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Payer Family Genealogy

S F Payer (1) Bio
From History of Schuylkill Co.
1907

History of McAdoo,PA
ZerbeyCollection

Carpatho-Rusyn Home Page

Slovakia Home Page

June Meyer's Recipes
Hungarian-German Cooking

Julius Payer
Explorer 

Lehigh Valley Railroad
The LVRR. Main railroad, long time ago, throughout the eastern mid-Anthracite Region.

Central Railroad of New Jersey -- Route maps, terrain, history of Anthracite Railroading

MAPS:
Small Map of McAdoo - Hazleton

Local Area McAdoo Area Patch Town Map

Magnified Patch Town View

PA Mining Geology - County Overlay
122K Gif -- Counties and county overlay on anthracite and bituminous coalfields.

See the local area up close by clicking on the next several Topographical map links. These show ruined mining tracts, small towns and some patch towns:

Aerial Photographs of north Schuylkill County Towns.

Schuylkill County Topographical Map
106K Gif. -- Shows Mining Areas, Towns, Much More.

McAdoo - Hazleton Topographical Map
124K Gif

Spring Mtn. NW:3D Terrain
Obtained by using Delorme mapping software 3D features.

Spring Mtn. NW: Magnified 3D Terrain
Terrain View: Derived from the topo map. 115K Gif.

Many More Topo Maps of North Schuylkill Co.
via USGS, and DeLorme
Mapping Software. Early Railroad maps added 03/2003.

MORE REGIONAL LINKS:

Another Eckley site
<broken link>
Stacy Moore's -- Contains a good collection of links to the life of the miners.

Wilkes Barre & the North Anthracite The best Breaker pictures on the WWW.

Lehigh University Alma Mater #1.
This institution is in Bethlehem, PA, which city see at link below.

Similarly for the Lehigh Valley, and see the 'Moravian Putz'. Links at Bethlehem page .

Pennsylvania Indians
Pennsylvania places have an inordinate number of names derived from the following:

The Susquehannock
Impressive and scholarly website for the four links above.

Map in Indian Times

Schuylkill County Chronicles
Broken Link from 'Pottsville Republican' website, but see similar here.

Home Page

Top of Page

Page 1- The Language

Coal Region Commentary - The Region

The area discussed here is the small portion, about 30 mi. X 15 mi., of the Eastern Middle- and the Western Middle- Anthracite Coal Fields shown on the following map bounded by the blue lines:

See many more maps in greater detail at the Map directory

McAdoo, PA, northernmost coal town in Schuylkill county, was sometimes called the 'Only Wild-West Town East of the Mississippi' ... although Shenandoah, PA has prior claim on that rough and ready name. There's even a book by that title. When you get to the most Godforsaken and highest part of Interstate 81, up atop the Spring Mountain ridge where the boughs shake against the cold, where it looks like there's nothing around but sky, clouds and winter-blasted scrubby trees, you're near the home town, McAdoo, Pennsylvania. That tough and resilient landscape both perfectly mirrored and shaped the character of the people who emigrated to this land.

Typical Spring Mountain Scenery

Schuylkill County Towns and Townships, Census Data

The Eastern Mid-Anthracite Region is shown here:
Map: The Eastern Mid-Anthracite Coal Fields-Towns, Roads and Geology

The McAdoo-Hazleton locale patchtowns can be seen in:
Local Patchtown Map ca. 1875

McAdoo was formed in 1896 from Klein Twp. See at:
A Large Klein Twp. Map from a USGS Topo

History of McAdoo,PA
ZerbeyCollection via Wash Snoich's Pupils

Annotated History of Klein Twp, PA. For the original, see also
Munsell, North Schuylkill Towns & Townships, ca. 1880

An aerial photograph of the McAdoo-local area.

McAdoo was not incorporated as a borough until 1896, the last village to incorporate in these parts. Before that it was called Sailor's Hill and Pleasant Hill. That whole highland of north Schuylkill County, adjacent to "The Great Swamp" (Poconos) to the east, was developed and exploited in a boomtown way, very much like that of the Wild West in just about the same time frame. It was hardly settled at the time of the Civil War and even until the discovery of coal it was a wild and remote region, desolate even of Indians, called St. Anthony's Wilderness, similar to the Western Frontier.

More about St. Anthony's Wilderness' southwestern quarter.

