This article was written by Marianne Wilski Strong
(Photos by: David Strong)
In 1964, I left my hometown of Wilkes-Barre in northeastern Pennsylvania. But northeastern Pennsylvania never left me. It haunted me for years, until in 1990, I began to tell the story of that ravaged, nearly gothic area, the anthracite coal fields stretching from Pottsville in the south to Scranton in the north.
I had, of course, read the novels of John O'Hara who grew up in Pottsville. Appointment in Samarra, published in 1934 and often considered the best of O'Hara's novels, describes the wealth of Gibbsville, the fictional Pottsville. The source of the wealth is black diamonds, the shiny blue-black, hard and long burning anthracite coal that lay deep beneath the surface of Gibbsville's hills. The mine owners and managers poured this wealth into magnificent homes, some still gracing the hilly streets of Pottsville. In my own home town of Wilkes-Barre, too, I saw the magnificent River Street mansions of the wealthy. The wealth, I knew, had been acquired on the heart and back breaking labor of the Irish, Polish, and Italian immigrant miners. Whatever small wages they earned flowed back into the company's coffers. The miners had to pay for the equipment to mine: explosives, axes, hammers, carbide lamps. Miners wives had to shop for food and clothing in company owned stores and to pay rent for the cramped, dark company houses.
This broad and deep divide between owners and laborers created a tension that I began to write about in "Medusa in Mourning," (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, 1990), the first in a series of mystery short stories set in the anthracite coal fields. In the story, Anna, widow of a miner, works for the widow of a mine owner. Anna must listen to the old woman's tales of Pottsville and Philadelphia parties, of the summer mansions built alongside the cool lakes of northeastern Pennsylvania, of summers of boating and swimming at these lakes. Anna knows that the magnificence of the old woman's life had come at the expense of the lungs of Anna's husband, lungs whose cells were packed with coal dust. Black lung, the miners called the disease. Those afflicted with it, and there were many, coughed up black phlegm. They felt, they said, as though they were drowning in coal dust. Anna's husband died in the back room of a coal company house, a house such as my own grandmother lived in for many years. Anna hopes to be given some of the rich widow's money as recompense for her and her husband's work. But the money mysteriously disappears, melting away from her just as the wealth of the black diamonds had flowed away from the miners.
Many coal company houses in Wilkes-Barre disappeared as I grew up. But some remained in surrounding mountain towns, some almost ghost towns, through which I wandered with my father. In the coal "patches," as these towns were called, small dark coal company houses with roofs sloping toward the back, crowded round the colliery, the mine site and its buildings. Set apart from the colliery, a lovely home with porch and filigreed wood decoration stood in splendid isolation. Only a mine superintendent could have occupied such a home.
One such patch, near Hazleton, is Eckley, now a state historic site. Eckley remained so untouched for nearly one hundred years that Hollywood used it to film The Molly McGuires in 1970. The film and Robert T. Reilly's 1979 novel Rebels in the Shadows tell the story of several miners, supposedly members of a secret Irish miners' organization, The Molly McGuires, based in Eckley and nearby towns, McAddo, Tamaqua, and Jeddo, and bent on retaliation against mine owners and foremen for wage cuts and for hellish working conditions that broke backs and crushed skulls. In the 1870s, striking miners, desperate to keep the strike going, did resort to violence. Strikebreakers were attacked; railroads sabotaged. Several mine superintendents and several Coal and Iron policemen, the "law enforcement" agency, privately owned by the coal companies, were murdered. Franklin Gowen, President of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, owned by coal companies, took advantage of the situation to crush a miners' benevolent association, organized to help feed the families of striking miners. Gowen hired a Pinkerton agent to infiltrate and then testify against the miners' association, calling it a terrorist organization. On June 21, 1877, Pennsylvania's "day of the rope," several miners, convicted of the murders, were hung in Carbon County.
Whether the men were guilty or not remains controversial. Whether they had organized within the miners' benevolent association to which they belonged an inner core of "Mollies," dedicated to violence is controversial. What is certain is that the trial of the accused was and is a study in injustice. Unreliable witnesses, a jury, largely German immigrants who understood little English, and inflammatory rhetoric on the part of the prosecutor, resulted in a conviction.
Legend has it that the strange print on the wall of Cell 17 in the former prison in Jim Thorpe, now a mountain resort town, is that of Alex Campbell who, on the day he was hung, is said to have pressed his soiled hand against the wall, exclaiming that it would remain there forever as testimony to his innocence.
