by Sharon Ann Holt

The story of the Coxe family mining interests in Pennsylvania’s anthracite region began long before there were families craving anthracite to burn in their stoves and fireplaces.  And part of the story began far away from Pennsylvania.  While young Tench Coxe paid his dues in the 1770s as a Philadelphia merchant, across the Atlantic in Great Britain, Germany, Poland, and elsewhere, lives began to change in ways that would turn hundreds of thousands of individuals and families into a steady stream of trans-Atlantic migrants, many of whom would find their way to the coal mines.

By the late 18th century, the great forests of Roman Europe had long since been leveled to feed the cooking fires and warm the chilled hands of generations of peasants and nobles.  Meanwhile, for more than a century, reports from North America had spoken of simple farmers warming their feet in front of fires fit for a king.  But wood and warmth were the least of it.

In Europe, small landowning farmers, who through the generations had divided their lands into ever-smaller holdings, increasingly relied on common grazing lands to make ends meet.  But noble families, likewise facing eager heirs and a shortage of family lands, increasingly claimed the common lands as their own, closing them off to ordinary people, and wreaking havoc on rural life.  So villagers became wanderers and farmers became laborers, and men and women, especially the younger ones, reached out for new trades and skills that would enable them to bear their share in supporting their families.

As need pressed, ingenuity answered.  Growing towns and cities became the incubators for new kinds of labor, while displaced rural people provided markets for new products and hands for new work.  Technologies developed to burn scarce wood more efficiently and cleanly,  and people began to think about coal, a richly black concentrate of carbon capable of burning hotter and longer than wood.

Tench Coxe knew that anthracite coal lay in quantities just under the soil of northeastern Pennsylvania, so he bought in all 80,000 acres of that land, betting that someday it would pay off handsomely.  Coxe turned out to have been, though not a lucky man, a man of keen foresight.  Though land speculation ultimately bankrupted him, part of his vast acreage lay on top of one of the richest veins of anthracite in Pennsylvania.   At his death in 1824, he urged his son, Charles S. Coxe, to hang on to those lands at all costs.  Charles did.  Though the anthracite industry was in its infancy in the 1820s and 1830s,   Charles Coxe paid taxes and managed debt on land he  could not work. 

After the Civil War, though, the market for anthracite was poised to expand  exponentially.   Pennsylvania’s western bituminous fields were much bigger than her anthracite fields, and by the late-nineteenth century the coal pouring from the western part of the state would, along with oil wells, carry Pennsylvania to dominance in American industry.  But anthracite, hard, glossy, and almost pure carbon, was the queen of coals.  Bituminous coal worked well for industrial uses, but anthracite burned hot, long, and clean enough to be the fuel of choice in Victorian households. 

Charles’ son, Eckley Brinton Coxe, had been born to the coal fields and had traveled, at his father’s behest, in Europe and around the United States to get the best practical and theoretical education in mining-related matters that could be had.    And just as he and his brother, Alexander, organized to dig, prepare, and market the coal, the children and grandchildren of Europe’s displaced farmers began arriving from all over the known world to swell the local workforce.  Some had skills, especially those who had mined coal in Wales, England, or Germany.  Some had more strength than skill to offer, but all came with a determination to get a stake in the world at the far end of a long migration.   Their labor, firmly and paternalistically managed by a succession of Coxe coal mining interests from 1865 through 1905, sustained the largest independent coal operation in the United States.  They helped keep Pennsylvania’s coal fields in production even after anthracite’s heyday, right through the Great Depression and into the 1960s.

By 1888, Eckley B. Coxe, president of Coxe Brothers and Company, employed almost 4,000 people.  Of these, he explained to a Congressional committee, 1,840 were “inside men,” who worked underground in the mines cutting, loading, and ferrying coal to the surface.  Besides the miners, there were men below shoring up the “gangways” – “rooms” dug out amidst the coal veins with coal walls, floor, and ceiling.  As the miners chopped away at the coal all around them, the gangways had to be supported with wood to keep them, everyone hoped, from falling in.  The inside men also included boys who opened and shut heavy doors to move cars between one gangway and another, and placed blocks on the rails to keep carts from moving as they were loaded.  Boys also tended and guided the mules who hauled the carts out of the mine, each cart loaded with a “miner’s ton”  of coal, between 2,240 and 3,360 pounds, depending on the colliery.

