"Pennsylvania Dutch," and other essays

by Phebe Earle Gibbons

The German’s house is a good one, painted or whitewashed. Germans cultivate flowers and vegetable gardens, principally worked by the women, who carry produce in baskets for sale. The Welshman, too, when he has a home, has a comfortable one, looking quite pretty with its surroundings. But though the Irish often own their homes, these are of a ruder kind.

Has the miner aspirations? This question has been put, and I have been tempted to reply by another, Is he a man? Mr. L⸺, of Scranton, came to this country when about twenty. He worked a few months at Carbondale, in this Lackawanna region, and afterward in Ohio, mining bituminous coal by the bushel,—one hundred and twenty bushels a day, at two cents each. Here he laid by one hundred and thirty dollars, which he sent to Wales to bring his parents over. “I was,” said he, “the only son they ever ’ad.” At twenty-five he married, and soon after took a contract in a mine in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. Here the failure of his employer threw him into debt, from which he was not clear until about thirty. He took contracts on coal slopes, working always as a miner himself, but hiring hands to help him. For twenty years he was a foreman, a foreman’s salary averaging twelve hundred dollars. He also went to California, and mined gold to profit. He bought, too, a farm in Pennsylvania for three thousand five hundred dollars, and tried farming himself for two years, but found it harder work than mining.

“Some eight of us,” he says, “all miners, bought some years ago about five and a half acres of ground here for eight thousand and fifty dollars. We sold it out in building-lots, in about two months, for nearly the cost, and retained the mineral, which we value at twenty thousand dollars.” By mineral is meant, of course, the coal, of which several valuable veins underlie Scranton at the point alluded to.

Mr. L⸺ continues: “Another company of us, all miners and all poor men originally, have bought a tract of four thousand acres of coal lands near the centre of Alabama. I have been down twice to see it.” He has now retired from active business, and lives in a neat house surrounded by a large garden, which he cultivates with pleasure and profit.

Another instance of success in a more intellectual field is Mr. ⸺, editor of a Welsh paper. When he was eight years old his mother was left a widow, with nine children, from three years of age to sixteen, and with nothing but a few household goods. By putting her children to work early at the mines she kept her family together. She herself spoke nothing but Welsh. Mr. ⸺ was a precocious laborer, if I may use the expression, he being well grown, and becoming a driver at ten years, and a miner at sixteen. He never had but thirty-two days’ schooling; but having great delight in books, he got a Daboll’s Arithmetic, and went through it twice, and found some one to set him copies for writing, making use afterward of copper-plates. One great advantage which he had was the leisure which the miner often enjoys. He says, “When I was working at Carbondale two years, I could generally get my day’s work done by noon. When a miner, I wrote essays three times for the eisteddfod, and two of them drew prizes. These were each twenty-five dollars; but the pecuniary reward was not what we aimed at,—it was the honor. I gave up mining in 1869, and have been connected with a newspaper ever since.”

The miner occasionally attains to great wealth. Such, at least, was the case of Richard Care, of Minersville, of whom I hear that he came to this country a poor man, and died worth a million and a half.

But all these cases are exceptional. The chief ambition of the miners in general is plenty of work and good wages. “They’re death on the wages,” says one, “as the last suspension showed.” As to their desiring to improve their condition, a German tells me that there is always such a desire among his people. “I can take you up,” says he, “to Elmira, New York, and show you, I guess, a whole township of farmers who have been miners. The Germans who work here are very rarely from the mining districts of Germany, but from the agricultural. The German will take his boys into the mine to lay up a little capital, and having done this, he will buy a farm, or go into merchandise, or open a saloon.”

What provision has the miner for times when he is out of work?