I grew up hearing such stories, including the whispered story in my family that an uncle had killed a particularly cruel mine foreman, bashing in his head with a coal shovel. True or not, the family legend became the story "The Honored Guest," (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, 2001; Mystery: The Best of 2001, Jon L. Breen, editor). I created Mr. Porchek, who moves like a tragic ghost in and out of the family in the story, refusing to reveal the real murderer. Miners, like my Mr. Porchek, are said to haunt the tunnels, shafts, and corridors of an underground mine city, stretching from Pottsville to Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. This was the realm of hell. Called by the wail of the coal company's whistle at break of day, the miners rode cages a thousand feet down into the dark earth. If they were not crushed by rock falls, smothered by gases, or burned by fires, as over one hundred thousand were in eighty years, they emerged to wash down the coal dust in the saloons of northeastern Pennsylvania until the dust settled into and began to eat their lungs.
But the miners are not the only ghosts who haunt the area. In "The Shaft" (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine), I created a woman, Aunt Chesla, whose backyard had a mine shaft that caved in, as many do in the yards of northeast Pennsylvania homes. Like so many black lung widows, Aunt Chesla survived with a sense of her own strength. She is an avenging fury. In her stories, "The Shooters," "Ice-Cold Murder," (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine) she brings her own brand of justice to bear on those who exploit the black lung widows. Greedy sons of former coal mine owners, petty thieves, or corrupt officials, none escape her anger. Nor can the police figure out how she takes her revenge.
As I combed and still comb these mountains of Pennsylvania, my eyes alight on strange barren heaps of rock. They stretch out, not exactly monochromatic, but in shades of grey and brown. They are slag heaps, the detritus of the black diamonds: unwanted slate and rock, as useless and expendable to the coal companies as the worn-out miners.
An even more eerie experience I had of environmental devastation in the now almost abandoned town of Centralia, Pennsylvania became the inspiration for the fictional Jenkinsville in my story "St. Casimir's Fire," in the June 2007 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Centralia is a modern day ghost town. Sitting on top of an underground mine fire, the town had to be abandoned and most of its houses destroyed. What the visitor notices first, approaching on Highway 61, are blackened trees, rust colored dirt and stone, then signs warning of the instability of the ground and dangers of walking upon it. In the town, sidewalks and streets lead to nothing. The earth feels warm on one's hands from the heat of the fire raging below. The fire burns toward a cemetery and a church, the settings for "St. Casimir's Fire," the story of a miner and his wife, desperate enough to commit murder to save the church, all that remains of their lives, their daughters' bones having long since burned, victim to the fire below.
Is Centralia haunted? Perhaps. What is certainly haunting is a view from near the hospital in Pittston, Pennsylvania, near Wilkes-Barre. From the cliff site, the I have often looked out over the Susquehanna River to the green hills of the river's west side. This river is featured in my story, "Murder to Die For," (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine). In the 1980s and 1990s, unscrupulous companies poured chemical and other toxins into mine boreholes that, in turn, vomited the wastes into the river. In my story, a woman, to help her ill sister, blackmails such a company. She saves her sister, but herself falls victim, as so many before her, to the greed that created the tragedy of Pennsylvania's coalfields.
The final tragedy came in January, 1959. Ice-choked in the cold winter, the Susquehanna river broke into the Knox Mine, valuable for its thick shiny vein of pure black diamonds. The hole the river gouged into the mines, as if in angry revenge, swallowed train cars and millions of tons of sandbags, dropped in to try to block the waters. But nothing could stop the river. It ran from mine tunnel to mine tunnel, snaking beneath Wilkes-Barre. Its cold icy water drowned twelve men, their bodies trapped forever in the flooded mines. A marker, near St. Joseph's Church in Pittston, lists the names of the twelve men, the last victims of the northern black diamond fields. Anthracite mining had come to an end.
Please continue to: Mystery Interview: Marianne Wilski Strong
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Marianne Wilpiszewski Strong
Marianne was born and raised in Wilkes Barre, Pa. She received a BA in English from College Misericordia and an MA in English from the University of Maryland. She chaired the department of Literature at Prince George's Community College where she taught American and World Literature. She is a published author of twenty-four mystery short stories, many published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. She is currently at work on a novel set in northeastern Pennsylvania and a historical mystery story for young readers involving heroic women in the American Revolution.
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