{"id":234,"date":"2016-11-01T18:19:33","date_gmt":"2016-11-01T22:19:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/projects.nyujournalism.org\/stateofpa\/?page_id=234"},"modified":"2016-11-03T15:25:52","modified_gmt":"2016-11-03T19:25:52","slug":"coal-town-coal-town","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/projects.nyujournalism.org\/stateofpa\/scranton\/coal-town-coal-town\/","title":{"rendered":"Coal Town? What Coal Town?"},"content":{"rendered":"

By James Thorne<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m sitting next to Spider-Man in the last car of a steam-powered train in Scranton, PA, and it\u2019s all thanks to Donald Trump. When the Republican candidate came to Lackawanna College in July, he promised to \u201cbring back coal\u201d to the region. But when I asked around Scranton, people were adamant that coal wasn\u2019t coming back.<\/p>\n

Sarah Piccini, assistant director of the Lackawanna Historical Society, says she doesn\u2019t know any living former miners. How disappointing, I thought. I\u2019d come to the city looking for remnants of coal country and was told to check out Steamtown National Historic site, which is how I ended up next to Spider-Man.<\/p>\n

For Halloween weekend, Steamtown was hosting rides on a coal-fired locomotive from the city\u2019s heyday. Both coal and steel production once made Scranton a major hub of rail activity, but Steamtown is all that\u2019s left. If you want to move around the city or get out of town nowadays, you\u2019re taking a car or a bus.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a reason why Scranton didn\u2019t join other Appalachian regions in coal\u2019s resurgence. The region\u2019s hard, hot-burning anthracite is shunned by refineries, which prefer softer and cheaper bituminous coal. The last Scranton mines closed in the 1960\u2019s, and only around 120 people currently work in natural resources and mining in Lackawanna County.<\/p>\n

Democrat Hillary Clinton has called for the country \u201cto move away from coal\u201d last spring and has repeatedly advocated for the job-creating potential the renewable energy sector. In the Scranton area, natural gas and wind are the major energy providers, but these endeavors don\u2019t supply work like coal once did. Fracking has mostly bypassed Scranton and takes place along the Marcellus Shale in counties to the north and west of Lackawanna County. A proposed natural gas plant northeast of Scranton in Jessup would produce 1,480 MW but supply only a few dozen well-paid positions. A 9,000-acre wind farm\u2014the largest in the state\u2014sits in neighboring Wyoming County and employs 11 workers.<\/p>\n

Scranton is nostalgic for coal. The city\u2019s Masonic Temple, designed by architect Raymond Hood and now a beloved cultural center, opened in 1930 when coal money still saturated the town, says Piccini. The electric trolley that gave Scranton the moniker \u201celectric city\u201d was one of the first of its kind in the nation and built to carry commuting miners.<\/p>\n

Yet the coal industry was not without its problems. Coal mine accidents claimed 1,500 lives nationally in 1900. Even today areas of earth around Scranton occasionally cave in, events known as subsidences that are caused by the collapse of underground shafts. \u201cIf you ever live in Scranton, you want to make sure you don\u2019t buy a house that\u2019s over a coal mine,\u201d said Pat McKnight, historian at Steamtown.<\/p>\n

Will there be anything to replace that coal jobs that built Scranton? \u201cThere\u2019s always some factory that\u2019s closing or some new one moving into the area,\u201d said McKnight. \u201cScranton is always trying to find their economic salvation with a silver bullet.\u201d<\/p>\n

My short train ride ended, and I left Steamtown looking for what I thought would be a better view of Scranton\u2019s coal heritage: slope #190 of the Lackawanna Coal Mine. A group of us huddled into a yellow cage that was lowered on tracks into the cold, damp mineshaft. The children on the tour seem a bit spooked.<\/p>\n

The tour guide showed us an wooden blasting machine that once sent a charges to dynamite that blew chunks of coal from the walls of the mine. He asked the boy if he knew what the hand pump was used for, and the boys\u2019 eyes lit up. For a moment I thought he might be recalling something\u2014a detail from school, some piece of shared local history.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah,\u201d the boy said. \u201cThey have those in the cartoons.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By James Thorne I\u2019m sitting next to Spider-Man in the last car of a steam-powered train in Scranton, PA, and it\u2019s all thanks to Donald Trump. When the Republican candidate came to Lackawanna College in July, he promised to \u201cbring back coal\u201d to the region. But when I asked around Scranton, people were adamant that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":238,"parent":12,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nCoal Town? 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