First Anthracite Coal Burned in Grate by
Judge Jesse Fell, February 11, 1808
The first knowledge of anthracite in America dates back to about 1750 or 1755, when an Indian brought a supply of it to a gunsmith at Nazareth for repairing his rifle, the smith’s supply of charcoal having become exhausted.
Stone coal was used by the garrison at Fort Augusta, mention of which fact is made by Colonel William Plunket, who was one of the original soldiers sent to build this important provincial fortress. The records in the British War Office also contain references to its use there.
A certain Ensign Holler, of the fort’s garrison, wrote that in the winter of 1758 the house was heated by stone coal brought down the river from near Nanticoke and that a wagon load had been brought from a place six leagues from Fort Augusta, which point must have been at or near either the present Shamokin or Mount Carmel.
Anthracite had been used in the Wyoming Valley before 1755, and during the Revolutionary War it was shipped down the Susquehanna for the use of the arsenal at Carlisle.
On November 25, 1780, the Congress “Resolved, That all the artificers in the department of military stores in Pennsylvania be removed to Carlisle and that in the future only an issuing store and an elaboratory fixing ammunition be kept in Philadelphia.”
Immediately thereafter Colonel Blaine was directed to prepare stores, etc., for the troops, and during the month of December of 1780 nearly all the artificers were sent to Carlisle.
There is no doubt that coal from Wyoming was there used in the casting of cannon, as it could have been more readily brought down the Susquehanna in bateaux than hauled from the seaports for that purpose. It is also well known that provisions were taken up the Susquehanna, and as coal was then known and probably mined, the bateaux in returning evidently conveyed the fuel to Kelso’s ferry, opposite Harrisburg.
The barracks erected by the Hessian soldiers captured by General Washington at the battle of Trenton, and sent to Carlisle as prisoners of war, later became one of the historic buildings of Pennsylvania. The building was one long used by the Carlisle Indian School and is still standing on the Government reservation there.
Pittsburgh, too, had used fuel dug from a high bluff before the town. Coal was known to have existed near the present City of Pottsville as early as 1790, when Nicho Allen is said to have discovered some of the black stones and tested their burning qualities.
An act approved by the Legislature of Pennsylvania, March 15, 1784, was “for the purpose of improving the navigation of the Schuylkill so as to make it passable at all times, enabling the inhabitants to bring their produce to market, furnishing the county adjoining the same and the City of Philadelphia with coal, masts, boards,” etc.
In 1766 a company of Nanticoke and Mohican Indians visited Philadelphia and reported to the Governor that there were mines in Wyoming. A survey of Wyoming in 1768 notes “stone coal” near the mouth of Toby’s Creek. One of General Sullivan’s officers in 1779 records the presence of “vast mines of coal, pewter, lead and copperas.”
Obadiah Gore used coal in his blacksmith forge as early as 1769. He also used it in nailing in 1788.
The Conestoga wagons might have transported the products of the farm to market for many years more had not Philip Ginter, the hunter, in 1791 discovered “stone coals” under the roots of a fallen tree nine miles west of Mauch Chunk.
About the same time that Ginter made his discovery coal was discovered by Isaac Tomlinson at what is now Shamokin. He had recently removed on a farm between there and Mount Carmel and found the coals lying in the bed of Quaker Run, a stream running through his farm and so called because he was a member of the Society of Friends.
Thus we see that the three discoverers of anthracite were Allen, Ginter and Tomlinson, and what is more remarkable, all these discoveries were made about the same time, and yet it is a fact that coal was mined at Wyoming nearly a quarter century before these “discoveries.”
Philip Ginter did not exactly “discover anthracite.” He knew all about the existence of coal at Wyoming and something of its use. But his discovery of coal in 1791 while hunting on the mountains where is now Summit Hill is the date from which the great business of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company originated, though it was twenty-nine years before the coal trade really began.
The date is usually accepted as 1820, the time that the Lehigh schemes got into action.
Ginter made known his discovery to Colonel Jacob Weiss, residing at what is now known as Weissport, who took a sample in his saddlebags to Philadelphia.
But the coal trade was active in Wyoming Valley as early as 1807, when the Smiths shipped a boat load to Columbia. George H. Hollenback shipped two loads down the river in 1813, and sent coal by wagon to Philadelphia. Lord Butler and Crandall Wilcox both shipped coal in 1814.
The use of anthracite for domestic purposes seems to have been discovered by Judge Jesse Fell, of Wilkes-Barre. The following memorandum was made at the time on the fly-leaf of one of his books:
“February 11, 1808, made the experiment of burning the common stone coal of the valley in a grate, in a common fireplace in my house, and found it will answer the purpose of fuel, making a clearer and better fire, at less expense, than burning wood in the common way. Jesse Fell.”
News of this successful experiment soon spread through the town and country, and people flocked to witness the discovery. Similar grates were soon constructed by Judge Fell’s neighbors, and in a short time were in general use throughout the valley.
In the spring of that year, John and Abijah Smith loaded two arks with coal at Ransoms Creek, in Plymouth, and took it down the river to Columbia; but on offering it for sale, no person could be induced to purchase. They were compelled to leave the black stones behind them unsold, when they returned to their homes.
The next year the Smiths, not in the least discouraged, took two arks of coal and a grate, and again proceeded to Columbia. The grate was put up, and the coals were burned in it, thus proving the practicability of using coal as a fuel. The result was a sale of the coal, and thus began the initiative of the immense coal trade of Pennsylvania.
