We behold a stream as deep as it is dark, which indicates, by its continuous current, that it is derived from an unfailing fountain, and which however augmented by the contributions of other streams of bitterness, must be indebted for its main supply to some abundant and distant source. Where, then, is the wellhead to be found?
—Richard Lalor Sheil, on Irish secret society violence
The Schuylkill River earns its name in the rugged, coal-laden hills north and west of Minersville, Pennsylvania. Arendt Corssen of the Dutch East India Company dubbed the river “Skokihl,” Dutch for “hidden stream,” in the 1600s, and its West Branch rises as two all but invisible creeks that meander through Foster and Cass Townships in Schuylkill County.1
One of the creeks, the West-West, begins in the hills above the village of Forestville, whispering its way down through a quiet, fern-lined hollow where the waters pool below a series of falls. Over the eons the action of water flowing over rock ate through the ridge, exposing seams of hard coal, or anthracite. The ridge came to be known as Mine Hill.
Deep in the hollow, near one of the falls, a broad, flat rock bears the chiseled names of long-dead coal miners—S. Lynch, C. J. Lynch, W. J. Dormer, E. P. O’Brien, and P. J. Doyle—and the year, 1886. Their families had come from Ireland decades before to mine the coal, creating Forestville, where the stream tumbles out of Mine Hill. Over the course of half a century, miners tore more than a million tons out of the Forestville Colliery.2
Today, the mine is gone. The village consists of a sprinkling of houses, the Forestville Fire Company, and a barely noticeable bridge that carries Forest Lane over the creek.
From Forestville, the stream winds south to an even smaller hamlet, Phoenix Park, which shares the name of that vast green expanse in Dublin where Irish radicals assassinated London’s chief secretary and undersecretary in 1882, amid Ireland’s last great land war. It was there, on the banks of the West-West, that mine workers like Pat Lynch voiced their bitterness about mean-spirited bosses, abysmal conditions, and miserly pay in a ballad, “The Phoenix Park Colliery”:
It stands right there in Phoenix Park
You all may know it well
Although it stands in Phoenix Park
It may as well stand in hell.
. . . There’s “Snipey” Dormer, the breaker boss
A snip of a man, they say;
He wants you to work as hard as a mule
For ninety cents a day.3
Lynch knew all about abysmal conditions in the Phoenix Park breaker, a vast structure where the coal was sorted outside the mine; he had worked there for years as a young man. In 1958, after singing the ballad for a folklorist, he recounted how his older brother, Pete, slipped as he was working as a slate picker, or “breaker boy,” at Phoenix Park. Pete took a long fall and was impaled on a stalagmite of ice that had formed as water dripped from the breaker, he said. It was the darkest of winter days, December 22, 1896. Pete was just thirteen years old; Pat, seven months.
“They tell me I was the last one he touched before going to work,” Lynch recalled. “He was killed that day in the mines.”4
From Phoenix Park, the Schuylkill moves south to its junction with the Muddy Branch flowing down from Branchdale. The waters are then deflected eastward by Sharp Mountain, and eventually join with others to become something like a river.
The second creek, the West Branch, rises miles to the north in Foster Township and flows largely unseen beside the road between Glen Carbon and Heckscherville, two tiny collections of houses notable for the lilting brogue that was still to found among some older residents through the end of the twentieth century. To mapmakers this is the Heckscherville Valley, but the locals use another name: Irish Valley. The stream runs east through Cass Township, between Broad Mountain and Mine Hill, past slag heaps and strip mines, by Clover Fire Company and St. Kieran’s Catholic church, to Coal Castle.
There it turns to the south, through Mine Hill Gap, wandering past another sprinkling of houses, Duncott, where Bill Keating composed that quintessential hard-coal ballad, “Down, Down, Down,” in the dank gloom of the Oak Hill Colliery. It is the bitter, comic lament of a hung-over miner, to be sung as work boots tap barroom sawdust, in a voice lubricated by whiskey and porter and seasoned by the cadences of the ould sod:
The Oak Hill officials are foxy galoots
With company-store tyrants they’re all in cahoots;
With the gangways a river, you’re bound to buy boots
While you’re down, down, down.
. . . All I drew for a year was a dollar or three.
Those company-store thieves made a pauper of me.5
Below Duncott, the stream gains strength as it enters its first real town, Minersville, then turns toward the Schuylkill County seat, Pottsville. But before reaching Pottsville, the stream merges with the West-West and flows through a gap in Sharp Mountain. The west and east branches of the Schuylkill, in turn, join a few miles to the south at the twin boroughs of Cressona and Schuylkill Haven. From there, the waters run south, tamed partly by a canal, into the history of the industrial revolution. For coal dug in Schuylkill County fired the forges of Reading, Phoenixville, and Philadelphia, turning the lower Schuylkill Valley into the workshop of an emerging nation.
