Cast Iron Kitchen Stove at Eckley Miners’ Village

Many immigrants working in northeastern Pennsylvania’s anthracite region in the nineteenth century lived in “patches,” small villages laid out and owned by coal companies adjacent to their mining operations. Of their possessions, immigrants prized their cast iron stoves not only for the comforts – cooking and heating – they provided, but also took great pride in them as signs of prosperity. A coal-fired cooking stove, the “Good Morning” model, which dates to the 1870s, interprets an immigrant miner’s household in Eckley Miners’ Village, neat Weatherly, Luzerne County, a rare example of a largely intact “patch.” Such coal stoves were kept lit twenty-four hours a day, even during the warm summer months, when they were moved to summer kitchens.