Pennsylvania Anthracite Research Articles

On the interactions between strength and petrology of Pennsylvania anthracite

Six blocks of anthracite, each from a known seam and mine location, were tested for their unconfined compressive strength and elastic modulus. The maceral content and the proximate analysis of the test specimens were examined after the strength tests were completed. The coal rank (2.84 to 5.84%Rmax), the maceral composition (41.9–88.6% vitrinite (mineral-free basis), and as-received ash content (2.76–28.29%) are not good predictors of the strength for these samples. Instead, the highest compressive strength and elastic modulus samples were the anthracites with the highest ash yield. Among the lowest ash specimens, compressive strength decreases with an increase in the ratio of (telovitrinite + fusinite + semifusinite)/detrovitrinite). The cleats and the inorganic (mineral) and organic (maceral) composition of megascopic and microscopic lithologies likely contributed unquantified variables to those determined in this study.

Social Engineering at the Company Home Hearth: Coal Company Use of Architecture to Control Domestic Spaces in the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region, 1866–1889

Social Engineering at the Company Home Hearth: Coal Company Use of Architecture to Control Domestic Spaces in the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region, 1866–1889

Contrasts in maceral textures in progressive metamorphism versus near-surface hydrothermal metamorphism

The contrast in the textures of high reflectance vitrinite and liptinite in the Ragged edge exposures of western Kentucky's Herrin (No. 11) coal versus the macerals in regionally metamorphosed anthracites opens a window into the metamorphic mechanisms prevailing for both of the Ragged edge and regionally metamorphosed coals. Regionally (Barrovian) metamorphosed anthracite, at least in the cases noted in this study, was at a bituminous rank at the onset of enhanced metamorphism, contributing to the preservation of the bituminous-like appearance of the anthracite macerals. Exceptions are possible where melting and subsequent coking occurred, but melting is generally absent in the Barrovian-style Pennsylvania anthracites and the igneous/coal contact zone was sufficiently distant from the Cretaceous Colorado and New Mexico anthracites such that melting was not present. In contrast, the high-rank portions of the Ragged edge are lodged within and/or adjacent to high volatile bituminous coal; in some cases, metamorphosed fragments are juxtaposed with anthracite-rank fragments. High-reflectance vitrinites within the Ragged edge coal have textures reminiscent of peat and low-rank coals with no evidence of the softening of the vitrinite, suggesting that the metamorphism was the consequence of localized hydrothermal events influencing the peat or, at the most, the low-rank precursor to the extant high volatile bituminous coal.

Distribution of rare earth elements and other critical elements in beneficiated Pennsylvania anthracites

The Pennsylvania Anthracite Fields are in a complex tectonic and metamorphic terrain, historically hosting one of the largest concentrations of coal mining in the USA. Anthracite mining now largely consists of the surface mining of the pillars remaining from the prime years of underground mining. The geochemical study of the sized coal products and the refuse (largely rock) from three preparation plants (breakers) demonstrates that Principal components analysis (PCA) of select major oxide, minor element, and rare earth elements illustrates some differentiation among the products from the individual plants. The rock samples, with abundant quartz and metamorphic Al-Si minerals and with a lower ash-basis REE concentration than the coals, were distinctly separated from the coal samples on the PCA plots. Plots of GdN/GdN* vs. EuN/EuN* and CeN/CeN* vs. EuN/ EuN* showed differentiation between the individual suites of coals showed that the refuse samples had distinct REE distributions compared to the associated coals. Several minor and trace elements show enrichments in the coal samples. Lithium, with concentrations of up to 314 ppm on an ash basis, is among the most promising of the critical elements, exceeding the enrichment of the REY and Sc.

Sewn in Coal Country: An Oral History of the Ladies' Garment Industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1945–1995

Sewn in Coal Country: An Oral History of the Ladies' Garment Industry in Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1945–1995

An Archaeology of Structural Violence: Life in a Twentieth-Century Coal Town, Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite Country

An Archaeology of Structural Violence: Life in a Twentieth-Century Coal Town, Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite Country

