The Story of Anthracite.
Though a Company Was Organized in 1792 to Market “Stone Coal,” As Late as 1817 a Man Who Sold Some was Charged With Swindling by Philadelphians, Who Where Unable to Make it Burn.An original article written forThe Scrap Book.
Though a Company Was Organized in 1792 to Market “Stone Coal,” As Late as 1817 a Man Who Sold Some was Charged With Swindling by Philadelphians, Who Where Unable to Make it Burn.An original article written forThe Scrap Book.
Though a Company Was Organized in 1792 to Market “Stone Coal,” As Late as 1817 a Man Who Sold Some was Charged With Swindling by Philadelphians, Who Where Unable to Make it Burn.
An original article written forThe Scrap Book.
Coal is such a commonplace article that few people take the trouble to find out what it is and how it came into use. The average householder’s thoughts about coal are mainly confined to questions of price.
One picks up, of course, such interesting facts as that the United States burns three hundred and fifty million tons a year, at a cost to consumers of about seven hundred million dollars. In this estimate all grades of anthracite and bituminous coal are included. One wonders how long the visible supply will last, and whether the men who in future generations are to take up the work begun by Edison and other experimenters will find a new source of practical heat-supply in time to prevent a protracted “cold spell” when the coal gives out.
One is troubled, too, by the relations between miner and operator, and is worried when he learns that the great strike of 1902, for example, involved a total loss to workers, operators, railroads, and business men of about one hundred and fifty million dollars.
But all these matters are problems of the day—mere seconds on the clock of Nature. If we look back over so brief a gap as one hundred and fifteen years, we shall see the discovery of anthracite in America.
In 1791 a hunter, named Philip Ginther, lived on the eastern slopes of the mountains which are drained by the Lehigh River. Late one afternoon he found himself at the summit of Sharp Mountain. A storm was coming up, and Ginther broke into a run, for his home was some distance away. Stumbling over the roots of a fallen tree, he kicked up a black stone, and noticed that the soil in which the tree had grown was mingled with similar specimens of an unusual formation.
Now Ginther had heard that there was “stone coal” in the mountains, so he picked up the stumbling-block which had checked his course, and carried it home with him and gave it to Colonel Jacob Weiss, who lived near the site of the present Mauch Chunk. Colonel Weiss sent the specimen to Philadelphia, where it fell into the hands of Charles Cist, a printer, who recognized it as anthracite and advised Colonel Weiss to buy the land where the coal had been found.
To get the land was easy, for the region was wild and remote from the easier connections of civilization. Colonel Weiss bought from the government several thousand acres, and organized in 1792 the Lehigh Coal Mine Company. His associates included Robert Morris (the well-known financier), John Nicholson, Charles Cist, and J. Anthony Morris.
In May, 1792, an expedition—four laborers, with a member of the company to direct them—set out to open and work the mine. It was found that a great bed of anthracite lay quite near the surface. The company quarried several tons of the coal.
The question now was how to dispose of the product. The anthracite was there in vast quantity, ready to be pilfered from old Earth; but many miles of forest and mountain separated the mine from the nearest market. Moreover, people were dubious as to the burning value of anthracite, and wood was still plentiful, and—well, like other new products, anthracite had to prove its usefulness before it would be accepted.
After a few weeks the laborers were discharged. Colonel Weiss carried lumps of coal in his saddle-bags and induced a few of the blacksmiths of near-by settlements to try it; but there was no general tendency to adopt the new fuel.
The Pennsylvania Legislature, in 1798, chartered a company to improve the navigation of the Lehigh River. The work was completed in 1802, but although the removal of obstructions and the building of wing-dams were something of an improvement, the river was still likely to prove rude to voyagers. The coal company, however, resumed its quarrying, and built a fleet of arks which, during high water in the spring of 1803, were loaded with coal and sent down the stream. Four of the six arks were wrecked; two reached Philadelphia. But when the Philadelphians tried to burn the coal, they had no success with it, and the Lehigh Coal Mine Company abandoned its efforts to introduce a fuel so unlucky.
In 1810 coal was found near Pottsville, and blacksmiths used it successfully. A Philadelphia chemist, after making a careful analysis, announced that the heating power of anthracite was extraordinary. Colonel George Shoemaker, who had dug up coal on his lands near Pottsville, loaded eight or ten wagons in 1817, and took the caravan to Philadelphia. Inasmuch as he guaranteed that the “stones” would burn, he succeeded in disposing of his stock; but now, as formerly, the Philadelphians failed to get any heat from their purchases—except the heat of their tempers, which led them to secure a warrant for the arrest of Colonel Shoemaker on the charge of swindling. He escaped to Pottsville by making a detour, and meantime the Fairmount nail-works, which had bought several tons of the anthracite, hit accidentally upon the way to make it burn.
The proprietor and several of his men had spent a morning vainly trying to fire up a furnace with the coal. They had raked, stirred, poked, and used blowers, but the stuff refused to burn. Noon came, and the men shut the furnace door and went to their dinner. When they came back they found the furnace red hot. The closed door had solved the draft problem. The way to make anthracite burn was to shut it in the furnace and let it alone.
In a few years more the coal industry became established. The Lehigh company reentered the field. They shipped 365 tons In 1820, 1,000 tons in 1821, and 2,240 in 1822. By 1830 their annual production was more than 41,000 tons; by 1840 it was 225,000 tons; by 1850, 722,000 tons. Up to 1847 the company got all its coal from its open quarry on the summit of Sharp Mountain. Boats carried the coal down the Lehigh.
To get the product from the mine to the river, a railway, nine miles long, was built in 1827. Excepting a track laid in the quarries at Quincy, Massachusetts, this was the first railway to be operated in the New World. Mules drew the cars to the summit; gravity carried them down.
The little black stone which the good people of Philadelphia rejected in 1792 has become the keystone of all our industries.