Coal Mining in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania

The history of coal mining in Northeastern Pennsylvania goes back hundreds of years.  The physical collection at the Luzerne County Historical Society includes photographs, stereographs, negatives, and postcards, some of which date back to the early 1800s.  Over 100 of the images held in the physical collection have been scanned and uploaded to the digital collection exhibited here.  While this does not include the full extent of the physical collection of images related to coal mining in Luzerne County, the digital collection provides an overview of the information that has been collected over the years.

Considering that some of the photographs and images date back to the early 1800s, there is information about each individual photograph that remains unidentified.  Only a portion of the photographers have been identified over the years, and specific locations are also missing from several of the images.  The images in this collection range from day-to-day jobs to abandoned mines to mining disasters and accidents.