Caption: In 1904, the H.C. Frick Coke Co. built the patch town of Shoaf for the workers at the Shoaf mine and coke works. After the coal mine closed in 1951, the coke ovens continued to operate into the 1970s, whent they were shut down by the state for their failure to comply with new clean air standards.
Courtesy of Coal and Coke Heritage Center, Penn State Fayette, www.coalandcokepsu.org/
Caption: "I worked there for a while, probably less than a year. You did a little bit of everything, mostly clerking. You had sales slips that were all duplicated. People would come in, and whatever they bought you had to write it down. You handled no cash; that was handled in the office. It was a check-off basis. They took out of your pay what you owed when you worked for Frick at the coal mine, before you got paid. When they said you owed your soul to the company store that is true. We had a little spring type of clipboard, and we would keep those slips from payday to payday. You could tally-up and see what they took out of your husbands pay and what they said you owed. You [the sales lady] were the jack of all trades. I sold gas and I sold yard goods. You could buy bedding, furniture, and appliances too. Gas was fifteen cents a gallon and people thought that was high. I was getting eighteen dollars a week for forty hours work. You could have bought things cheaper in town if you had cash."
Adapted from an oral history of Elsie Hunchuck Stepanovich
Courtesy of Coal and Coke Heritage Center, Penn State Fayette, www.coalandcokepsu.org/
Caption: Company Store at Fallbrook, 1874
Courtesy of David and Bev Jones http://blossburg.org/
Caption: "Well it happened during the 1921-22 strike, and it lasted about a year and a half, and the men had to call the strike because for better pay and for better working conditions. And the men refused to go to work. So the families of the men that had refused to go to work had been evicted … Evicted from their homes. And they were given ten days notice, prior to the eviction, but if they didn't move out [of the company houses], the sheriff came and move them out. And the sheriff would get these people's furniture on a truck, and they would just dump it right on the ground."
Adapted from an Oral history of Tekla Skomra
Special Collections and Archives, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Caption: "Along with the various support systems devoted to the physical well being of the people of the coal and coke communities-teachers, physicians, social workers, nurses, midwives, family, neighbors, and the patch community -there was also a support system for the soul. The work carried on in these missions was mostly educational and welfare work among women and children often with the goal of assimilation of the newcomers into the ‘American culture and way of life"." Evelyn A. Hovanec
Courtesy of Coal and Coke Heritage Center, Penn State Fayette, www.coalandcokepsu.org/
Caption: This winter photograph of the housing owned by the Berwind-White Coal Company outside of Windber, PA, captures the isolation of the coal patch towns erected by mine companies during the coal boom of the 19th century and early 20th centuries. Miners and their families would spend the Pennsylvania winter of 1922-23 in canvass tents after Berwind-White and other coal companies expelled them for going on strike.
Special Collections and Archives, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Caption: In the late 1800s and early 1900s Pennsylvania had more company towns than any other state in the nation. Most of these were isolated coal patch settlements where the coal companies not only owned the housing and stores, but also controlled law enforcement through powers granted them by state law. Pennsylvania's private coal and iron police existed from the 1860s to the 1930s.
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives
Caption: "Well we had check [chit] or chinky money. It was aluminum. They had a dollar; they had fifty cents; they had a quarter; they had nickels; they had dimes; and they had pennies. Now in many mines that had paper [money], what they called scrip … You went down to the company store, and we'd ask, ‘We want a dollar". Mother sent me and my sister down to the store, and she'd write out a list. Charlie would look it over and say, ‘Well your father don't have no coal out, so I can't give you a dollar, but I can give you fifty cents." Ok so we take the fifty cents and go back and tell Mother that's all we got. See, you could get fifty cents worth of soup meat or bones at that time. They give you bones; you didn't have to pay for that. The soup and the noodles was the mainstay, let me tell you that right now. You had soup for dinner, and you had soup for supper, and if you wanted a snack, you had soup too."
Adapted from an Oral History of Steve Butchock
Courtesy of Coal and Coke Heritage Center, Penn State Fayette, www.coalandcokepsu.org/
Caption: Mine owners constructed and rented shanty-type houses to their workers, mostly immigrant laborers. Conditions in these communities, known as patch towns, were less than ideal. Here, women are drawing water from one well, which had to supply twenty-five families.