Eckley Coxe had another 1,300 men employed in preparing the coal, including an enormous number of “breaker boys.”  Anthracite coal didn’t come from the ground in “user-friendly”  chunks, but it surely had to go to market that way.  The breakers, large structures that dominated the landscape of the coal fields,  had large rollers over which coal was passed while the turning pinions broke the irregular coal from the carts into useful, marketable sizes.  Coal sizes included “pea,” “nut,” “rice,” “buckwheat,” “barley,” “egg,” and “stove” coal,  an interesting tribute to the enduring meaning of agricultural experience within this most industrial of pursuits.

Breaking was not enough, though, because anthracite did not come from the ground pure, either.  Underground, anthracite had long kept company with slate and shale, and miners could scarcely help scooping some of that waste in with each cartload.   Miners were expected to remove the waste, which some did more thoroughly than others.  One miner, questioned by his foreman about why his coal was so “dirty” with waste materials, replied waggishly and philosophically, “What God has joined, let no man put asunder.”[1]  To clean the coal, dozens of breaker boys, children of 6-10 years, bent over troughs of coal flowing from the great rollers of each breaker searching for pieces of slate, which they picked out and discarded.

Besides these boys, there were 366 “outside men” engaged in the processing, weighing, loading, and supervising the coal.  These included the breaker boss, who estimated, and penalized the miners for, the amount of waste in each cartload, the machinists who kept the rollers turning, lumbermen who made the wooden supports, and the men who emptied the carts onto the rollers. 

For the rest of the business, Coxe employed 155 machinists, 6 men constructing and repairing buildings, including miner’s homes, 53 clerks and office workers, and a sales force of 193 scattered from New York City to the Great Lakes.   Their jobs included maintaining the tools miners used and the pumps that labored to keep the underground passages dry, building dwellings for the miners and their families as well as buildings for the operations themselves, tracking all the planning, surveying, engineering, payroll, and other correspondence produced by a large company, and ultimately finding buyers for the coal from New England to California.  

A miner might start his career as a breaker boy, especially if a family needed an additional breadwinner to survive the accidental maiming or death of an adult.  By adolescence, he would be working with the mules and carts underground.   As a young man, he would want to sign on as a miner’s assistant, learning the trade first hand for a small share of the miner’s wages.  By the time he was thirty, he might be a miner in his own right, unless, as often happened, accident, illness, or some other calamity intervened. 

Mining anthracite involved the delicate business of undercutting – digging out a two-foot tall, six-foot long opening at the bottom of a vein of coal, then blasting the coal above the cut to break it,  hammering it loose, and loading it onto a cart headed for the surface.   Undercutting involved working on your stomach, hammering out a narrow slit in the coal by hand.  Blasting took precision and care, to minimize waste and avoid the dangers of collapse.  Hammering and shoveling took time and strength.

Danger was a constant.  A miner could be crushed by a roof collapse or by a loaded cart.   Blast explosions could bring down walls unexpectedly, or ignite natural gas that lingered in certain areas of the mines, ready to explode or asphyxiate miners if the fans at the surface broke down.  The cages in which the inside men rode up and down moved on cables that could fray and snap, sending men plummeting miles into the earth.  The pumps that kept the mines dry might break, drowning miners in groundwater.  Though gas explosions were the most common recorded mining accidents,  quirky accidents also happened,  like an “inrush of quicksand”  that killed 26 miners at Nanticoke in 1886.[2]

A miner’s wages depended upon how much coal he could harvest daily from the mine, but management’s expectations differed sharply from the realities experienced by laboring miners.   In 1888, an anthracite miner could generally fill two carts of coal each day.   Average daily earnings across forty-five anthracite mines varied from $1.31 to $4.08, with the bulk of men earning between $2.00 and $3.50.[3]   In that same year, however, Eckley Coxe testified that the Coxe company assumed that a miner produced five carloads each day, at 87 cents/load.  Eckley calculated that, from the resulting  $4.35, a miner could pay his assistant $1.80, plus a portion of various local and school taxes amounting to about $3.90/year.  Coxe miners were then docked at the breaker for the amount of slate mixed with each cartload, and in addition, miners were charged for their own “powder and oil, blasting barrel, cotton, and squib.”[4]  

Dockage, the practice of discounting the value of a carload of coal based upon the slate it seemed to contain, was a particular grievance of miners, and turned up near the heart of several  periods of labor strife.   In the context of the large difference between coal operators’ assumptions and the realities of miners’ lives, dockage must have seemed nearly unendurable.  Indeed, someone who styled himself after the Molly Maguires sent several letters to Coxe  breaker bosses warning them, at the peril of their lives,  to “stop dockin so heavy.”[5]

If he lived in a house rented from the company, a miner’s rent was also deducted before his pay was issued.  For 35 cents, a Coxe miner could rent “some sort of shanty” fit only for a “bachelor.”[6]  A family, for $4/month, could share a four- room dwelling with three other families, two rooms upstairs and two on the ground floor, plastered and whitewashed, with a communal kitchen.   More generous quarters could be had for $5.50/month, the price of sharing three rooms upstairs and two down with just one other family.  These units cost the company $850 to build, and with a monthly rental income of $11, paid for themselves, including repairs, in 6-8 years. 

