Yesterday I started reading the first of what may turn out to be a stack of books about the coal industry: Dan Rottenberg's In the Kingdom of Coal, whose study deals specifically with the Leisenring family, the dynasty behind the Westmoreland Coal Company, which operated mines in Virginia, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, as well as "remote places like Connellsville, Pennsylvania"--that remote place where my grandfather went down into the pit every day.

I'm still no further into the book than the introduction, but I already see that it will make its mark on me. Consider, for instance, Rottenberg's description of a hotel that "catered to the streams of coal brokers, entertainers, and tourists who constantly passed through Pottsville," a thriving eastern Pennsylvania burg, which was home to numbers of "anthracite coal barons":

The red-brick, nine-storey Necho Allen [was] named for the hunter who discovered anthracite coal on a nearby mountain in 1790. This hotel's subterranean Coal Mine Tap Room, decorated with anthracite walls and ceilings supported by mine timbers, attracted visitors from across the country who would never set foot in an actual coal mine. In the Necho's ballroom, big bands entertained standing room-only crowds. The Necho's elegant lobby-level dining room, with its ornate chandeliers and heavy white table linens, was dominated by an enormous three-piece oil-on-canvas painting of Sistine Chapel pretentions--but the subject of this monumental triptych was not God awakening Adam, but Necho Allen arousing succeeding generations of coal miners, coal towns, and coal machines to their heroic destiny.

Meanwhile, consider Walker Evans's July 1935 "Street Scene, Mt. Pleasant, Pennsylvania," one of the many portraits of the Connellsville area that the artist photographed for the Farm Security Administration. I spent a fair amount of time in Mt. Pleasant during the 1970s. It did not look very different from this.