Under my hat: Marking Anthracite's 250th anniversary

It was special and necessary to set aside a full year, 2018, to celebrate something older than America.

The birth of the anthracite coal industry deserved it.

“Anthracite is the only coal which evolved beyond geology,” says Scott D. Herring, Tamaqua native and chairman of the 250th Anthracite Anniversary Board.

“It became the symbol and identity of a unique and historic region and cultural heritage. We, the People of the Black Diamond, are the only people on earth to take our cultural name and human identity from coal mining, iron-making and railroading.”

The 250th celebration was predicated on common agreement, including by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, that the anthracite industry got its start in 1768. That’s when Connecticut blacksmith Obadiah Gore Jr., returned to the Wyoming Valley, fully aware of coal’s potential.

Through experimentation in his shop near present-day Pittston and Wilkes-Barre, he proved that the local stone attained very high and even heat, ideal for industrial use. His discovery launched the anthracite mining and iron industries in northeastern and central Pennsylvania.

This was nearly a quarter century before other similar significant discoveries by Necho Allen in the Pottsville area (1790) and Phillip Ginder in Summit Hill (1791).

The 250th anniversary came to life in our regional communities through concerts, plays, festivals, museum displays, parades and celebrations. In fact, the anniversary was celebrated from Macungie to Forest City and everywhere in between. The official logo was ubiquitous — seen on posters, banners, license plates, calendars, printed programs, television shows, and even on trains of eleven regional railroads.

Key towns earned a designation of “Showcase Community,” the highest regional honor for their success in pulling off major events during the celebration. Those that earned the distinction: Forest City, Lansford, Alburtis, Macungie, Minersville, Scranton, Shenandoah, Tamaqua, Tremont and Valley View.

All of this reinforced a cultural statement at a critical juncture in our history. We’re in an era where many of the vestiges of coal mining now have vanished. Our towering coal breakers are gone. Heavy equipment has rusted or been scrapped. Many of our ethnic churches, built by the love and sweat of miners’ families, have been closed.

And so now more than ever, it’s important to join together and acknowledge our past, our achievements and our traditions.

“Our origin is not an industrial issue,” says Herring. “It’s a cultural one. And culture is an outgrowth of community.”

Of course, the coal industry today is only a shadow of what it once was.

Less than 1,000 of our residents have ever deep-mined coal. Remaining deep miners number less than a few hundred.

The celebration was an unprecedented success in touching the lives of residents of the hard coal region.

It’s unclear what forces might prevail to orchestrate a 300th anniversary in 2068. Many of us will be gone by then.

But if they’re lucky and hardworking, they just might achieve a fraction of the excitement and participation engineered by volunteer Scott Herring and his steering committee.

Herring says the whirlwind year of activity proves that our people still fully know who we are and what brought us together.

“Anthracite is the greatest gift we will ever receive: It gave us a common language which brought together the varied ethnicities which comprise all of our individual families. It gave us our regional history and inseparable American identity; and most of all — it gave us each other.”