Eckley Coxe expressed pride in the quality of shingle-roofed, frame dwelling houses the company provided, emphasizing that they had “good cellars” and plastered interior walls and contrasting them sharply with earlier inferior dwellings.[7]  In the early 20th-century, records show expenditures for installing water, heating, and electrical systems in company houses in Drifton, Beaver Meadow, Oneida and Deringer, though in the Drifton fields some families still made do with “new village toilets” as late as 1927.[8]  Monthly rents had risen since 1888, and now ranged from $4 for the presumed shanty through $10 for a well-equipped, family-sized place.

Families might take in boarders, even in these crowded dwellings, and a miner’s wife would earn income for the family by doing cooking, washing, and mending for the boarders.  Women and children also raised cabbages or potatoes, and picked the blueberries that grew on the mountains.  Some kept chickens, and, if they could afford the taxes, a cow.  All these enterprises supplemented a miner’s meager earnings.[9] Though the company insured the dwellings and kept a staff of repairmen and carpenters to maintain them, some of the buildings were 62 years old and must have been in a sorry state when the company began tearing them down in the 1930s.[10]

The miners came to this corner of northeastern Pennsylvania from all over Europe.  Eckley Coxe testified in the 1880s that Coxe miners were “a general mixture, we have Englishmen, Welsh, a good many Americans, Pennsylvania Germans, Hungarians, and Poles.  And quite a number of Italians, Tyrolese, and Austrians.”[11]  The names of tenants in Coxe houses in the 1930s testify to the successive waves of migration.  Welsh families named Jones, Davis, and Morgan lived with Irish Mallorys and Gallaghers, as well as families named Ambruch, Kowalik, and Andrasko.  Ulshafer, Kirchdoerfer, and Zanatelli shared a community with Nause, Nitka, Laputka, and Johnson.  Italians, Poles, and German ethnics predominated in the later years, but did not eclipse the earlier influxes of Welsh, Irish, English, Dutch, or later arrivals from Russia and the Baltic states.  Relations could be vicious between groups.  Welsh Protestant miners brought scorn for Irish Catholics unabated with them from Britain.   Later, Irish miners faced with Slavic immigrants tricked the newcomers by offering “English classes.”   These classes turned out to be lessons in cussing, and the Irish miners hoped the bad language would inflame the mine foremen against the Slavs.[12]

Each group brought its customs and costumes, foodways, music, poetry, and religion to the company “patch towns.”  Groups of miners frequently asked company management for plots of land to create cemeteries for their particular group, apart from those of a different background.  In 1894, Polish Catholics respectfully importuned “Mr. Hon. E. B. Cox” to give them a timely answer about their purchasing “1 acre near the Grick’s Cemetery,” because, as they explained with sorrow, “we have some children sick.”  Five years later, John Klinger, a supervisor in Hazleton, had to explain to his boss in Drifton that Orthodox Jews would prefer a cemetery of their own, set apart from the one used by the Reformed congregation.  Both requests testify to the internal diversity within groups that might seem quite homogenous to outsiders.[13]

The Coxe companies ran a number of collieries, and ethnic groups tended to live together  in particular patch towns, suggesting that, as elsewhere in American industry, miners who were already employed helped find jobs and homes for relatives or compatriots.  In 1929, the company recorded the extent of idleness at different collieries during a wide array of Christian and national holidays.  The Oneida colliery showed the most diversity in the religious observance of its employees, marking 17 out of 35 religious or ethnic holidays with appreciable reductions in labor.  Beaver Meadow was second, with 13 holidays, followed by Spring Mountain with 12, and Deringer with only nine.  Eastern Orthodox believers took their Christmas holiday on January 7, shutting down Beaver Meadow entirely and forcing Spring Mountain and Oneida collieries to operate at 80% and 70% of capacity, respectively.   On Easter Saturday that year, only the Spring Mountain miners took any considerable holiday, though on Easter Monday two collieries closed entirely, with only Oneida and Deringer operating, and at ¼ and 1/3 of capacity, respectively.  The Eastern Orthodox faithful at Oneida and Beaver Meadow stayed out for Ascension Day and  “Greek Green Monday” in May, while observers of the Roman Catholic rite closed down Spring Mountain and Oneida, but not Deringer or Beaver Meadow, for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception in December.  All the collieries worked at full capacity on Saint Patrick’s Day, emphasizing the diminishing presence of Irish miners in the 20^th century.  In addition to national holidays and election day, all the collieries shut down for Labor Day and April 1, a holiday marked “U.M.W. of A.”  -- United Mine Workers of America.