But something more than a river was born in those rugged hills above Minersville. For just as the hidden stream gave rise to the mines, the coal industry spawned a hidden by-product of its own along the westernmost reaches of the Schuylkill—the Molly Maguires, a secret society of assassins rooted in the north of Ireland. The emergence of the Mollies on the banks of the West Branch and their prolonged battle with the mine owners became one of the most sensational newspaper stories of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the Mollies fired the first shots in America’s labor wars. Observers ranging from the socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs to leading historians like Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, and William E. Leuchtenburg agreed that it was the Molly Maguires who gave the United States its first glimpse of class warfare.6
The spark for all this trouble was the Civil War, which created a labor shortage and increased demand for coal. For the first time, the mine workers had the upper hand in dealing with management. They exploited it with a strike that soon became intertwined with violent resistance to the draft. In May 1862 troops occupied Heckscherville and Forestville during a mine strike. In the fall, the draft led to a new strike, with opponents of conscription staging a paramilitary march from mine to mine. And in December 1862, strikers invaded the Phoenix Park Colliery uttering a peculiar battle cry: “Molly Maguire!” If the name mystified some managers, it was well-known to their Irish workforce as a secret society in the Ulster borderlands that wreaked bloody vengeance on landlords and their agents for evicting tenant farmers during the potato famine of the 1840s.
In Coal Castle, on January 2, 1863, five assassins gunned down a disabled Union Army veteran in his home. A little over a week later, two of the victim’s acquaintances were shot and wounded as they walked on the road that parallels the West Branch between Heckscherville and Coal Castle. These shootings were the first in a long series of attacks that inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to write that Sherlock Holmes classic, The Valley of Fear.
In 1865, a mine boss was gunned down in broad daylight near Branchdale. The following year, a Heckscherville mine superintendent was killed by three gunmen on the road between Pottsville and Minersville. The gunmen fled toward Minersville—and Cass Township, where the slain mine boss had provided quarters for an army of occupation just a few years before.
The wellhead of this Civil War violence in the hills outside Minersville is nearly as obscure as the origins of the Schuylkill there. The secret society at the center of it all left no records, and had two contradictory identities. Its public face was the Hibernian order, a politically active fraternal organization of Irish Americans pledged to benevolence and mutual aid. The hidden side was the Molly Maguires, a smaller group within the Hibernians that used anonymous threats and assassination in a long battle with the mining companies and their allies in government. There was no group called the “Molly Maguires” separate and apart from the Hibernians—the name simply came to designate a subset of the order (itself a subset of the larger Irish community) that was willing to resort to violence and intimidation.
When twenty reputed Mollies were hanged, the subject became taboo for many in the anthracite region. The silence was deep, pervading, reflexive—a part of the culture. In Schuylkill County, where company houses, company stores, company police, and company spies created a state as totalitarian as any this nation has known, people learned to talk all day without giving away things like names. Pat Lynch was happy to regale the folklorist George Korson with stories of life and death in the mines, but when he was asked who had taught him “The Phoenix Park Colliery” half a century before, the old reflexes kicked in: “I hesitate to mention his name.”7 The song, like many miners’ ballads, was inherently subversive—what good could come from the naming of names, even as late as 1958?
Much of what is known about the Mollies was gleaned from investigations and trials conducted in the 1870s, more than a decade after the initial outbreaks of conspiratorial violence. Those records offer a wealth of detail on the period 1874–76, but far less on the 1860s, when the Mollies emerged along the West Branch. And the sources of those records—undercover detectives hired by the coal companies, and trials where coal company executives served as prosecutors—present their own problems.
