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ABSTRACT
What stories do ruins tell? What is the legacy of the extractive coal industry? When is extraction complete in a single-industry area? Tied to global capital, fuelling the Industrial Revolution on the labour immigrants, the legacy of extraction in the Anthracite Coal-Mining Region in Northeastern Pennsylvania extends into local notions of heritage, memory, community welfare, and place. Tracking (de)industrial life scenes in the Anthracite Coal-Mining Region, this ethnographic work follows traces of the past as they emerge and the day-to-day practices that sustained them noting intensities and flashpoints as they arise in daily life. As a particular flashpoint, Coal Region residents processed the demolition of the ruins of Saint Nicholas Coal Breaker, the last anthracite coal breaker built before 1960 and once the largest coal breaker in the world. Residents rapidly produced and shared digital media of the Breaker with and through a large public digital humanities collaboratory that I created and maintain through an active Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/AnthraciteCoalRegion) of more than 8000 members and a corresponding website. Engaging in community dialogue, participatory communication, and offering critical interpretations, residents wrote accounts about the demolition of the Breaker including its historical and mnemonic relevance, the cultural politics surrounding it, and the ethical dimensions of its extraction from the landscape by a mining company engaged in strip-mining on the surrounding land. These connections and dislocations between situated pasts show affective intensities arising suddenly even though dominant or more official narratives may have overwhelmed them. The sanitizing of the landscape of Saint Nicholas Breaker tries to empty the physical place of the material cultural traces of mining people/mined people to re-extract more coal through strip-mining operations, thereby rendering superfluous the underground miners’ labour by removing the last sign of it - the Breaker - from the landscape.
Acknowledgements
This paper is part of an earlier version presented at the National Communication Association Convention 2015 in Las Vegas, where it awarded the Donald P. Cushman Memorial Award. The author thanks Nancy Morris and Patrick D. Murphy for feedback on an earlier version and her reviewers at Cultural Studies for their comments. The author thanks the residents of the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania for their contributions to this project and for sharing their stories, memories, writings, and media about the ‘Coal Region’.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Note on contributor
Melissa R. Meade is a doctoral candidate in Media and Communication at the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication, Temple University in Philadelphia. She has taught at Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM), Mexico, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, and Temple University. Her research sits at the intersection of media, identity, and memory and explores the experience of marginalized people and their cultural production. Her dissertation uses online and offline ethnographic approaches to understand the upheavals of deindustrialization on struggling former coal-mining towns in northern Appalachia. She is the 2015 recipient of the Donald P. Cushman Memorial Award from the National Communication Association and the Founder and Director of the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania digital project. [www.melissameade.com]
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1. Bottom ash is the leftover industrial waste filtered from a coal-fired industrial furnace. Fly ash consists of the smaller waste particles that escape through the flue or chimney-like structure.
2. See https://www.facebook.com/AnthraciteCoalRegion Community participation exceeded 8000 at the time of writing.
3. Future plans include converging these materials on another more user-friendly content-management platform called Omeka that will serve as a place of long-term community engagement and reflection. The technological affordances of this platform will aid in cataloguing and searching the material that the community develops and in creating a permanent archive and memory space.
4. White city residents’ migration from racially mixed urban areas to more homogenous suburban/exurban areas has often been referred to as ’white flight‘. This term references in particular the post-World War II period starting in the 1950s in which the development of suburban living gave white urban dwellers a place to live outside of city limits. Numerous factors stemming from that era shaped white flight including the desegregation of both schools and public services in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.
5. Black lung disease, miners’ pneumoconiosis is due to long-term exposure to coal dust in which the inhaled dust builds up in patients’ lungs leading to severe inflammation, fibrosis (the formation of fibroid scars in the lungs), and in the worse cases, necrosis – the death of cells by self consumption. Silicosis, or the effects of inhaling silica dust, was also common in the Anthracite Region.
6. See the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry for additional information https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/sites/polycythemia_vera/index.html.