St. Paul's, which was brought over from the town of White Haven; it was built on the same plan as St. James, at around the same time, and was even served by the same rector, Rev. Peter Russell. He and his wife are memorialized in two of the stained glass windows. All of the woodwork and furnishings are original, and the wood is English walnut, which gives an idea of how wealthy the congregation must have been. No one uses it for worship anymore, but our guide told us that the church organ gets played at Christmas, and occasionally people rent the church for weddings.
The mule barn and the real company store were also in this part of the village, but both have long since been torn down; a replica mule barn stands near the company store prop. At the extreme western end of Eckley are the home and office of the company doctor, which is currently being renovated and will be open for tours in the future, and the homes which belonged to mine owners Asa Lansford Foster and Richard Sharpe. Sharpe's mansion is seen at right. Foster's house is about to undergo a lot of changes as part of a revitalization project, becoming a research facility for continuing exploration of this time period. Other aspects of this project, which are detailed in the PHMC article linked below, will eventually include renovating some of the homes to allow people to actually stay overnight in Eckley and experience the conditions firsthand.
The village is the big draw in Eckley, but by no means the only one. Inside the visitors center is a small museum filled with artifacts from and information about daily life in Eckley. There is also more information about the mining company and the men who operated the community, particularly Eckley Coxe and his wife Sophia. The picture of her at left hangs in the museum. Strong believers in an educated work force, the Coxes established the Institute of Miners and Mechanics, which still operates today as the
MMI Preparatory School, and Eckley was also involved in the founding of Lehigh University alongside
Asa Packer. Although he was militantly anti-union, he was kinder to the residents of Eckley than many mine owners; he refused to allow any of his tenants to be evicted during the winter months. If a miner was killed, instead of evicting the widow (as many other mine owners did), he would allow her to remain for several months and provide a small pension on which she could support her family while she figured out what to do. Sophia, according to our tour guide, was known as "the Angel of the Anthracite" for how much interest she took in the welfare of the miners' wives and children. In particular, every year she would personally finance a large Christmas party for the miners' children, and provided them with two gifts each - one practical (gloves, socks, or something like that) and one personal (something fun like a sled or a doll).
Eckley is the largest and best-preserved anthracite mining community in the entire United States. Walking through the village is free and can be done year-round, although guided tours are only available from Memorial Day through Labor Day - or on special event days, such as when I was there. The museum in the visitors center has a small fee, and you can also inquire at the desk about a self-guided cell phone tour of the village. (Do keep in mind that the only public restrooms are inside the visitors center, so pay attention to their hours of operation!) With the dynamic changes that are planned to unfold in the next few years, it's going to be an exciting time to visit and discover.
Sources and Further Reading:
Lowery, Andrea. "Coal Patch, Take Two: The Preservation of Eckley Miners' Village." Pennsylvania Heritage magazine, Spring 2016.
Blatz, Perry, and Craig A. Benner. Eckley Miners' Village: Pennsylvania Trails of History Guides. Stackpole Books, June 2003.
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Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
I greatly enjoyed the pictures and the history.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much, I'm really glad you did!
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