created: December 7, 2001

PHMC's Anthracite Heritage Museum is next door to the privately owned and operated Lackawanna Mine. The sites are located in McDade Park (named for U.S. Representative Bill McDade) on the northwestern outskirts of Scranton. This tipple greets visitors as they approach the parking area.

Mine cars on the tracks leading to the Lackawanna Mine tipple.

The Anthracite Heritage Museum houses a large collection of artifiacts, such as this power drill, relating to all facets of life and work in Pennsylvania's Anthracite Region. In addtion to coal mining, the displays interpret agriculture, home life, and the textile industry, which grew as a result of the availability of cheap labor in the form of wives and daughters of coal miners.

This horse-drawn dump wagon is a predecessor of the scissors-dump delivery trucks that once plied the residential streets of towns throughout the Northeast.

Here is an excellent example of a pre-industrial plow. The only metal parts are the fastenings and the tip of the plow.

This is one of several machines in the museum's area portraying work in the silk and cotton mills of the Anthracite Region.

Lackawanna Mine tours take visitors underground via a steep slope. After a thrilling ride in a low-slung cable car, qualified miners take small groups on a walking tour that leaves participants with an indelible impression of what it was like to work in a deep Anthractie mine. This cut-away diagram on the surface orients visitors before going underground.

The nerve center of the underground mine was the foreman's office. This one was carved out of the rock face in the main gangway near the base of the slope.

At the low-ceilinged working face of a seam of coal, vibrating chutes were used to move the coal from the face to the gangway so it could be loaded into the cars. Two mannequins portray a miner and his helper working on their knees in the confined space. Their helmet-mounted lamps are visible in the gloom.

Probably the most important sign in an underground mine.

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