Earliest Inhabitants

For an excellent description of the early towns and townships of the local area, circa 1880, see the text transcribed from Munsell's 'History of Schuylkill County', published in 1881. This transcription has been done by hardworking members of the US and PAGenWeb project. Pertaining links are listed directly below. The local incorporated villages and towns of the time were Summit Station, now called Lofty, Silverbrook, and Honeybrook, all of which can be found in the following:

Surrounding Towns and Townships - Patchtown Capsule Sketches

Surrounding Townships and Counties - Composite Map

Schuylkill County Map - Munsell, 1880

Schuylkill County Topographical Map-via DeLorme Software

Spring Mountain Topographical Map-via DeLorme Software

Schuylkill Co.US Census Data
   With Tiger Area Maps.   (Link courtesy of CMS, Girardville, PA)

Schuylkill County, Timeline and Population

PA GenWeb
Munsell History Table of Contents (1)
Munsell History Table of Contents (2)
McAdoo, PA Census

McAdoo was a town of Catholic Churches, nine for a population of about 5000 in the 1950s. Here were represented most countries of Eastern Europe/Russia except for what is now Yugoslavia. The population has gone steadily downhill ever since the 1930s. Every other block had a church (the number of which was exceeded by at least two saloons). In January and February few landscapes were bleaker and colder and grayer than midwinter days on the high ridge of Spring Mountain. When the ice-storms blew in from the east, it looked like the study in gray, here, especially in the '50s before the stripped and mine-ruined trees started to regenerate

Then when the wet, gray freezes were blown out eastward by the really frigid Canadian Expresses from the northwest, the clear brilliance and big, rolling cloud shadows were a celebration and icy epiphany.

The Churches

For the rest, see the Lattimer Massacre link at the left side of this page.

Kelayres Massacre: Some of the Bruno family and its associates in Kelayres, a western extension of McAdoo, upset over FDR's party winning the midterm elections in 1934, opened gunfire on the Democrats' victory parade. Click the link to see Kelayres and the story of the bloody event.

The 'Rezzie': The fenced off McAdoo borough reservoir watershed. Here were several score acres expensively fenced off, for what reason God only knows. This local distribution reservoir was fed by the much bigger #8 Dam west of Kelayres, also posted No Trespassing; We lived in mortal fear of The Watchman, (who never did show up). We snuck in all the time to pick stumpers and to fish the dam at night. The same action, (sneak & fish), for the Lofty Dam. There was a big sign there saying 'Keep Out, Mahanoy City Water Company'.

The #8 Dam

UpdaMountain: To pick huckleberries, (we never called them blueberries). In McAdoo it was just a small rise to the high elevation of Spring Mountain, nearly 2000 feet above sea level. It could also mean the more remote, wild and high Delano Mountain, the highest point in the Middle Coal Field, located right above Mahanoy City. Delano was about five miles from town. We got there on Harman Scarpati's huckleberry truck. Three quarts of huckleberries, picked in a morning and sold to Harman at 30 cents a quart for his resale, got you into Mt. Laurel, the local chlorinated (real and authentic) swimming pool, with 40 cents to spare for a candy bar and some icecream, (1950s). Also see:

View from the The Big Rock: Some called it the White Rock, the biggest rock outcrop of many atop Spring Mountain near McAdoo Heights. Elevation is about 2000 feet there. On a clear day you'll see thirty, forty miles in all directions, maybe more. Here see wave after rolling wave of silent blue Appalachians and swooping cloud shadows overall. It was about a half hour walk from the center of town, up the mountain.

Spring Mountain Topographical Map 

The 'Gorilla': McAdoo version of Bare Ass Beach. Every locality had its own version of this "ol' swimmin' hole". A deep, cold water-filled-in Strippin Hole on the Silverbrook Mountain, a mile or two south of town. It was a good two hour hike up one mountain and down the other to get there on a hot summer's day.

A deep, cold water-filled-in Strippin Hole

Tresckow Falls Pictures

The Hollow: Silverbrook Hollow, a deep ravine a mile to the south of McAdoo that widens out into the Quakake Valley. (Quake-ache). Quakake is an Indian name meaning Blue Water. The Hollow is the headwaters of Quakake Creek which flows into Black Creek and the Lehigh River some twenty miles downstream. It's the earliest, closest picnic-spot and last day of school outing hike. This place is actually the earliest recorded settlement in that location of north Schuylkill County. It was the site of a tavern/inn along the rutted post-road south of Spring Mountain, once called GreenFields, and can be found in the Munsell history.

Greenfields Area
Greenfields History

Camp Breezy: Where the headwaters of the Schuylkill River flow out of Spring Mountain near Ginthers and into Quakake/Tuscarora Valley. The stream is extremely cold and mixed with a reddish mine-acid selfer (sulfur) water stream coming down from Silverbrook at that starting point.

