People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 6, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 July 1893 — The Miner’s Cabin. [ARTICLE]

The Miner’s Cabin.

One charm of the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania has almost disappeared, and that is the comfortable and even picturesque log shanty of the Irish miner. The best of these were well chinked from the weather, and within their flattened logs were whitewashed and spotless. The floor was scrubbed until it was nearly as white as the walls. On one side was a great fireplace, with a large grate piled high with perhaps a hundred pounds of glowing anthracite. Wrinkled old Irish women, in the whitest of starched caps, sat in front of the grate, knitting stout blue woolen stockings. To the tiny breaker boys coming home or winter nights after a hard day’s work these shanties, with their cheerful fires, were welcome resting places where they might stand in front of the fire unrebuked while black streams ran from their grimy boots over the shining floor. The shanties have given place to formal tenements, and the Irish miners are retreating before thousands of even poorer laborers from continental Europe.