The Waynesburg Hills begin where the three rivers of Pittsburgh meet. It was at this intersection, known today as Mt. Washington, that Pennsylvania’s first coalmine was built in 1760. More mines cropped up down south in the valleys along the Monongahela, a river whose name means “mountain of falling banks”, a tribute to the frequent landslides along its steep sides.
Unlike the raised plateau to the north, this southwest pocket of the state is a dense thicket of sharp ridges that leer above the narrow streams and valleys below. These hills that rest upon the Mason-Dixon line form a natural boundary between the more cosmopolitan Northeast and the Appalachian hinterlands of West Virginia and beyond. The very features that made the region resource-rich also steal it away from its neighbors. Skeletal towns from its coal-boom past now sit snuggled in the gnarled, twisting hills, nestled among the forests, farms and fracking wells.
It wasn’t always so desolate here. Some 360 million years ago, the land was submerged in a flat, humid swamp forest, teeming with strange new forms of terrestrial life. Heightened levels of oxygen allowed for an explosion of growth in massive organisms to occur. Shallow, fern-like plants called lycopsids, the forefathers of trees, reached over 160 feet in height to better draw energy from the sun. The world became an open burial mound as vegetation collapsed into piles, while new lifeforms crept through them faster than the dead ones could decay.
Locked away and pulverized by the dual-attack of advancing glaciers and colliding continents, this organic matter hardened under layers of heat, pressure, sediment, and time, transforming into the precious black rock we know today as coal. Cooling temperatures ended this era of runaway growth, but not without leaving widespread rainforest collapse in its wake. Billions upon billions of tons of dead plants were sealed away into carbon chunks deep beneath the Earth, especially in the area that makes up modern-day Pennsylvania. Hence the name for this period being the Carboniferous, or coal-bearing, and its tail-end years, the Pennsylvanian.
The vast supply of coal lay dormant underground, like a sleeping dragon waiting to awake. This isn’t a huge surprise, since coal isn’t terribly impressive to look at. It’s a dirty, slippery, brittle little rock, with a smooth silky face that’s rough around the edges. You have to wash your hands after you touch it to get the residue off. It has a scent of sulphur before it even burns. Compared to glamorous metals like copper and gold, early humans had little need to mine for it.
Coal’s strong odor, heavy smoke, and unreachable depth below the surface discouraged its use as fuel when trees were in ready abundance. Though the Romans, Greeks, Chinese, Hopi, and Aztecs were all aware of its presence, their small-scale coal mines remained largely untapped. It wasn’t until the 13th century that coal gained some traction in England as a fuel source when it was found washed ashore. Early reviews were overwhelmingly negative. Its shape and color resembled the boils caused by the bubonic plague. It wasn’t great for cooking and brewing unless you wanted coal-flavored pottage and ale. Legend has it that Queen Eleanor fled Nottingham Castle to escape the smell of the local coal stoves. As medieval science held that disease was spread by polluting vapors called miasma, coal was universally unpopular, and in 1307, it was outlawed entirely.
Nevertheless, three-hundred years later, the English began running low on trees to power their nascent industrial revolution. They had nowhere to go but down, and so, like necromancers communing with the dead, séanced the coal reserves from their state of rest. When the black rock proved efficient for running machines like the textile mill and steam engine, the masses changed their tune about the miasmatic rock. Coal was seen as a godsend that had come to save the British economy, and it quickly became the backbone of ordinary life. Soon lights, stoves, and trains were all fueled by coal. Even jewelry made of a low-grade coal called jet became fashionable as a status symbol among Victorian royalty. Money and progress turned the once-foul smoke into the stench of success.
Coal’s trickle out from the bowels of the Earth and back to the sun had begun. Its exodus took it across the Atlantic to America, where fortune was found in the form of anthracite: a harder, shinier, hotter kind of coal that was in ample supply throughout northeastern Pennsylvania. Its discovery triggered a new explosion of life, much like in the time it was formed. Immigrants poured in from Europe, summoned by the newly-built railroads to bring coal out to the light. The rock forged families around its mines, but took sacrifices with it on the path out. Men and women young and old suffered from asthma and disease in record numbers.
But it was in the lower western corner of the state where the most money was to be made. Bituminous coal, anthracite’s ugly younger brother, burned dirtier and smokier, but was also far more common, and better suited for coking for steel. It’s also more explosive. Mining disasters became a routine part of life in the small company towns in the Waynesburg Hills. Communities like Mather, Marianna, and Jacobs Creek, forged on the promise of riches from coal, turned from modern marvels to mass graves overnight, as collapses buried dozens of men back into the caves they had built.
Only from above can one see the magnitude of change coal has brought upon the Earth. Strip mines, drainage pools, and decapitated mountaintops pockmark the landscape of the Waynesburg Hills. Struggling towns like Marianna stand atop abandoned mines as remnants of coal’s journey to the stars. What do those dead plants see, as they stare down at their handiwork from up high? How do they view their devoted hosts, the coal-people who gave their lives to raise them from the soil? And what will come of their descendants, the new fossils they’ve left behind?