Eckley Coxe, and his wife Sophia, invested considerable personal effort and wealth in benevolent activities aimed at workers and their families.  These included large-scale activities, like founding a local hospital and the Miners and Mechanics Institute, along with smaller scale personal philanthropy like their annual Christmas gift-giving.   Eckley believed that men in his position should show paternalistic benevolence to those below him, and he practiced what he preached in both his holiday season generosity and his management of labor strife.  In 1884, for instance, the Coxe’s bought dozens of baskets, vases, trumpets, scrapbooks, umbrellas, harmonicas, and tea sets, all destined for the children of mining families.  Easels and frames, silk handkerchiefs, and japanned boxes may have been calculated to please miner’s wives.[14]  In any case, Eckley and Sophia Coxe believed deeply in this kind of charitable benevolence, and continued their Christmas giving right through periods of labor strife.  Despite a costly strike in 1888, for example, the company gave away almost 1600 Christmas trinkets in 1891, and in 1892 gave more, including new goodies like “surprise boxes,” “automatic rabbits,” and jointed snakes.[15]

Enjoyments were indisputably part of life on the Coxe lands, but holiday gifts did not solve problems created by low wages, danger in the mines, and sharp practice at the breakers.  The entry of successive waves of new ethnic and religious groups into this community of workers may have initially undermined the Coxe miners’ ability to organize and challenge management, as it did in other industries.  But by the 1880s, the Knights of Labor were actively working in the Coxe fields, and in 1888 the men struck to demand better wages.  The miners stayed out for months.  They were also determined to rein in the arbitrary power of breaker bosses, whose decisions about the value of a given cart of coal could make or break a man’s income in a stroke.  The strike’s impact on the national economy eventually spurred a Congressional investigation into the wages, prices, and work processes of coal mining. 

Eckley Coxe testified reluctantly but extensively before this investigating committee, and the legislators probed him for details about coal mining methods and about the possibility that railroad and coal mine owners colluded to profiteer by depressing wages, inflating prices, and sharing profits.  Eckley vehemently denied any such collusion, asserting that he, as he was honor bound to do, had made the decisions affecting his collieries on his own, without consulting any of his colleagues.[16]

The tone of the legislators’ questions softened as they found Eckley Coxe, a man of their own stripe,  an increasingly reasonable and credible witness.  But they were entirely baffled by his refusal to negotiate openly with his men and explain his position to them.  His arguments, they assured him, were reasonable and would carry the day, if only he would make them openly.  But for Eckley, striking workers were a challenge to his independence, not to his intelligence,  and their demands had to be resisted with manly fortitude.  Eckley viewed labor trouble almost as a force of nature.    Labor strife, he  ventured, “has been common to all people who employ others to work for them, I suppose, since the time of Adam.”  He returned to the subject at several points in his testimony, repeatedly invoking family images to explain his obstinate equanimity.  “Coal operators and men,” he said, “are very much like a man and his wife; they quarrel and fuss but they have got to live together.”  Later, he admitted that the first time Coxe workers struck, “it almost made me sick.  [But] it is like a man when his first child has a tooth, he thinks it is dreadful, but when his third child has the fifteenth tooth, he does not think so much of it.”[17]  The only remedy he could imagine for strikes was the spread of common schools, so that labor and capital would better understand each other – though the understanding he envisioned seemed to go only one way.

Miners and their families found the Coxe management’s position less charming than did the members of the Congressional committee.   Disputes over dockage had led to the murder of breaker bosses and the midnight torching of several breakers earlier in the decade, and flared again in 1888.  To the congressional committee, Eckley declared his willingness to accede to the miner’s demand that a miner stand with the breaker boss and monitor his decisions for fairness.  But Eckley was not in the least willing to discuss the question with the Knights of Labor, claiming the classically anti-union position that an employer has the right to deal  with his men directly.

