06/15/2026
In the summer of 1869, a Boston newspaperman sat on a log in Summit Hill, Pennsylvania, with two Welsh-born coal miners named Thomas Williams and William Pritchard.
Both belonged to the new Workingmen’s Benevolent Association, the first lasting union in the anthracite coal fields.
They spoke about their hard lives underground in the years after the Civil War.
“After a man has worked 20 years in a mine he can stand it no longer,” Williams said, describing a man they had just buried, dead at 40 from the poisonous air below.
They pushed back, too, against the papers that called them lazy and lawless. “We are like soldiers in the front of the battle,” Williams said. “We have the hardest of it.”
Weeks after the interview was published, the Avondale disaster would kill 110 men and change the Coal Region forever.
Image: Mineworkers in Carbon County, PA, circa 1870 (Getty Museum)
