Taken in again.

So.
So today we went to Eckley Miner's village. It is a coal patch town founded in 1854. The owners needed coal hauled out of the ground, so across the northeast, towns like this sprang up like weeds. The Owners built the houses, and the miners had to rent from them. They also had to buy coal for heat and cooking they just hauled out.

They looked like this:

That's where the miners lived, here is where the task-master lived:

Note the slight differences in the architectural styles.

Then there is this, behind the workers homes.

 That's the breaker. Those white spots are not dust on my camera, it is snowing.

The coal would be hauled up that ramp on the left, and dumped into the breaker, and gravety would pull the coal along chutes to the bottom where it would be loaded, by size into coal cars and sold.

You may recall the photo I posted, from January 1911. Breaker boys in #9 Breaker, Pennsylvania Coal Company mine at Hughestown Borough near Pittston.

They are called breaker boys because they have to sort the coal, by hand and remove bits of rock and stuff as the coal goes along the chutes beneath them. Any lumps of coal too large has to be broken into smaller bits. As well as fingers, wrists and arms.
If your child was too young to work, the company was happy to provide forged  documents.


So after looking around for a while, I find out that the breaker is a 1/3 scale model of a real breaker, built as a prop by Paramount for the 1970 film "The Molly Maguires".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_XZzA1-24k

THEN I find out the whole town was abandoned in 1950 when the mine shut down!

The whole place was bought in 1968 by Paramount and rebuilt for a movie set!
What a gyp!

But, The PA Historical and Museum Commission took notice of what Paramount was up to, and basically said "Thanks Paramount, we'll take it from here, this is now a State Historical site".

Go Figure.



Oh, and the Molly Maguires? They were Irish who where not happy with the working conditions, the wages and being a slave to the man, so they started to stir the pot, as it were. The company then hired a private detective agency. A private police force arrested them, and private attorneys for the coal companies prosecuted them. The state of PA provided only the courtroom and the gallows.

On 21 June 1877, six of them were hanged in the prison at Pottsville, and four at Mauch Chunk.

In 1953 Mauch Chunk was renamed Jim Thorpe after the athlete.

 I guess they liked "Welcome to Jim Thorpe" better than "Welcome to Mauch Chunk, step out of line, and we will hang you too".