Wolfe's: A remote, hidden, wooded spot, near Sheppton, long ago gone back to woods after the coal was mined out there. It's the headwaters of the Catawissa Creek, fed by many small streams off the western filigree of Green/Spring Mountain. Here two major drainage tunnels extracted water from all the western Audenreid Basin Glen Alden mines and those of the Green Mountain area. One tunnel has now caved in, but you can still enter the other; A fifty degree blast of cold air and flapping bats blow from that tunnel now even on hot summer days. Note, (Feb.2003): This area is now the province of a modern day 'off-roader's club' attempt to return the land to its earlier stripped out and half ruined character by converting it to a peculiar 'Adventure Park'.

The Mile Hill: Actually it's about two miles. The steady steep grade of the Spring Mountain on Rte. 309 heading south to north from the Quakake Valley at Ginthers. They needed the pusher-engines on the coal trains starting from Quakake to come up the switchback grade to Lofty and the yards at Delano. The start of the Schuylkill River river flows out of Spring Mountain near the bottom of the hill and heads for Tamaqua, Reading and points south.

Dead Man's Curve: Sharp curve in the road between McAdoo and Tresckow. Somebody was killed, run over there long ago and a cross marked the site up through the 50's. The cross/grave is no longer there. Might have been removed to make way for the cigar factory.

 
Beaver Brook is a mine patch suburb of McAdoo. It's hidden behind a coalbank, right off Rte. 309 on the way to Hazleton.

McAdoo Map
Beaver Brook - 1
Beaver Brook - 2

It was the home of my Hungarian immigrant grandparents. Ernö Marko and his wife, Mary, settled there in the early 1900s. He was an anthracite coal miner at the Beaver Brook works. It has changed little today except that all the old company houses are coated with vinyl or aluminum siding and most have storm windows. This put an end to the ice crystal filigree webwork seen on the windows on winter mornings.

Beaver Brook Breaker
View of the town

Beaver Brook is one of the oldest Mid-Anthracite Region coal towns. It had the name Frenchtown a long time ago. A building there served as a hospital during the American Civil War. Its cemetery was known then as St. Patrick's of Audenreid before that parish moved to McAdoo. In the mid 1940s part of cemetery caved into the Yorktown mine works which bounded the property at its south end. Grandmother Marko would not let us go see the uprooted skeletons.

Beaver Brook Cemetery
Beaver Brook Cemetery Burial List

Hungarian grandmother Mary Marko's house was of two-family 'company house' model. Both the old, used-to-be company store run by Joe McNelis and Red Cann's saloon were directly nearby, right up the coaldirt alley. There was a heavy black-iron coal range always going strong winter and summer in the slanty-floor kitchen. The best food in the world was cooked on that stove! The Magyar, (Hungarian) Priest always knew when to pay his occasional visit, right after she baked bread, kolach and cinnamon buns. Winter heat came, at first, from an ornate nickel trimmed polished black cast iron 'heater' in the middle room. Later it was replaced by a drab 'Heatrola'. The heat got to the bedrooms upstairs through a ceiling louver vent directly above the heater. On winter nights when it was zero outside the upstairs might've got to forty degrees. Those nights brought out Jack Frost and his ice-crusted mosaic crystal paintings on the storm-windowless windows. The cold was offset somewhat by her homemade goose-down featherticks (the Hungarian 'duna' blanket), and 'Gold Medal' flour-sack encased pillows. Sometimes you'd put a stovetop heated sad iron between the sheets. Hot water was heated in the iron steam kettle constantly kept going on the kitchen stove. Unless you were the miner head of the house you got one bath a week. The one-tap cold faucet put out a suspiciously tadpole-tasting, never cold liquid especially in late summer. (See 'The Derrick', below). 

Typical "Company House"

Washday-Monday: Visualize: The kitchen of her company house had a slanted floor; It sloped downward to the black-nicked, porcelain-on-iron, single cold water faucet, cupboardless sink. I remember a double set of galvanized, wheel-in stationary tubs with an attached handcrank wringer; Before that modern appliance appeared she used the heavy oak family washtub dragged in from the shanty and a washboard. The boiling hot water was got from the steel kettle and poured into an oval copperplate 'boiler'. She washed them by stirring them with a wooden stick-paddle, then ironed them with a sadiron.

From the Eckley Miners' Museum
Click

That warm, moist feel of the washday kitchen was most welcome on the frigid January and February days. It was a steambath there in the summer. I remember the froze-solid clothes actually crackling when they bent only half dried on the typical bitter winter washdays. Sometimes the shirts and pants stood up straight! There was never one dirty piece of cloth in that house, and the fresh smell of the air dried bedclothes still returns on occasion. 