PENNSYLVANIA’S ABANDONED MINE LAND (AML) EMERGENCY PROGRAM

Abstract. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation (BAMR) implements an Abandoned Mine Land (AML) Emergency Program to address high-priority, abandoned mine land (AML) problems that suddenly occur throughout Pennsylvania’s coal fields. BAMR maintains two field offices: one in eastern Pennsylvania (Anthracite Region) in Wilkes-Barre and one in western Pennsylvania (Bituminous Region) in Ebensburg. Both field offices maintain in-house construction crews with significant equipment available to respond to and address many small AML Emergencies (hazards) such as pothole (or cavehole), subsidences, and mine drainage breakouts. For larger AML Emergencies such as subsidence events causing structural damage to homes, businesses, and roads; mine fires; coal refuse fires; landslides; or other large-scale or complex AML problems, projects are completed by outside contractors. Project designs are completed by BAMR engineering staff. The contractors are then hired through solicitation of bids or proposals with very short timeframes between bid issue and bid opening. Since October of 2010, BAMR has addressed nearly 800 AML Emergencies which equates to approximately 80 AML Emergency projects each calendar year. The average construction cost to address those emergencies was just over $3.25 million per year. Due to the increased precipitation over the Commonwealth the last several years, that number has increased to an average of 86 AML Emergency projects over the last five (5) years (2015–2019) with a record number of 127 addressed in calendar year 2018. The average cost to address those AML Emergency projects over that five-year period was $4.66 million per year. This paper will provide some background on Pennsylvania’s AML Emergency Program, some summary statistics including the annual number and types of projects completed including costs, and also highlight through both photos and video links some typical projects recently completed by the program.

History of applied coal petrology in the United States. IV. Reflections on the centennial of the introduction of coal petrology to North America

Reinhardt Thiessen introduced a thin-section-based, botanically oriented method of coal petrology to North America in 1920. The nomenclature derived from this system, although eventually reconciled with and largely superseded by the European reflected-light techniques and nomenclature, persisted for decades after Thiessen's death in 1938. The research by Thiessen and his colleagues at the U.S. Bureau of Mines was the foundation of applied coal petrology in the United States, with research on the preparation, coking, and hydrogenation properties of coals. Thiessen's botanical training enabled him to recognize distinct spores in coals. Although he did not macerate the samples and he did not provide genus and species names, the demonstration that he could use spores to correlate coals through the Northern Appalachian coal basin provided a foundation for regional stratigraphic palynology.Homer Turner, an American geologist and fuel scientist, was a pioneer in the petrographic study of anthracite. Using a method of etching polished blocks of anthracite, he developed a parallel approach to Reinhardt Thiessen's studies of thin sections of bituminous and lower-rank coals, describing well-preserved botanical structures. This, in turn, supported the view that anthracite just had a higher degree of metamorphism than bituminous coals, opposed to the older view that anthracite had a different botanical origin. In a joint study with the U.S. Bureau of Mines, Turner produced a map of equal volatile matter contours (isovol) across the Pennsylvania Anthracite Fields. He was also a collaborator in a study on the X-ray diffraction structure of anthracite, presaging better known studies by Rosalind Franklin and others.

Review: Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite County, by Paul A. Shackel

Review: Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite County, by Paul A. Shackel

Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite Country by Paul A. Shackel

Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite Country by Paul A. Shackel

Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite Country

Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite Country

Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite Country by Paul A. Shackel

