Pennsylvania anthracite coal region
AA-2026-8D1579
On the image
Someone hauled a camera to the top of a culm pile to get this shot, which tells you the operation below was worth showing off. The conveyor rigging in the foreground exists to move crushed rock and coal from one pile to another pile, a task that in the 1960s still required men, gears, and a certain faith that the seam underneath would keep paying for the equipment.
Down in the valley the breaker building and its single stack sit where the trees have been cleared just enough to make room for industry, the surrounding hills doing their best to look untouched. They are not untouched. The pale scars visible along the ridgeline are old strip cuts, the kind of thing a mining company in this decade considered a reasonable cost of doing business and a future generation would consider a reclamation project.
Nobody in this picture is thinking about that future generation. They are thinking about tonnage, and the stack is still putting out smoke, which in 1960s coal country counted as good news.
The historian's note
This scene documents a mid-twentieth-century coal processing operation typical of the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania, an area that by the 1960s had been mined continuously for over a century. The breaker building with its smokestack processed raw anthracite coal, separating it by size and grade before shipment, whilst the conveyor and aggregate piles in the foreground indicate an active strip or culm-bank operation extracting remaining coal from waste material left by earlier deep mining.
By this decade the anthracite industry was in steep decline, undercut by cheaper bituminous coal, natural gas, and oil, with many operations surviving by reprocessing culm banks rather than opening new deep shafts. The deforested and terraced hillsides visible in the middle distance reflect the strip-mining practices of the era, which predated the environmental regulations that would reshape the industry in the following decade.
Structures of this kind, along with the surrounding scarred landscape, were common across Luzerne, Schuylkill, and Lackawanna counties during this period and are now largely gone, replaced by reclaimed land or abandoned entirely as the industry contracted through the later twentieth century.
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Coal Processing Plant and Conveyor, Pennsylvania Anthracite Region, 1960s. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-8D1579. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/coal-processing-plant-and-conveyor-pennsylvania-anthracite-region-1960s.
@misc{aaAA20268D1579,
title = {Coal Processing Plant and Conveyor, Pennsylvania Anthracite Region, 1960s},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-8D1579},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/coal-processing-plant-and-conveyor-pennsylvania-anthracite-region-1960s}
}TY - ART TI - Coal Processing Plant and Conveyor, Pennsylvania Anthracite Region, 1960s PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-8D1579 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/coal-processing-plant-and-conveyor-pennsylvania-anthracite-region-1960s ER -
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