Courtesy the Pennsylvania State Archives
Caption: Coal communities were tight-knit groups, and workers helped each other through adversity, and banded together to demand better working conditions.
Courtesy Pennsylvania State Archives
Caption: Hundreds of the mines opened in northeast Pennsylvania’s rich anthracite coal region in the 1800s. There, poor immigrant miners and their families populated makeshift frontier boom towns built around the extraction of coal as cheaply and swiftly as possible.
Courtesy of the Historical Society of Schuylkill County, Pottsville, PA
Caption: A group of women and girls from a patch town pose in their "Sunday" clothes.
Courtesy of the Historical Society of Schuylkill County, Pottsville, PA
Caption: "They were five rows of houses, and the house was only one story high, and they called it Mexico. We lived in a block that was eight rooms, one story, no back porch and no front porch. We had two bedrooms, no, one bedrooms and a kitchen, two rooms. Until [I was] about eight or ten, we lived only in those two rooms. We all slept together, my dad and my mother on a bed and us four children on one, and I enjoyed the floor a lot. In the kitchen we had a coal stove and a cupboard and benches instead of chairs; maybe we had two chairs and a round table … we had no plumbing[no water in the house] we had to go outside to get it. And … up until [ I was] about seven or eight, we had no lights. We had oil lamps. [We had] wooden floor [and we] scrubbed them." Adapted from an Oral History of Anna Giacomalli
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives
Caption: "There was always a lot of dirty clothes around there, [and I was] rubbing, scrubbing, freezing, and hanging them up. When I sit and think how hard I did work when I was younger, I get so tired and can't hardly move - just thinking about it. I had one of those big boilers [used in washing clothes]. I would save my bacon grease; then I would mix it with lye to make scrub soap. [ You needed to balance the amount of lye used] according to how much grease you have in the water; you know you use about half cup for a quart; that is what I would do. Put it in the water and let it boil, and [it] turned to soap; stuff was strong too." Lena Walton, oral history interview.
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, http://www.jaha.org/
Caption: Crowded into dilapidated housing without indoor plumbing, immigrant iron and steelworker families were often feared and kept at arms length by Old stock Pennsylvanians.
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, http://www.jaha.org/
Caption:
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association
Caption: Butcher shop workers and shoppers pose outside of two Cambria City butcher shops. Each shop served different ethnic groups.
Courtesy of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, http://www.jaha.org/
Caption: Oral history of Stella Ochociensky Medlin.
"There was no money exchanged, in fact our parents [her mother and her husbands mother] never got paid with cash. I remember someone paying my mother with a slab of bacon and a sack of flour and food stuffs from the store, and they barely could afford to have it themselves to eat, but hey had to pay their way because my mother had to live too."
Courtesy of The Coal and Coke Heritage Center, Penn State Fayette
Caption: Patch Home, Bowood, Fayette County, Pa.
Courtesy of The Coal and Coke Heritage Center, Penn State Fayette
Caption: Phillips Playground
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives
Caption: Filbert Patch town, Redstone Twp., Fayette Co., Pa.
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania State Archives
Caption: In 1906, the H. C. Frick Coke Company built this illuminated arch made entirely of coke, on Crawford Avenue in Connellsville. The Connellsville seam, the most important of western Pennsylvania's three bituminous coal beds, contained the best coal in the country for the making coke that fueled Pennsylvania's iron and steel industries.
Courtesy of Coal and Coke Heritage Center, Penn State Fayette, www.coalandcokepsu.org/
Caption: "My dad was honored at Idlewood Park one year [at the Frick Company Picnic] I have the scroll. For 41 years, [he had] no lost time for injuries ….He worked in the mine for 51 years. At 45 years they gave him an Elgin watch …. [The scroll reads] - ‘Certificate of Honor for George E. Jones, United States Steel Corporation in Lamberton, Pa." It was given on the 21st day of April 1964 for 41 years without a disabling injury in the company's underground coal mine, and it has a gold seal …"
Oral history of Dorothy Jones Parnell
Oral history of Dorothy Jones Parnell
Courtesy of Coal and Coke Heritage Center, Penn State Fayette, www.coalandcokepsu.org/