Grandmother Maria Marko died in 1949 after a lifetime of constant, hard work as the wife of a coal miner. It was never the same there again, after she died. She lost three and raised five children. One baby died as a miscarriage after she was picking coal and was chased by a Coal and Iron Cop, one of the Reading Coal Company's hired goons. A story is told of the infant who died in the flu epidemic of 1918: The baby had not yet been baptized, so her husband Ernö, my immigrant Hungarian miner grandfather knocked together a little casket from gathered up boards. Then he carried the casket in his arms a mile and a half to the Hungarian Cemetery in McAdoo, where they buried the baby in a plot near the graveyard wall reserved for such unconsecrated burials. We do not know the location of the grave today. There was not much else they could do in those days ... While she lived she kept a beautiful, safe place for children.

See also similar tales of growing up in Shenandoah, PA.

Hazleton, PA: Center of Commerce and business center of the Mid-Anthracite region. It's the southernmost town of any size in Luzerne County. Pottsville, PA is its counterpart in the South Anthracite and the county seat of Schuylkill County. McAdoo is a 'suburb' of Hazleton, located three miles to the south. For Hazleton's size, and its population was nearly 40,000 when I left the region in the early 1960s (it's 24,000 today), it was and still is far more cosmopolitan than cities many times its size. After all, it was settled and built by the offspring of at least twenty nationalities.

Click

More on Hazleton

! Now (1999) endangered by a 'progressive' mayor and the usual squabbling factions who seem to want to knock over most of what's left of downtown and blacktop it for parking. Clue: Yank WalMart into town, otherwise here's little left to come into town for. But meanwhile, try to make life and transportation a little easier for the aged of the area who must visit their in-town doctors.

Empty Downtown

Hazleton Standard~Speaker: The local north Schuylkill County, south Luzerne County daily. Recently, ( ... after about a hundred years! ... ) it went to seven days a week. For a very long time it was the house organ of the Republican right-wing in this corner of the world. Lately it has begun to subscribe to a number of more centrist columnists. It has a good local columnist, (or two), and covers the local news exhaustively. You can't (new in 2004), view the obituaries online unless you subscribe to their view-obits plan*, a modification of the until-then buy the newspaper promotion. That latter seemed to be a reversal of the policy of the previous few years ... which, itself, reversed an earlier policy, which latter reversed the even earlier policy .... !?!?! Such pennypinchers. It's almost comical. Until very recently (April, 2006) their subscription page intro read:

"This is a seperate [sic] subscription from the print edition. We cannot [italics mine] offer print supbscibers [sic] free access at this time. Thank You."

Hazleton Standard Speaker Building

Similarly for the Pottsville Republican. Once upon a time that newspaper had a highly informative community-based website. It looks like now, (05/2002), that that website has a number of broken links, and has nowhere near the regional content it used to have.

"They don't suffer. They can't even speak English.": George Baer,
answering a reporter's question about the suffering of starving miners

So --- As a result, we had a one industry colony here, ill prepared to weather the oncoming demise of anthracite coal as a fuel. In spite of this, that multi-ethnically cosmopolitan population, more diverse, energetic and vibrant than in many better prepared places, has managed to resurrect the region so it can begin to thrive now at the the onset of the twenty-first century.

MMI: Mining and Mechanical Institute. The local prep-school. Located right outside of Freeland. It was founded by the Coxe Estate originally to train mining engineers. Not quite Phillips Exeter, it sent quite a few locals off to Lehigh University (and other schools) to become many kinds of Engineer.

Lehigh University  (Alma Mater #1)
Bethlehem, PA from the Lehigh University Campus

Senape's: One of the best bakeries I've found, no matter where I've traveled. Bar none and five stars! There's something about their bread ... It's on 17th Street, near Church St. (309 North). But now (2003) getting fine and welcome competition from Ms. Tveta Negrea's "Sweet Expectations" shop in the "Auction" bulding at the Hometown Farmer's Market. She specializes in a fine style of Central European breads, strudels and nut- and poppyseed- kolaches.

Skiing at Eagle Rock: About twenty years ago a ski lodge opened near the old Green Mountain mines. It's a pleasant place. Recreational facilities like this one may prove to be a great help in resuscitating the local economy.

Italian Saints' Days Festivals: Carrying the Saint: I wonder if this celebration still exists, where, and how much of it? As a young man I played cornet in several of the Italian based men's bands in the Hazleton area: Mother of Grace, the American Legion, and Lattimer bands. We were the music for the Italian Saints' Day festivals in area towns. I particularly remember the Shenandoah and Minersville jobs. Of course, close to home we played the St. Mauro's festival in Kelayres and the Blessed Mother's in Hazleton. You'd march in the all day parade all over town it semed, behind selected goodmen of the local parish who lugged a heavy statue of the church's patron saint or the Blessed Mother. It was hot on those July and August days! But the ladies kept every bandsman supplied with lemonade and beer! The idea was for the townspeople to pin dollar-money to ribbons affixed to the statue and make some money for the priest. Then in the cool of the summer evening we played the concert at the block party near the church.

