Emerging from doctoral research and adding infrastructure to the fragmented digital footprint of the Anthracite Region, Melissa created the “Anthracite Region” Facebook page (now with 7,700 members) and the anthracitecoalregion.com website as a public digital collaboratory wherein residents engage in community dialogue. This talk will discuss issues of environmental and economic concern expressed by residents: What is the socio-economic legacy of the Anthracite Coal Industry? What does extraction mean to residents in this single-industry area? How do residents relate to local landscapes and ruins?

1. Dialogical Communication and Digital Citizenship in the
Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania
Melissa R. Meade
melissa.meade@temple.edu

2. advancing toward the ruins of the Breaker
Photo credit: Melissa R. Meade, 2014

3. proposed digital project:
Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania
A user-friendly, content management website, The
Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania
Digital Project coalesces writings, artifacts, interviews,
commentary, ethnographic vignettes, oral histories,
photographs, maps, books, and letters with user-generated
content, user-curated content, and citizen journalism. The
project continues the momentum of the pilot project begun
in December 2013 as a Facebook page (now with about
8,000 followers) which later added a WordPress-based
website featuring researcher-written cultural essays,
offering a rich digital resource for community engagement,
teaching, future research, and general information.

4. Map image courtesy of US Geological Survey: Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources

5. site under development

6. overall research
•broadly, the lived experiences of social and
economic change
•explores restructuring of de-industrialized
Anthracite Coal Region

7. critical engagement
community members
are
producers of knowledge

8. invite residents to read images/materials
& offer interpretations
 as a dialogical form of communication
 to support participatory public culture

9. Facebook page with curated content and user-generated content
https://www.facebook.com/AnthraciteCoalRegion

10. current space for user content

13. fragmented digital footprint

14. WordPress-based platform
anthracitecoalregion.com

15. Collaborator, Jennie Levine Knies, Head Librarian, Penn State Wilkes-Barre

16. through curated content and user-generated content / comments
• place-based intensities and flashpoints emerge:
e.g. demolition of the Saint Nicholas Coal
Breaker, last anthracite breaker built before
1960

17. residents’ processing of the demolition of
the ruins of Saint Nicholas Coal Breaker
Photo credits: Melissa R. Meade, 2015

18. Samuel: To Reading Anthracite, the breaker is a
liability that’s only value is scrap metal. But to
those involved with the preservation of our
anthracite heritage, its value is much, much
more than the sum of its metal.

19. testament to time and a particular
economic configuration

20. a figure of memory

21. Samuel: Another part of our anthracite
mining heritage going, one excavator bite
at a time. Very sad!

22. “the ruined place itself remembers
and grows lonely” (Stewart, 1996,
p. 93)

23. lonely ruins

24. my mother: I could cry when I see it.

25.  How do residents relate to local landscapes and
ruins?
 What does extraction mean to residents in this
single-industry area?
 What is the socio-economic legacy of the
Anthracite Coal Industry? And, as an example, what
happens to a community when a coal breaker—the
archetype of coal extraction—sits in ruins on the
landscape for 45 years, only to be torn down
without much fanfare?

26. (de)industrial life scenes

27. community members as producers of media
impact of past extractions hopes, on economic
prospects, and on bodies

30. feeding the rats while the
“mine was playing out”
Jennifer: My dad John, his father Andrew, and my
uncles John and Lawrence worked in the tunnels
putting up props. This was especially grueling and
important when they were "robbing" whatever coal
was left when the "mine was playing out." I marvel
at their bravery and strength in this dangerous job.
They told me that they always left a little of their
lunch for the rats because when the rats left, there
was deadly gas and an explosion imminent.
[emphasis original]

31. breaker scene loomed large
Deanna: They just threw him on the porch.
Because that is what they did. The only thing
that my aunt remembers of the event as a little
girl is being pushed into the living room and
there laid his dead body.

32. Alice: She was Lithuanian.
Me: How did being Lithuanian help her to
survive with young children? What made that
different?
Alice: That means she hustled. That is how we
survived. A Lithuanian woman can hustle.

33. a sense of powerlessness
Stanley: That is why the [preservation] project
never got off the ground … there is coal under it
and these coal barons still control Schuylkill
County [name of the county].

