Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal mining industry has dominated the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly poor immigrants, for more than two hundred years
The earliest immigrants were of English, Scots-Irish and German ancestry, but when experienced miners were needed in the 1830s, a wave of migration from Wales, Scotland and Ireland began.
The 1840s were marked with the emigration of thousands of Irish, Germans and French to the growing coal region in northeast Pennsylvania.
By the 1870s, immigration from Poland and Lithuania grew steadily. But peak migration to the anthracite mining districts came between 1880-1914 as Slovak, Ukrainian, Russian, Serbian, Italian, Hungarian and Greek families began to settle in the region.
Anthracite production peaked in 1917 during WWI when more than 100 million tons were mined.