Quakers Make Protest Against Slavery to
Congress February 12, 1790
There is unmistakable evidence of Negro slavery among the Dutch on the South (now Delaware) River as early as the year 1639. In that year a convict from Manhattan was sentenced to serve with the blacks on that river.
In September and October, 1664, the English defeated the Dutch, and some of the Dutch soldiers were sold in Virginia as slaves. The Negro slaves were also confiscated by the victors and sold. A cargo of three hundred of those unhappy beings having just landed, failed to escape capture.
In 1688 Pastorius, the Op den Graffs (now Updegraffs), and Gerhardt Hendricks sent to the Friends’ meeting house the first public protest ever made on this continent against the holding of slaves, or as they uncompromisingly styled it, “the traffick of men’s body.”
These early residents of Germantown compared Negro slavery to slavery under Turkish pirates, and failed to note that one was better than the other. Their protest said:
“There is a saying that we shall doe to all men licke as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent, or colour they are. And those who steal or robb men, and those who buy or purchase them, are they not all alicke? Here is liberty of Conscience, which is right and reasonable; here ought to be likewise liberty of ye body, except of evil doers, which is another case. In Europe there are many oppressed for Conscience sake; and here there are those oppressed which are of a black colour.”
This memorial is believed to be in the handwriting of Francis Daniel Pastorius, and at the date it was written New England was doing a large business in the Guinea trade, the slave depots being located chiefly at Newport, where the gangs for the Southern market were arranged.
All honor is due these honest first settlers of Germantown, who asked categorically: “Have these Negers not as much right to fight for their freedom as you have to keep them slaves?”
They asked, further, to be informed what right Christians have to maintain slavery, “to the end we shall be satisfied on this point and satisfy likewise our good friends and acquaintances in our natif country, to whom it is a fairfull thing that men should be handled so in Pennsilvania.”
The Quakers were embarrassed by the memorial and its blunt style of interrogatory. It was submitted to the Monthly Meeting at Dublin Township, “inspected” and found so “weighty” that it was passed on to the Philadelphia Quarterly Meeting, which “recommended” it to the Yearly Meeting at Burlington, where it was adjudged “not to be so proper for this meeting to give a positive judgment in the case, it having so general a relation to many other parts, and, therefore, at present they forebore it.” So the matter slept.
Very soon thereafter slavery in Philadelphia was not very different from what it was in the South at a later period. The white mechanics and laborers complained to the authorities that their wages were reduced by the competition of Negroes hired out by their owners, and the owners objected to the capital punishment of slaves for crime, as thereby their property would be destroyed.
In 1708 two slaves, Tony and Quashy, were sentenced to death for burglary, but their owners were allowed to sell them out of the province after a severe flogging had been given them upon the streets on three successive market days.
The Assembly of Pennsylvania soon viewed with much concern and apprehension the introduction of so many slaves into the province, but the House would not consider any proposition to free Negroes, deciding that to attempt to do so would be “neither just nor convenient,” but it did resolve to discourage the introduction of Negroes from Africa and the West Indies. It laid a tax of £20 a head upon all such importations. The Queen and Royal Council failed to approve the act, for the British Government was set like flint against any provincial attempt to arrest the African slave trade or tax it out of existence—that trade was a royal perquisite.
The year 1780 is memorable in the annals of Pennsylvania for the passage of an act for the gradual abolition of slavery in this State. On February 5, 1780, the Supreme Executive Council in its message to the Assembly, called the attention of that body to this subject, and although it was forcibly presented, the matter was dismissed, “as the Constitution would not allow them to receive the law from the Council.”
On March 1, 1780, by a vote of thirty-four to twenty-one, an abolition act passed the Assembly. It provided for the registration of every Negro or mulatto slave or servant for life, or till the age of thirty-one years, before the first of November following, and also provided “that no man or woman of any nation or color except the Negroes or mulattoes who shall be registered as aforesaid, shall at any time hereafter be deemed, or adjudged, or holden within the territory of this Commonwealth, as slaves or servants for life, but as free men and free women.”
The Quakers partly forgot their woes on hearing of an act which they so much approved, as in 1774 the Pennsylvania Yearly Meeting had taken a definite and decided stand against slavery.
They proceeded without delay to urge war on the system.
On February 12, 1790, the Quakers made their first formal protest to Congress for the abolition of slavery in every form.
The movement against slavery had been making quiet progress during all these years, and on January 1, 1794, a convention was held in Philadelphia by invitation of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, of delegates from all societies throughout the United States.
At this convention two memorials were adopted, one to the Legislature of Pennsylvania, and the other to Congress, asking for suitable laws to suppress the slave trade.
The petition to Congress was referred to a committee, which made a report recommending the passage of a law against the fitting out of any ship or vessel in any port of the United States, or by foreigners, for the purpose of procuring from any part of the coast of Africa the inhabitants of the said country, to be transshipped into any foreign ports or places of the world to be sold or disposed of as slaves. The law was finally passed on March 22, 1794, and vessels were thereafter liable to heavy fine and forfeiture, and the freedom of the slaves on board.
Thus after the taunt of the early German settlers, the Quakers cleared their own skirts and then led in the movement which abolished slaves from Pennsylvania and were the first to lay this great question before Congress.