34. Jacob: There are buildings in other towns in this
county that need to be removed and the county
claims them as national history and puts them in
the county and state’s historical society. Due to
the owners of this property, this building was
basically bought out of the historical society in
the late 80s so it can be taken down.

35. poetic words
Sally: We are watching the stripping of the land
where Saint Nicholas Breaker once stood. Two
steam shovels are working hard at getting every
ounce of coal out of the ground … In a few months
it will totally be wiped off the map and all that will
remain is a chain link fence and steam shovels
digging up the coal they found. Wonder how long
they knew there was a thick vein of coal under the
surface of the Breaker property? And I wonder if
they will put the earth back to original form when
they are done collecting every speck of coal. I hope
so. [emphasis added]

36. losing the magic of commodity
Sally: Thanks, Sean Wargo for sharing your photos
of the demolition of the St. Nicholas Breaker.
Makes me want to cry to see it like this. Where that
black car is parked - take a straight line across the
highway (Rt 54) and that is where my Grandmother
Timms lived from 1929 until her death in 1944, and
then my aunt and her husband continued to live
there until 1988. Can't believe how they tore up the
real estate digging out the vein of coal they found.
Hope they put it back the way it should be when
they're finished. [emphasis added]

38. Randy: Leave it up. It’s a monument to hard
work.

39. Reading Anthracite: Sean Wargo, would you kindly post these to our page? You've
done fabulous work and we'd love to see you get credit! Photo credits: Sean Wargo, 2015

40. environment
Donald: … [W]e are still going to look in the
mountains and see black.

41. just an everyday black cloud
Jane: I worked at the school across the street. I
remember all the train cars loaded with coal and
the dust blowing all over the kids at recess!
Rachel: There was so much activity there in the
60s. As a student at St. Nicholas, I remember
watching from our classroom as the trucks and
trains would pull in and out. We were so easily
distracted!! On windy days we couldn't go outside
for recess due to the coal dirt in the air. It was very
sad to see our school destroyed by fire and equally
sad to see this landmark dismantled.

42. silt storms
“It was impossible to breathe in the area without
nostrils being ringed and coated in black. The silt
also caused grit between the teeth and the wind-
whipped particles stung the eyes. The storm,
similar to one two weeks ago, came three days
before Palm Sunday as people in the path of it tried
to clean up their homes for the holidays … Some
people had lights on as they came through the
heavy concentration of black dust on Route 54 just
north of the Saint Nicholas School, which lies in the
path of the storm.” (The Evening Herald, 1977,
March 31)

43. light to drive through the light of day
Sally: My grandmother lived directly across from the
entrance to the breaker and just below the St. Nicholas
Elementary School. The breaker worked 24 hours a day
and that rail yard was never empty of coal cars filled with
coal waiting to be shipped out. When a windstorm came
along, that fine coal on the culm bank blew around like
the desert sand. It was pitch dark and you needed to turn
the headlights on to see where you were going. The silt
seeped into every crack and crevice of those company
homes—there was coal dust all over the inside of the
homes. And yet, those folks remained living there for
over 85 years and would still be living there if they could,
same for working in the breaker.

44. a deindustrialized region’s identity
• important for economically vulnerable small
towns and cities and single-industry areas to
have public spaces dedicated to documenting
residents’ reflections on the history, culture,
and media representations of their region

45. “Twice a boy and once a man is a poor miner's lot”
• the coal breaker represented the life cycle of
the miner
• removing any trace of this symbol empties the
place of signs of mining people and mined
people
• miners’ labor has been rendered superfluous
yet physical traces remain on bodies and on
the landscape

50. challenges
• populate new site with content
• build a larger project team, including an intern
• funding

51. future plans (list of 27+)
• offer various search tools that will let users conduct
personalized data organization and retrieval with
different categories.
• use mapping technology to relate particular curated
material to photo vignettes, video interviews, oral
history films, etc.
• add digital models/maps

52. Thank you!
melissa.meade@temple.edu
Follow the project on Facebook at
https://www.facebook.com/AnthraciteCoalRegio
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