Reviewed by: Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite Country by Paul A. Shackel Thomas Mackaman Remembering Lattimer: Labor, Migration, and Race in Pennsylvania Anthracite Country. By Paul A. Shackel. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2018. 176 pp. Illustrations, maps, references, index. Cloth $99; paper, $28.) On the afternoon of September 10, 1897, near the small anthracite patch town of Lattimer, one of the worst labor massacres in American history took place. About 450 striking miners, peacefully marching to call fellow workers out on strike with them, were fired on by a posse of some 150 deputies and mine guards under the command of Luzerne County sherriff James F. Martin. The initial fusillade and subsequent fire from Martin’s forces left nineteen dead and nearly forty wounded, all of them eastern European immigrants from Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, and other lands. University of Maryland industrial archaeologist Paul A. Shackel brings this largely forgotten event to life by connecting the Lattimer massacre of immigrant coal miners to the anti-immigrant politics of the present, which, ironically, have been particularly pronounced in the nearby town of Hazleton, Pennsylvania. Shackel, the author of dozens of books and articles, including The Archaeology of American Labor and Working Class Life (University of Florida Press, 2011), has written a book that is at once a labor history, a study in public history and memory, a forensic archaeology, a contemporary sociology, and a plea for intercultural understanding. Shackel first situates the Lattimer massacre within the development of the late nineteenth-century anthracite industry and the struggle of “new immigrant” coal miners—at first dismissed even by the union, the United Mine Workers (UMW)—to defend their most basic interests. He then presents a detailed study [End Page 120] of the massacre itself, followed by the trial, during which the legal defense for Martin and his deputies deployed anti-immigrant tropes to secure acquittal. Shackel then studies the history and memory of Lattimer. The event was kept alive in oral traditions, he shows, but it was largely forgotten—at least in a public sense—until the early 1970s, when UMW officials, Catholic clergy, and local politicians began to invoke its memory, and contentious efforts were made to memorialize the massacre. This discussion is followed by a chapter detailing the archaeological study he carried out, which corroborates the overwhelming historical evidence from the time that Martin and his posse carried out the massacre. Shackel then turns to the present. Today the immediate area’s leading town is Hazleton, whose former mayor (2000–2010) and US congressman (2011–19), Lou Barletta, made a national name for himself by pushing forward a local ordinance to block what he claimed was a tidal wave of illegal immigration to the depressed coal town. Hazleton, whose population is now roughly half Latino, once again found itself at the center of the immigration debate—as it had one hundred years earlier, at the time of the massacre. Shackel draws out these connections. Shackel’s book, part of the University of Illinois Press series “The Working Class in American History,” is now the leading scholarly study of the Lattimer massacre. But it is more than that. Written in direct language, it will be of interest not only to scholars but also to a general readership and to teachers interested in helping students draw connections between past and present. Thomas Mackaman King’s College Copyright © 2020 The Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Feasibility study of preparation of carbon quantum dots from Pennsylvania anthracite and Kentucky bituminous coals

This short communication reports the synthesis of carbon quantum dots (CQDs) from US anthracite and bituminous coals by oxidation in presence of ultrasonic stimulation. The CQDs formed were examined by using chemical analysis, UV–Visible spectroscopy (UV–Vis), Fluorescence spectroscopy (FL), High resolution transmission microscopy (HRTEM), and X-ray Photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), revealing the formation of the varied sizes of CQDs ranging from about 2–12 nm. The present method could serve as a simple and a large-scale synthesis of CQDs from abundant and economical coal resources for high-end application.

Notes on the mechanisms of coal metamorphism in the Pennsylvania Anthracite Fields

Charred/devolatilized megasporinite and featureless vitrinite with devolatilization pores filled with pyrolytic carbon suggest that eastern Pennsylvania anthracites may have been altered by to localized episodes of metamorphism from superheated steam/CO2/CO/hydrocarbons, in addition to the pervasive regional metamorphism. Based on the extant vitrinite textures, the lack of mesophase anisotropic textures, and on comparisons to laboratory studies of the thermoplasticity of bituminous coals, the rank at the time of metamorphism would have been high volatile C or lowermost high volatile B bituminous. The temperature of alteration would have been in the 350–400 °C range, corresponding to the critical point of steam (374.15 °C and 22.1 MPa; about 1-km depth). It is speculated that while increased pressure would have prolonged the duration of fluid properties, fluidity is still a transient property and the vitrinite would have returned to a solid state after a few hours. The heat would have persisted, dissipating over the course of days to months to years depending upon the depth and ambient (pre-heating) geothermal gradient, but contributing to the coal metamorphism long after the vitroplast solidified.

Late Modernity and Community Change in Lattimer No. 2: The American Twentieth Century as Seen through the Archaeology of a Pennsylvania Anthracite Town

The shanty town at the periphery of Lattimer No. 2 began in the 1880s as an ephemeral settlement for new immigrant workers. Situated within the pluralist labor hierarchy of northeast Pennsylvania’s coal region, Italian families created a community here at the edge of an ethnically diverse, but spatially divided, company-town landscape. Here, and in places across the nation, the 20th century brought about transformations in the intimate relationships among individuals, economies, and the state. Giorgio Agamben proposes that the dominant paradigm of this political economy is materialized in places like the shantytown, paradoxical spaces in which “law and fact ... have become indistinguishable,” and individuals exist within “a constant state of exception.” Archaeology conducted in the shanty enclave of Lattimer No. 2, viewed through the long duration of the 20th-century political economy, illuminates this formation through its materialization of shifting landscapes, buildings, and boundaries.

