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During the decades after the 1820s, Americans reshaped the industrial landscape by gradually substituting coal for the wood and flowing water they were using as energy sources and iron for wood in structures and machinery. The amount of power they could obtain from wood or water at a given place was limited, but coal resources were so large that more was always available. Coal could be transported to distant consumers by the newly built canals and railways. With it, the resource constraints that had led entrepreneurs to favor small, dispersed mills and factories were less important. Production of coal was concentrated in Pennsylvania in the first part of the nineteenth century. At first, the largest markets were in the East, and as long as the Appalachians were a barrier to shipment of bituminous coal from the West, the anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania remained the principal source of industrial fuel. Ironmasters using anthracite to smelt ore mined in eastern Pennsylvania dominated American ironmaking until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Industrialists west of the Appalachians experimented with bituminous coal and with coal converted to coke. They built furnaces around Pittsburgh and Cincinnati (where rivers provided good access to coking coal), and then through Ohio, Indiana, and, eventually, Illinois. But it was in eastern Pennsylvania that artisans and entrepreneurs established many of the economic and social practices followed by American heavy industry well into the twentieth century. Industries based on wood and water starkly contrasted with those based on coal and iron. Death and injury from mine accidents, social strife in mining communities, and environmental degradation from mine wastes were new costs of wealth created by the digging of anthracite. Because coal could be hauled long distances and still be sold at a lower cost per unit of energy than locally cut. wood, it could be shipped profitably to distant customers. They used it to make primary materials, such as iron, glass, and brick, and to convert these materials into finished, high-value-added goods. The social and environmental costs of getting the coal were left behind at the mines.

As American entrepreneurs enlarged their undertakings and began to shift them from waterpowered shops in the countryside to factories in the cities, they created a demand for new sources of energy and larger quantities of raw materials. The coal and, later, oil that they used to power their factories were brought to manufacturing centers on canals and railways and by coastal or river shipping. They used the wood and water resources of North America more heavily than ever, but they also created new kinds of workplaces. Their workplaces in the coal and oil fields, on canals and railways, in mills that made iron with mineral coal, and in the nonferrous-metal mines and mills were outside any previous experience of American artisans. Often, these workplaces were not adequately described or recorded before they were replaced. Material evidence helps us fill this gap in the historical record. In mining anthracite, both miners and mine operators faced a complex underground environment where there were few reliable clues to guide their work (Chapter 4). Geologists could help little, and, as anthracite was not much used elsewhere in the world, mining expertise could not be easily borrowed; instead, mining methods were developed through experience and error on the part of individual miners. The technological and social practices that endured in anthracite mining were largely established in the years between 1827 and 1834 by inexperienced adventurers whose aim was to obtain coal quickly and with the least trouble. Many of these practices were later adopted in underground bituminous mines. We can reconstruct a picture of the work of anthracite miners from study of the remaining mines, artifacts, and accounts of mine operation. Each breast in a mine was worked by a miner, who was paid on piece rate. He directed and paid one or two helpers, for whom he provided the necessary tools and supplies. They reached the breast where they worked by walking through the haulage ways and gangways that were the common ground in the mine.