Given the nature of the evidence and the emotions involved, it is hardly surprising that there has been little agreement about the events that led to the deaths of dozens of men on both sides of the anthracite region’s sectarian and social divide in the years 1863–75. Early apologists for the prosecution portrayed the hanged Irishmen as primitive terrorists who applied Old World methods of resistance to a New World where such practices were no longer needed.8 Marxists and socialists saw the executed men as labor martyrs—indeed, looking back on the hangings decades later, Debs called the dead men “the first martyrs of the class struggle in the United States.”9 Some Irish Americans have likewise defended them as the victims of a coal company conspiracy.10
Today, the only consensus is that there is no consensus. Donald Miller and Richard Sharpless summed it up in their book The Kingdom of Coal: “On the question of the very existence of a society called the Molly Maguires, even professional historians have been unable to give an incontrovertible verdict . . . And as to whether the anthracite Irishmen were class heroes or cutthroat vigilantes concerned more with getting even than with getting fair treatment for their brethren—well, the answer still depends, in the region at least, on which side your ancestors took.”11
The lack of consensus about the Molly Maguires may in part reflect the fact that for a century after the organization first appeared in Pennsylvania, many writers tended to view the violence in a primarily American context, rather than an Irish one. Until about twenty-five years ago, two of the most important (if elusive) elements of the anthracite troubles—their Civil War origins and their roots in the peasant mores of the Ulster borderlands—were often glossed over. In recent decades there have been big strides on both fronts. In 1990 the historian Grace Palladino published Another Civil War, a groundbreaking study of the labor troubles in the West Branch region during the 1860s. And the historian Kevin Kenny framed the anthracite violence in an Irish context in his 1998 book Making Sense of the Molly Maguires.12 My work augments theirs, exploring in detail the relationship between Irish folk culture and the Mollies—a link so profound in famine-era Ireland that it echoed across the Atlantic during the Civil War.
The key to understanding what happened in the anthracite region in the 1860s is the realization that it was one of the few rural areas of the United States where Irish Catholic immigrants settled in such concentrated numbers that they retained the folk culture of the Irish countryside. Indeed, the Mollies were but one aspect of a transplanted culture that included the Irish language (most of the Mollies were Gaelic speakers), keening and wake games, belief in fairies, and holiday customs like mummery.
What follows is an attempt to explain and place in an Irish context the draft resistance, labor unrest, military occupation, and premeditated murder that wracked the anthracite region during and immediately after the Civil War—to show why the violence broke out when it did and how it did.
It is also an attempt to set the record straight, for much of what we think we know about the origins of the Molly Maguires is unproven at best, and wrong at worst. The name almost certainly does not come from an old widow evicted from her Irish farm by a callous landlord. There is no contemporary evidence whatsoever that the organization was founded in the County Longford village of Ballinamuck in the 1830s, as the Irish Mollies claimed, or near Carrickmacross in County Monaghan in 1843, as a landlord’s agent famously claimed. The Jeremiah Reilly who in that same period supposedly transplanted the organization to Cass Township, Pennsylvania, does not appear in any records from that time and place. And the first victim of cold, calculated Molly violence was not a mine boss, but an Irish mine worker.
Last but not least, this book is an attempt to examine some of the consequences of the violence. For the impact of the West Branch troubles, like the river itself, did not remain dammed up in the hills of Cass Township. The effects of the conflict flowed out, slowly at first, but gaining strength over time, widening and deepening, forever altering the industrial landscape of eastern Pennsylvania and areas far beyond.
My journey tracing the course of those troubles is nearly as long and twisted as the river itself. It began with a discussion of family history. My mother was born on the banks of the West-West, into an extended clan of Lynches and O’Connors. As a young girl she was lulled to sleep on summer nights by the soft babble of water over rock outside her bedroom window. It was the sound of the Schuylkill a few feet away, still small enough to jump, slowly cutting its way into Mine Hill. Her ancestors had come from Ulster, and worked the Forestville mines for generations.
Pat Lynch, whose rendition of “The Phoenix Park Colliery” is now in the Library of Congress, was her uncle—so was his brother Pete, who died in the breaker. Like all the Lynches and O’Connors of that generation, Pat died before I was old enough to ask him about the Molly Maguires, and why they first turned up at Phoenix Park when his father was a young mine laborer there.
To find the answers my older relatives might have supplied, I have haunted Harrisburg archives and Minersville cemeteries; dug through military correspondence in the National Archives and old newspapers in the Library of Congress in Washington; read crumbling reports of long-forgotten crimes in Dublin, compared the texts of mummers plays outside Belfast, and visited a museum in the home of a murdered landlord in County Roscommon. I have examined Pinkerton detective reports in Wilmington, Delaware; pored over court records in Pottsville and trial transcripts in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania; checked out census data in Philadelphia and coal company correspondence in New York; and toured Irish battlefields.
The result may not be an “incontrovertible verdict” that finally lays to rest all the controversy about one of the longest and most murderous industrial conflicts the nation has ever seen. But it does strip away some of the gray mist of myth, misinformation, and propaganda that has long shrouded the origins of the Molly Maguires. Here, then, is the story of when, where, how, and why the first of America’s labor wars began.