Mother of Grace Men's Band
Mother of Grace Church

For the block party food menus, go see the pierohi/pierogi, holupki and bean soup entries at the Shenandoah CoalSpeak recipes web site. Unforgettable! The Magyars called holupki töltött kapusta.

Shenandoah 'Coalspeak' Recepies Web Site

Sabatella; Stanziola, (Old John, master musician, organist at the Capitol Theatre ....and his son Bernie, music director at McAdoo High School); Cerasuolo, Sabia, Terraciano, Sabia, Lettiere, Yalo; Ralph Marsicano: Bandleader of the American Legion Band; The Merolas from Pardeesville; Buglio, --- And there was one Irishman, (Burke?, who?), a wonderful clarinetist from Mahanoy City ......

AM RADIO ANNOUNCEMENT: "WAZL, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, 1490 on Your Dial, 'Pennsylvania's Highest City' : Siswein's of Shennandoah presents --- Jolly Jack Robel and his Polka Band from Shennandoar Penn-syl-wania !! "

The Knife Sharpener: He came around too, every now and then in an old 40s style panel truck with a small sharpener's machine shop in the back. Name: Tisi Gino. Then there was: 

Smiling Tony: Who did not belie his name. A mobile drycleaner-tailor from Hazleton. He looked like Caesar Romero, fancied jodhpurs, sported an outfit that looked like a chauffeur's; Cruised around the local small towns in what looked to us like a limousine. Name: Dom Di Cusatis ? 

The Black Diamond: This was THE speedy and elegant main line steam locomotive of the Lehigh Valley Railroad. We got to the main New York and Philadelphia routes by taking a local steam shuttle to Lehighton from Hazleton. From there you could go north through what is now Lehigh Gorge State Park to Wilkes-Barre and Buffalo, south and east to Philadelphia and New York City via Allentown and Bethlehem. The locomotive's advent at the Hazleton station was announced by an increasing rumbling. Six foot diameter ground-shaking driver wheels, hissing and clanging and steaming to a stop as it pulled into the station. The engineer and fireman were always inspecting and oiling and adjusting all kinds of amazing steaming machinery. The overall'd engineer and fireman always looked like responsible Dutchmen (Pennsylwanische Deitch), of course.

Hear the train pulling into the LVRR Station ...

And starting out.

LVRR Locomotive taking on water
Near the McAdoo, PA station.

The Conductor: Wore a black frock coat, brass-buttoned, with an air of eminent command. After all, he was responsible for all the passenger cars behind the tender. Hollering: "Stockton ... Ashmore ... Weatherly ... Maaawk-Chunk! ... Leeee-highton! ... Transfer for points North and South at Lee-highton ... Booo-ooard!" ---(there was no crackly, unintelligible intercom on those cars).

There was a novel and entertaining bouquet in those passenger coaches, a mixture of velour upholstery, spittoon tobacco, cigar smoke, steam and oil, cologne and ladies' perfume, all warmed and mixed by the steam heat in the coaches. The mainline trains even had a dining car with attendant mouth-watering cooking smells and silverware and linen! Most of all, there was the intriguing odor of travel, far-off mystery ... adventure and purpose .. the Great Outside World beyond the coalbanks.. Then with a couple jolts and jerks as the train eliminated slack, off we went, out through the ruined mine-stripped landscape past the Hazleton Shaft works and the flumes near Stockton, down through the Hazle/Black Creek Valley, past the Ashmore Yards and Weatherly to Penn Haven Junction where the branch line met the Lehigh River and the main line of the LVRR. The Weatherly station had a candy factory right across the tracks!

In the early-mid-1950s there came the harbinger of collapse. The local steam engine shuttle to Lehighton was replaced by the "Budd Car", a shiny, diesel-electric, self-propelled coach similar to modern Light Rail cars. It looked like a small, silvery highway diner of that era. The interior upholstery was coated in plastic. The hint of adventure disappeared with that car, and even more so with the earlier arrival of diesel engines. Still, there remained that fascinating trip through the southern part of the Lehigh Gorge into Mauch Chunk with bright rushing streams tumbling into the Lehigh River from all sides of the canyon. The mainline tracks are gone now, it's all become the Lehigh Gorge State Park.

The Hazleton LVRR Station had its own brass spittoons and the ubiquitous inky smell of old-time bureaus and official affairs. Although it was classically elegant and victorian styled, it was torn down in the 1960s by that same usual hometown breed of unthinking 'civic leadership'. Now the same kind of leadership wants a big-city kind of municipal airport. Without the tax base to afford it!. --- To service a growing number of tax exempted, minimum wage paying industrial parks.
Note (10/99): This leader was recently removed from contention in the past Spring primaries. 

