Eckley Mining Village

Today Shippensburg University’s history department sponsored a trip to the Eckley Miner’s Village — a restored community built after 1854 when a mining firm called Sharpe, Leisenring and Company began construction on a small community (between 1,000-1,500 people) specifically to house the coal miners who worked for them. The region had hundreds of similar establishments, attracting the interests of mine owners who profited enormously from the high-quality anthracite coal in the area.

The lives of the miners who worked for the firm lived hard, as anyone who explores the Eckley Miners’ Village today would be able to understand on a visceral level. The homes of the miners, the street plan of the village, and many aspects of the material culture that developed there have been preserved by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. The mining town benefited by a film called _The Molly Maguires_ made in 1969, which was all about mining life. Afterwards, many of the film’s set designs, like the wooden coal-breaking machine that you can see on the first slide, were kept there to illustrate the way the mining villagers lived.

Eckley had one main road — it was never paved — and the houses went from poorest to wealthiest. The shabbier side housed many immigrants from Catholic Eastern European countries. Tiny cottages would be stuffed with people. These folks had to buy most of their supplies (including the coal they used to warm their homes) from a company-owned general store, whose owners jacked up the prices.

The second slide shows some interesting interior spaces of the wealthiest miners: the mining supervisors. These families might have been able to send many of their children to school (which they had to pay the mining company to run). The parents even had their own bedroom, showing a rare access to privacy. The blue paint of the walls showed their relative affluence. Some of these luckier mining families even afforded a summer kitchen, where the cooking stove could be moved to in warmer weather. The town doctor’s office has many medical items, such as this “pickle in a jar,” a traditional cure for coughs which did not, in fact, cure black lung