"People in this town had a hard life. We had a hard life": Creating and Re-Creating ‘Patchtown’ History in the Anthracite Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania

Summary

The modern Northeastern Pennsylvanian landscape is dotted with coal "patchtowns" – villages and towns where coal miners, textile mill operatives, and their families lived and adapted coping mechanisms to survive Northeastern Pennsylvania’s gilded age of industry. Today, the majority of these industries and, by extension, jobs, have relocated or disappeared altogether, while the patchtowns and their residents have remained. Public archaeology has opened the door to exploring how patchtown residents remember their communities’ past and express their identities today as vestiges of a lifestyle that is rapidly ceasing to exist. Via archaeology, historical documents, and oral histories with lifelong residents of Lattimer No. 2, an 1870s coal mining patchtown, a modern interpretation of the town’s past by the town’s residents around ideas of family, religion, community, and self-preservation reveals how residents of a former industrial town have constructed a community-based history that answers their misgivings about their role in society today. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2015   •
• Approaching Labor through Archaeology in the Twenty-First Century

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 367