Area Industry Solicitation
The Hazleton Station, Before and After

Early Railroad Maps of the Region
Catawissa Railroad Stories

Lehigh Valley Railroad (1) -- Ignore the badly done home page, the rest is worth looking at.
Lehigh Valley Railroad (2) -- A comprehensive picture gallery.
Lehigh valley Railroad (3) -- Links to early railroading and more ...
LVRR Timetable

Central Railroad of New Jersey -- "The Jersey Central". Route maps, terrain, history of Anthracite Railroading. Its routes paralleled those of the LVRR in many cases. A good series of pictures of the Lehigh Gorge transit.

Lehigh Township
Rockport, PA in the Lehigh Gorge
Lehigh Gorge State Park
Pictures of Lehigh Gorge from Broad Mountain (*Striking Photos)

Lehigh River Watershed
By a Lehigh University Group

Allentown and Bethlehem

DowndaValley: This might have been one of several, Quakake-Tuscarora, Conyngham, or the Ringtown/Catawissa Valley, depending where you were situated on the sprawling plateau of Spring Mountain. That high rise of eastern Pennsylvania Appalachians (see topographical links at left), runs about 25 miles southwest to northeast and about 10 miles across, although it is extended by many spur outcrops. Toward the northeast, past Buck Mountain, it merges into the Pocono highlands, broken at last by the deep Lehigh River gorge past Weatherly. The Dutchmen, (Pennsylvania Dutch) tended their farms in the valleys; See some Pennsylwanische Deitch links at the left hand side of the page. There were no easily reachable coal seams down there in the valleys, and the up-down alternation of pleasant, well tended farmland to devastated, stark, bleak coalregion provided an unending, alternating variety of curious beauty to local journeys.

da Lake: Lakeside/Lakewood Amusement Park and Polka Ballroom, down da farms near Barnesville. This place was still a big going thing in the 1950s, '60s and on through part of the '70s for polkas on Saturday Night. They held the Bavarian Festival there for quite a while in the '70s, maybe later, and almost every summer Sunday saw a big local church festival. It had a great wooden rolley-coaster, and a wet, mildewey tunnel of love. The ballroom finally burned down completely a few months ago, (Summer, 1998). 

The settlement of the regional valleys preceded the development of the coal fields. The earliest settlers of Quakake Valley were Pennsylvania Dutch who probably reached here in the late 1700s. See a few links below to the Packer Cemetery at St. Matthew's Church and some pictures of that area.

East Union Township (with Klein)
Packer Township
Rush Township and Delano
From History of Schuylkill County, Schalk and Henning, 1907
Delano Mountain
Quakake-Tuscarora Valley
Early Settlers in Quakake Valley
The Packer Cemetery
St.Matthew's Church
Weatherly: Eurana Park Pictures
Weatherly and Lausanne Township
The Pennsylvania Dutch

*Starring Sean Connery as Kehoe, Richard Harris as McParland, Samantha Eggar as the coalminer's daughter love interest.

 *In the Movie 'The Molly Maguires', made nearby at Eckley, PA in the late 1960s; A number of the Molly leaders were brought to a rigged trial by Franklin Gowen, later the CEO of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Co.. They were convicted and hanged.

Lehigh Township
Carbon County Cemeteries
Jack Sterling's Carbon Co. Research
Carbon County Web Site
Nesquehoning

Mayflower: A delicate pink-white flower, gone by May, the Trailing Arbutus. This was the first flower to appear in the cold March early Spring. We found it under the brown dry winter leaves in certain places. A rare thing with a delicate perfume.

See more local flora here.

Huckleberries: Blueberries. The low blues are in full flower now, (July 1998, June 2002), until about the end of July. Then out come the 'swampers', the bigger, less tasty high bush berries. The best spot for these was in a mountaintop swamp near the western end of Spring Mountain, where it looks down into the Ringtown/Brandonville/Catawissa Valley. Here was the best place to see the cloud shadows rolling. There were hovering hawks and buzzards there, and an absolute stillness except for the occasional 'pweeeet' of a woodthrush and the sigh of the wind.

Mushrooms -- We hunted these:

Pupinki: (Poo-pink-eee). (Polish name for) a tasty mushroom; Otherwise called 'Stumper' because they grew out of decaying oak stumps and the fallen trees going back to the earth. Looks very much like "Boletus Edulis". The best month for finding them is October.

Holubinki: 'Gray-Topper' Mushroom; Summer months. (Also Polish named).

