from Dan Rottenberg, The Kingdom of Coal:

Once placed in the mines, the mules never saw the light of day again, for fear the shock would drive them mad.

According to Rottenberg, "the Connellsville coking coal basin was about thirty miles long by an average of two and a half miles wide." The area was also known as the "Pittsburgh seam." Although the names on this small map may be difficult to read, you can see how many mines were crammed into a relatively small area. What you don't see are the coking ovens, where the soft bituminous coal was cooked into coke, a coal residue that was used to fuel the blast furnaces that made steel. In the 1870s and 80s, with the exponential rise of the railroads, the Connellsville coking basin was a trove. By 1883, the district had "more than ten thousand coke ovens." Imagine breathing that air.

Coal

Dawn Potter

Beneath houses and mountains, the coal seam lurks,

snaking under markets and factories, under churches, farms,

soda fountains, and garages, under railroad tracks and the hotel

where drunk old men sleep. The woman walks over the coal,

tracing an aimless map onto the earth—trailing, cigarette to lips,

through the ragged yards and alleys to the matinee minstrel show,

where she sits alone and watches the red-lipped white men mop

their black brows, cough and sing in the rising smoke from a hundred

women’s cigarettes, thick enough to choke the light; where she waits

for the piano player to seek out the chords of a darky strut,

for two black white men to stomp their feet, one two one two,

bow, and disappear into the empty wings, into the hill-bound town

where the chimneys hide behind the smoke and the riverbank

flares like a forest, where new leaves are painted in dust that sifts

onto the woman wandering home across the yards and alleys,

under the sooty trees, up the buckled, heaving streets to home;

where soon the man also walks, swinging a lunch bucket, not fast, not slow,

but quiet, stepping one step after another to where the woman sits,

smoking and silent in the kitchen where the kettle boils on the stove,

fogging the window where the child writes her name in careful script

on each little pane, index finger black with the coal that seeps into the house

that the woman has not dusted for weeks, for months, for years:

the glass-faced cabinets, the letters sloping onto tables, the newspapers

jaundiced with age, the scarred legs of couches draped in sheets,

the end table swathed in shabby linen where a once-gilt lamp perches,

throwing a saucer of light that never reaches the dark creeping

up the streets and alleys, the yards where black clotheslines streak the shirts

black and the trees shake black pollen onto the roofs. In the quiet house

the man takes off his boots and peels down his sweat-stiffened socks;

and the child gapes at the white hairless feet, soft and puffed, cramped toes

bending and stretching helplessly under the lamplight while the woman

smokes in silence, while the little kettle coughs and sings on the fire

and the minstrel show rises like steam in her memory, a slow vapor

that bends and frays. Ghostlike, the black-faced men mouth their songs;

crimson seats fold up over wraiths; invisible hands press the silent keys

of the piano. Smoke vanishes into ceiling, and ceiling melts to sky; the clouds

dissolve to pinpoints of light, and the light fades to nothing, not even black;

night descends on a town where the smelters burn and rusty bridges

hang over the creek like mothers staring into an empty crib.

For the child has flitted away into the darkness—a moth, velvet and brief,

wings brushing the soot-stained air, her shadow painting an eyeless window.

[from Boy Land & Other Poems (Deerbrook Editions, 2004)]