It was important for the Hope Horne Gallery at the University of Scranton to feature an exhibition on anthracite coal industry art because of the history of northeastern Pennsylvania.

There's a long legacy of anthracite mining and there's also a long artistic legacy in conjunction with that and the context of our lives today are still shaped by those things that have happened over the past 150 years.

The show that we currently have in the gallery focuses on the 1930s and the era of the New Deal and the Great Depression.

Contextualizing 150 years of American anthracite industry production within the region, that legacy is still with us today.

There are families in the region who have had grandparents who have worked in the industry, maybe great-grandparents at this point.

It's important to understand what our history has been and why the region developed as it did.

What first sparked my interest would be, as best as I can remember, would be as a boy visiting the Everhart Museum in Nayaug Park and seeing the works of art, which some of them were very interesting to me.

And so I began to develop an interest, like other students at the time, in works of art.

And also that I learned over time that my both grandfathers had been anthracite coal miners.

That began to broaden my knowledge that there was an anthracite coal industry, but also that there were works of art on it as well.

The scope of the collection is a good representation of the different artists that did artworks.

The scope does cover a lot of mining activities and colliery activities, from mine mules to the patch towns.

We're dealing with the 1930s, the age of President Franklin Roosevelt, the Works Progress Administration, and the fine art workshops.

This region became the center of the anthracite industry because of the unique geology and geography.

This area had 484 square miles of anthracite coal fields, and that represents 75% of all the known anthracite that's in the entire world.

So geologically, it's a unique deposit, and it's very close to the eastern seaboard cities.

The miners, when they went down into the shaft, they were usually transported down by an elevator.

Once the miner got to the workface, the miner knew where to drill the holes into the face of the anthracite coal.

He would place the black powder explosives, and then he would tamp that into place with some coal dust.

Then they would light the fuse, and then that anthracite would be blown from the face in chunks.

The laborer would load the coal car.

That coal car would then make its way to the surface, where the coal would be dumped, crushed, sized, and cleaned.

I feel that it's important to preserve this history because it's a unique history.

If we think about these anthracite coal fields, geologically, it's an unusual deposit here in northeastern Pennsylvania.

It developed a unique culture area of people and communities.

This area was a microcosm for U.S.

immigration history, and they settled in these patch towns, and these were ethnic communities, and that really helped to shape the anthracite culture that developed in this region.

And it really contributed to the growth and development of the eastern seaboard of America.

So this is part of American history, so I think it's important to preserve it.

Sponsored in part by the Lackawanna Heritage Valley National and State Heritage Area, in partnership with the National Park Service.