Spongers: A kind of boletus (probable) mushroom that likes to grow on the reforesting hills of mine waste.

Sheepshead and 'Piney' mushroooms too, but usually only the Italians ate those.

The mushroom caches, or 'kootches', (see huckleberries), were also kept secret from all but your best woods-buddies.

(Click)
The Mushroom Hunter

Ash-Man:  Different from the garbage man. He came in a truck once a week in the summer, more in the winter to pick up the buckets and tubs of furnace and coal stove anthracite coal ashes. The whole business of the homeowner was a bit more strenuous than merely taking out the garbage. While not overly heavy for an adult, the tubs posed a problem for the little folk. The first thing you did was to lay a light coating of ashes over the always slippery backyard path in the winter. The gritty ash did almost as good a job as modern snow-melter. Then you lugged one to ten buckets of the stuff out to the back alley fence for pickup.

Hucksters: Name given loosely to the grocers from the bigger towns who visited the smaller patches in small trucks fixed up like mobile grocery stores. They hollered out the truck windows as they passed down the street: "Apples ... Peaches, Apples, Pears ... " Usually, depending on their mood, they were good for a cookie or piece of baloney treat for the little kids. Some names: Goodman, (John was the soft hearted one of the two brothers, John and Jack), McDonald, and Bresky, all of McAdoo. There were some now almost forgotten others too ('The Boys', Zukovich?, O'Lear?). 

The place has come from one extreme to the other. Although one finds many of the side roads of the region still littered by the occasional bedspring, mattress, refrigerator, one cannot get easy access to municipal waste disposal. You have to hire a local hauler, one with the connections or license to do trash hauling. This is very strange but not untypical of the region. Most metropolitan municipalities fund a site where the homeowner can dispose of the odd pickup truck load of backyard pruning, cans of old oil, chemicals, etc. Recently, for disposal of a bit of backyard clippings we were actually advised, sotto voce, to "Find some old back road in the woods ..."

John O'Hara: Nothing dealing with McAdoo/Hazleton here. O'Hara did not much mention or write about our kind of folk or the heavy, dangerous work that sustained the region. A Pottsville, PA, native, he was the son of a prominent doctor. Although born of Irish stock, he devoted his writing career to chronicling the manners/mores of the WASP owner class in exhaustive detail. Master of a certain kind of preppie-stylized dialog, eternal outsider looking in, he wrote several good reads, 'Appointment in Samarra' being his best. See, (here), a critical and incisive essay on O'Hara's strivings and efforts. It is a curious thing that exemplary authors John Updike, Conrad Richter and O'Hara were born and lived within 30 miles of one another.

Commentary - The Mines

Strip-Mining: Easiest, latter day, most ruinous to the land. Done by excavating a big hole in the ground and piling the removed dirt and rocks nearby. Now all the modern mine sites call this latter overburden; Now they piously say that it's nicely piled nearby for later reclamation. The work is usually done by draglines and yookies (Euclid Company heavy duty dump trucks). Note also the mine-wasted areas on the several topographical maps and the pictures on this web site.

Euclid Style Dump Trucks
More Earth Moving Equipment
Topographical results of this kind of mining.

We had a big dragline at Audenreid #5 in the mid '50s, a walker; So-called because it maneuvered itself into position by a slow side to side 'walking' motion. Climbing to the top of the dragline was one helluva scary experience.

#5 Type Dragline

The Mine-Gases:

Eviction - 1902 Strike
 
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MineNumbers: (Near the home town): All the local coal-works had numbers, Audenreid Slope #4, Honeybrook Slopes #1 and #2, Audenreid #5, Jeanesville #1. The Hazleton Shaft Colliery was just called The Shaft. The descent into Hazleton from the south, on Rte. 309 is called the #6 Hill. These numbers repeated themselves over and over depending on your locale. The thousands of bootleg holes didn't rate numbers.

Bootleg Mining

'Independent' Mining near McAdoo, PA

The Great "Bootleg" Coal Industry
from "The Nation" magazine, by Louis Adamic, 1934

Breakers: Coal processing plants. Collieries. The coal went in at the top, was sent down through a series of shakers, grinding mills and screens, then was loaded into the railroad gondolas at the bottom.

1. 'Off-roading',

2. Hunting crystals (quartz crystal) and selfer diamonds, (sulfur diamonds).

3. Gunnery.

4. Dumping. This provides targets for gunnery. 

Audenreid, Beaver Brook, Silver Brook, etc, Banks: Every coal works had its bank of black slate, bad coal and rock refuse. Audenreid's is just about gone. So is most of the whole town. It made way for latter-day stripping (strip-mining), when deep mining became unprofitable. Audenreid was a little original coal field town, larger than a patch, of about fifty homes up through the 1960s. Now it's a forlorn cluster of a few dilapidated houses mixed with prefab trailers clustered along Rte. 309 between McAdoo and Beaver Brook. Never much to look at, that whole stretch has got far worse recently. It's a trail of ruined mining equipment, cluttered, rusted-out machinery, and the broken, charred timbers of old coal works. 