Reconstructing a cultural fire regime in the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region

Fire history reconstructions provide fire managers with valuable information regarding historical fire regime dynamics. Yet, in the Central Hardwood Forest Region (CHF), there is an absence of dendroecological studies where frequent wildfires have persisted into the twenty-first century. This study presents the first documented tree-ring reconstruction of fire history in the Pennsylvania anthracite coal-producing region. An approximately 150-year fire chronology was developed from fire-scarred pitch pine (Pinus rigida) and sassafras (Sassafras albidum) collected on Spring Mountain in Schuylkill County. Principal component analysis and k-means cluster analysis were used to identify four fire regime clusters based on interacting fire and non-fire parameters. Results indicate that fires occurred under a variety of moisture conditions and that a mid-twentieth century increase in fire activity on Spring Mountain was associated with the collapse of the regional anthracite industry and possibly amplified by the 1960s drought. Fires continue to burn on Spring Mountain in the twenty-first century, contrary to the dominant pattern of fire exclusion across the CHF. Future research needs are highlighted regarding historical fire regime dynamics and cultural ties to landscape burning in the Pennsylvania Anthracite Region.

Chemistry and petrology of paired feed coal and combustion ash from anthracite-burning stoker boilers

The feed coal and corresponding ash from a series of stoker boilers burning Pennsylvania anthracite were investigated for their petrographic and chemical characteristics. The coals have low-S and moderate-ash contents with similar major oxide and minor element compositions. The volatile minor elements, such as Zn and As, decrease in concentration from the feed coal to the stoker ash (comparisons on the ash basis). The light rare earth elements (La through Sm) decrease in concentration relative to the heavy rare earth elements (Eu through Lu) from the coal ash to the stoker ash.

Petrology and chemistry of sized Pennsylvania anthracite, with emphasis on the distribution of rare earth elements

Sized samples of anthracite were obtained from three preparation plants (breakers), several beneficiating multiple coals, in the Pennsylvania Anthracite Fields. Vitrinite reflectance spans 5.07% Rmax (anthracite, approaching meta-anthracite) in the east to 2.36% Rmax (semi-anthracite) in the west. Maceral distributions do not show the size partitioning observed in many bituminous coals. All sites showed distinct Gd anomalies, possibly a function of hydrothermal metamorphism of the coals. The rare earth distribution pattern (L-, M-, and H-type) within the products from each breaker are similar. Principal components analysis confirmed an observation from the latter assessment that coals from the same breaker tend to cluster together, but distinct from the clusters of the other breakers.

THE LABOR OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION: HOUSEHOLD WORK AND GENDERED POWER IN THE HISTORY OF CAPITALISM, 1870–1930

•Susan Porter Benson, Household Accounts: Working-Class Family Economies in the Interwar United States (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).•Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Forced to Care: Coercion and Caregiving in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).•Elaine Lewinnek, The Working Man's Reward: Chicago's Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, USA, 2014).•Katherine Leonard Turner, How the Other Half Ate: A History of Working-Class Meals at the Turn of the Century, California Studies in Food and Culture 48 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).•Karol K. Weaver, Medical Caregiving and Identity in Pennsylvania's Anthracite Region, 1880–2000 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011).•Wendy A. Woloson, In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

Comparative Study on Structural Parameters of Graphitized Coal–Petroleum Co-cokes and Pennsylvania Anthracites, with Implications for Their Use

Nuclear-grade graphite samples, anisotropic commercial graphite, graphitized co-cokes, and anthracites were characterized using X-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, and temperature-programmed oxidation. Through evaluation of relationships between structural parameters, it was observed there is better likelihood to obtain isotropic or near-isotropic graphite from co-cokes than anthracites. The addition of coal to petroleum feed, i.e., vacuum resid or decant oil, reduces the concentration of large isochromatic units in a co-coke structure, thus leading to a graphitic structure that lacks anisotropic character upon graphitization of the co-coke. The structural characteristics of graphitized anthracites showed more similarities to anisotropic commercial graphite, in comparison to graphitized co-cokes. It was also found that coking a vacuum resid/coal blend offers better potential for producing an isotropic or near-isotropic graphite than the coking of a decant oil/coal blend. Increasing the co-coking temperature from 465 to 500 °C appeared to favor obtaining isotropic or near-isotropic graphite upon graphitization.