We Are Anthracite and Other Industrial Heritage Trail Highlights

New programming offered at the Foster House at Eckley Miners’ Village will include hands-on research experiences for K–12 students and workshops for local educators to engage with emerging scholarship.
Photo, Eckley Miners’ Village

Trails of History sites will be hosting harvest and Halloween-themed events this fall, with holiday programming to follow. Many visitors make these events part of their own seasonal traditions. Do you have a favorite event? For details on all sorts of activities on the Trails of History, be sure to check PHMC’s Events Calendar online at phmc.pa.gov.

Of course, events and programs aren’t the only reason to visit the Trails of History, either in person or virtually. For example, our Industrial Heritage Trail offers long-term, temporary and virtual exhibits; guided and self-guided tours; and historic buildings and landscapes at Cornwall Iron Furnace, Drake Well Museum & Park, Eckley Miners’ Village, Pennsylvania Anthracite Heritage Museum, Pennsylvania Lumber Museum, Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania, and Scranton Iron Furnaces. Let’s take a quick look at what’s new at Anthracite Heritage and Eckley.

Pennsylvania Anthracite Heritage Museum

Staff at the Anthracite Heritage Museum have developed several ongoing projects in partnership with other organizations. The first is a digital exhibit, We Are Anthracite: New Voices of Anthracite Pennsylvania.

These cast-iron hexagons were created by visitors at a Fire at the Furnaces event at Scranton Iron Furnaces. Each has its own design, but together they symbolize the strength of people connecting in ever-expanding networks.
Photo, Pennsylvania Anthracite Heritage Museum

As site administrator Dr. Bode Morin describes it in the TICCIH Bulletin (2nd quarter 2023), this project is designed “to collect and share the stories of people not represented in the museum.” The exhibit will examine the experiences of recent immigrants in the context of more than 150 years of immigration to the anthracite region, showing similarities and differences. For example, many groups, starting with Eastern European and Irish immigrants in the 1850s and continuing to the present, were made to feel like “outsiders” when they first arrived. Describing the museum’s exhibits and other interpretive programs, Morin notes that “we all understand the challenges immigrant groups faced when they arrived including ethnic persecution, economic segregation, and limited opportunities. . . . But the focus has been almost entirely on Euro-Americans.”

Working with the University of Maryland, the museum has completed the first phase of this long-term project, consisting of video interviews with immigrants who have origins in Central America, South America or the Caribbean. This phase is available in English (“We Are Anthracite: The Hispanic Community”) and Spanish (“Somos Antracita: La Comunidad Hispana”).

The museum has also recently opened two on-site exhibits. One is in partnership with the Interdependence Hexagon Project (IHP), an organization that uses art “as a vehicle to reimagine how [social and global] challenges can be addressed through critical thinking, research and creative expression.” The exhibit, which continues through December 2023, features cast-iron hexagons that commemorate the 10-year collaboration between Anthracite Heritage Museum and IHP at the annual Fire at the Furnaces event at Scranton Iron Furnaces.

The other on-site exhibit is a series of panels developed with the Penn-Anthracite Chapter of the American Society of Mining Engineers. Opening this fall, it helps visitors explore the roles of engineers and other STEM careers in the mining industry and provides a general overview of mining today.

Eckley Miners’ Village

The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded PHMC a $48,400 grant to create an interdisciplinary research and learning center at Eckley. The center will be housed in the restored home of Eckley cofounder Asa Foster and will encourage collaboration between Eckley’s academic partners and residents of the anthracite region to bring new perspectives to the historic village and its collections. Research at the center will also create greater understanding of the region’s social, cultural and environmental legacies. The funded project is part of a long-term strategic plan to preserve the buildings and regional stories at Eckley and is also supported by PHMC and the Appalachian Regional Foundation.

Amy Killpatrick Fox is a museum educator in PHMC’s Bureau of Historic Sites & Museums. She writes a weekly blog also called Trailheads.