PA Mining History, Bootleg Coal

Preserving the radical history of Pennsylvania’s bootleg coal miners
By Jordana Rosenfeld

Photo: Stevie B Photography

The Prohibition-era bootleggers who illegally manufactured and sold alcohol from 1920-1933 are favorite characters to historians and the American public. Much less widely known, however, are the stories of America’s bootleg coal miners, workers in Pennsylvania coal towns during the same era who asserted their right to survive exploitative conditions by mining coal in their communities and selling it themselves, even if the land and the coal were owned by huge corporations.

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