Eckley died, relatively young, before the great strikes of 1900 and 1902  that helped establish the United Mine Workers of America in the anthracite fields.  But he gave no sign in his testimony of 1888 that he would have brought any fresh imagination to that challenge, or that he could have understood the equally adamantly self-evident independence of his work force.

Both owners and workers in the anthracite fields faced a new world in the twentieth century, as oil, gas and electric fuels took over the home heating market, and industrial users continued to prefer less expensive bituminous coal.   During the Depression years, coal operators closed the mines, then waged a losing battle to stop desperate “bootleg miners” from taking small loads of coal to market.  Miners wives and widows left an oblique record of their determination to keep a roof over their families’ heads.    In 1938, the company noted a long list of derelict tenants, eighteen of whom simply refused to pay or move out.  Five of the refusers were women, or 22%, a far larger proportion than their numbers among household heads.  Their boldness may have grown from desperation, but they also seem to have found some shelter behind the Victorian sensibilities of the rent collectors.  Though 8 refusers were “given to the constable for collection,” none of the women were so treated.[18]

After 1905, the Coxe family began to divest itself of its mining and shipping interests until, by the 1960s, they were engaged principally in selling off the remains of the real estate holdings that had begun with Tench Coxe’s speculations.  Homes and whole company towns were turned over to the people living in them, most by sale, and miners who had survived the Great Depression and the long, slow decline of anthracite mining became homeowners, and began to look for new livelihoods.  Today, the towns of Drifton, Eckley, and othershouse descendants of generations of miners.  Ethnic traditions and religious institutions survive to serve their communities, and tourists and leisure travelers come to the small towns to enjoy camping, biking, and hiking, while derelict breakers still dot the skyline.  The Coxe mines hosted many a brand-new American family.  The miners witnessed many a desperate tragedy, and, with their work, warmed many a home around the world.  Their stories reveal so many crucially important aspects of Pennsylvania’s history.  The Coxe story derives from the accidental partnership of cosmopolitan land speculators and desperate immigrants.  It shows us owners working to create family-like relations with their workers, and workers determined to be “treated like men.”  The Coxe mining experience holds the history of the physical and mental demands of early industrial work, and the violence that accompanied it, and the ways that miners, their families, and their communities moved beyond exhaustion, danger, division, and fear and found ways to shape the future.

[1] Eckley B. Coxe, Testimony to Investigating Committee, U.S. House of Representatives, March 1, 2888.  Coxe Family Mining Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Box 554, Folder 6, p. 43.

[2] Pennsylvania State Department, Summary of Anthracite Accidents in which five or More Persons were killed.

[3] Blatz, Perry K.  "Democratic Miners: Work and Labor Relations in the Anthracite Coal Industry, 1875-1925"  State University of New York Press, Albany: 1994, 17.

[4] Squib was a fuse used to set off dynamite in the mines; Eckley B. Coxe, Testimony, 31.

[5] Coxe Family Mining papers, Box 564, Folder 3.

[6] Eckley B. Coxe, Testimony, 38

[7] Hazelton Standard Speaker, Jan. 15, 1962, Coxe Family Mining Papers, Box 110, Folder 6.

[8] Coxe Family Mining Papers, Box 583, Folder 4.

[9] Kucas, Antanas, Lithuanians in America, Paragon House Press, 1989, cited in “Why Pennsylvania,” by Jay Kane at www.lithuaniangenealogy.org

[10] Coxe Family Mining Papers, Box 583, Folder 1.

[11] Eckley B. Coxe, Testimony, 46

[12] “History Corner,” by Kay Jenkins Rew, the Pennsylvania Anthracite Heritage Museum, at www.paturnpike.com

[13] Pastor L. Demski et. al. to E. Oberrender, Drifton, PA, Oct 23, 1894, and John W. Klinger to E. A. Oberrender, August 3, 1899.  Coxe Family Mining Papers, Superintendent's correspondence.

[14] Coxe Family Mining Papers, Box 565, Folder 2.

[15] Coxe Family Mining Papers, Box 565, Folders 8, 11.

[16] Eckley B. Coxe, Testimony, 5-6.

[17] Eckley B. Coxe, Testimony, 23, 48.

[18] Coxe Family Mining Papers, Box 583, Folder 4.

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Image:  Six well-dressed young men posing with musical instruments in an unidentified Coxe Mining Village, ca. 1890. Coxe Mining Papers.