Sulfur Diamonds: ... Pyritic crystals of sulfur, found among the slate and coal refuse on the coalbanks. The bigger ones make pretty paperweights.  Also See : Pyrite - A hard, heavy, shiny, yellow mineral, FeS2 or iron disulfide, generally in cubic crystals. Also called iron pyrites, fool's gold, sulfur balls. Iron pyrite is the most common sulfide found in coal mines.

'Sulfur Water': Mine acid polluted water. See text directly below taken from HYDROLOGY OF THE ANTHRACITE REGION, part of LEHIGH RIVER MINE DRAINAGE ASSESSMENT AND ABATEMENT PLAN TO MITIGATE THE MINE DRAINAGE IMPACTS TO THE LEHIGH RIVER WATERSHED. A Project of Wildlands Conservancy and Parkland High School’s Lehigh RiverWatch May 2000

Pickin' Coal: There was still a lot of good coal in those refuse banks. A part time job for many families was to go pick it to supplement the household's year-round coal supply. Every house was heated by coal until about the mid 40s. You'd rumble the heavy steel-wheel'd, wooden barrow out of the shanty, then be off on a several mile trek to favored sites. Load up a few burlap sacks of good chunk-coal and wheel it back to the coal pile in the back yard ... There was very little need for health spa workouts in those days ... Then you'd crack the lump coal to stove size, pea or chestnut, at your leisure. The chink-chink-chink of old, derelict carpenter's hammer on coal chunk was a familiar back alley sound. In the earlier days the coal operators did not much care for this practice. So they set their Coal and Iron Police, (Reading Coal & Iron Company hired rentacops) on the women and children coal-pickers.

The Coalpickers

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More Coalpickers, here and here ... The economics of Cheap Labor Capital.

Lokie: A miniature locomotive. Not just the steam train at the Ashland mine tourist site. The name was generally used to denote any small switch engine type locomotive around the breakers.  No deep throated whistle like the mainline steam engines, they sounded a characteristic PEEP! 

...... In his 'Hard Coal Dockets' published in 1994, Carbon County Judge John P. Lavelle says: "Historians feel the Molly Maguire trials were a surrender of state sovereignty. A private corporation initiated the investigation through a private detective agency. A private police force arrested the alleged defenders, and private attorneys for the coal companies prosecuted them. The state provided only the courtroom and the gallows."
 

One of several comprehensive lists of Molly Maguires Links.

Vanished Patch-Towns: In the McAdoo area they were: Hunky-Dory, Honeybrook, Green Mountain, Clabber Row, Yorktown, Slackersville, Sawmill, even Audenreid which in the early '50s was still a thriving community of several score homes. Few of these are shown on today's road maps, but see the Patch Town Map, the Munsell Schuylkill Co. History Table of Contents, and several topographical maps of the area, all of which are linked at left and below. These patch towns were small, early, sometimes original settlements grouped around their own local coal breaker. All of them are presently gone back to woods or have been excavated to great stripping holes in the ground. Honeybrook #1 and #2 existed only as immense strippings by the 1940s. A picture of these can be seen on this site's magnified topographical map as a great depression a little north of Kelayres. The Honeybrook strippings are now filled in (03/2000) via an influx of US Taxpayer money. Even back in the '40s and early '50s all that remained of Slackersville was a sandlot baseball field, in the scrub woods along the tracks of the LVRR between Beaver Brook and Hazleton. The site of Yorktown was a stripping at the south end of Beaver Brook near the old company store. A place called Hunky Dory (#8) was the farthest from McAdoo. Locally it denoted a 'way far off mine in the boondocks. The farther off Sawmill-Green Mountain area is remote and hard to get to now; It's reachable only by putting a lot of stress on a four wheel drive vehicle. Once upon a time it was the site of a thriving coal works. Even now it has a half ruined county bridge, deep in the woods across the Catawissa Creek on what used to be the main road, now hardly passable, between McAdoo and Sheppton.

Map: The Eastern Mid-Anthracite Coal Fields-Towns, Roads and Geology

Vanished places from the air.
Small Local Patch Town Map
Munsell's History of the County
Local topographical map
Another view of the Patch Towns

Local Coal Miner Pictures

World War II was over. Cleaner gas and oil heat became more competitive than coal, even in the coal towns. The Co