East Side West Side
The colliery was on the east side of the river. All the young breaker boys worked there picking coal. They watched the miners, their fathers, the men they dreamed of being, walk across an iron bridge near the colliery and disappear into the adits of the mines penetrating the naturally elevated west side of the river. That was where the mine owner had his mansion and the miners their churches and schools - built atop the mines on land owned by coal barons. The miners mined for pay then paid to pray.
My mother and aunts and uncles walked across another nearby bridge to school. They felt their desks and seats shake when my grandfather dynamited coal loose in the mine tunnel below them. Also on that side, the right side of the river, were the miners' clubs with their bars, the banks and all the funeral parlors they were buried from -- if they could afford it. Otherwise, like my grandfather, they were waked in the house then on to the graveyard in the back of a borrowed pickup truck filled with family bracing, hanging on to a wooden coffin as it jostled up and down and back and forth over the windy, bumpy road on a cold January morning.
Coal and rail barons solicited non English speaking miners to labor here, especially Eastern Europeans like my maternal grandparents. They intended to divide the increasingly powerful labor union movement - but failed to. The miners found housing within walking distance of the mines in boarding houses, and if they lived long enough and saved enough - in row houses or modest wooden houses north and south on both sides of the colliery - on the lower east side of the river. The front doors of all of their houses next to the river faced the river, including mine. We were downwind of the burning culm dumps that peeled the paint off the siding. When the wind blew in our direction - windows closed to try and block the nauseating smell of sulfur - even in summer, air conditioning wasn't an option, fans in windows just pulled in the smell. In winter we pulled sleds up culm dumps that weren't on fire - the boys stood on those raised wooden platforms- and flew down the hills - early forerunners of snowboarders.
Each house along the east side of the river contained within its yard it's own miniature country. When their yards overflowed with flowers they crossed the dirt road and filled the river bank with roses and lilacs, lilies and forsythia, a riverbank they had all helped build with the tons of ash from their coal stoves and with the dirt they had hauled out when they dug their basements. The riverbank became a long narrow public park for anyone to walk through. Something so contrastingly beautiful next to a river that had become devoid of fish, so polluted it once froze so solid we built a fire in the middle of that river.
Dirt cellars were best on the east side. When the river flooded, and it did so often, it was easier to clean up. Early on there were no furnaces or washers and dryers in the basement only coal in a coal bin for the stoves upstairs. That changed. People wanted finished basements, furnaces and automatic washers like the people on the west side. They wanted better flood protection. It came with a new levee-- but all the houses next to the east side of the river had to go - and so did the gardens. They had been there for the better part of a century, lasting longer and past the demise of the major coal mining industry that had first brought the miners there. The gardens survived because of care and nurturing, the mines - developed and ended with greed.
The churches on the west side changed denominations, the schools closed. The owner's mansion became the most prestigious funeral parlor to be buried from before it was abandoned and demolished. Businesses and restaurants opened and closed. There appeared omens of the end of coal mining - gas stations, auto parts stores, auto repair shops. No buildings on the west side of the river faced the river. They faced the street: traffic and business not water. The embankment to the river behind and below them became a dumping ground for whatever debris they created. Part of the abandoned west side railroad bed along the river was filled in by one business, ironically, by a warehouse built to store artificial flowers. In 1959, most appropriately, it was a river that finally ended the coal mining industry . Mine owners, wanting every inch of coal, had the miners cut too close to the riverbed above. The river broke through and filled the mines. Today, the remaining deposits of iron ore, once the magnet for the early steel industry, leech into the water staining the river red orange. No fish can pass through the oxygen depleted water that once teemed with fresh water mollusks, eel and shad. Within less than a century- within the time span of the riverbank garden - the fresh water mollusks, shad and eel that had teemed and existed and fed human beings for millenia - completely disappeared - they will not return unless we call them back by healing the river and ourselves.
---for my grandmother, Magdalena and my aunt, her daughter, Nellie, who accompanied the wooden coffin of my grandfather in the back of a pick up truck. Years later, Magdalena and Nellie departed for the same cemetery in a hearse from the portico of that most prestigious funeral home, a home that had originally been the mansion of the coal baron who had owned the mines my grandfather, worked in. The trip to the cemetery was made possible by the diligence and devotion of their daughters, Mary and Clare - respectively.
The colliery was on the east side of the river. All the young breaker boys worked there picking coal. They watched the miners, their fathers, the men they dreamed of being, walk across an iron bridge near the colliery and disappear into the adits of the mines penetrating the naturally elevated west side of the river. That was where the mine owner had his mansion and the miners their churches and schools - built atop the mines on land owned by coal barons. The miners mined for pay then paid to pray.
My mother and aunts and uncles walked across another nearby bridge to school. They felt their desks and seats shake when my grandfather dynamited coal loose in the mine tunnel below them. Also on that side, the right side of the river, were the miners' clubs with their bars, the banks and all the funeral parlors they were buried from -- if they could afford it. Otherwise, like my grandfather, they were waked in the house then on to the graveyard in the back of a borrowed pickup truck filled with family bracing, hanging on to a wooden coffin as it jostled up and down and back and forth over the windy, bumpy road on a cold January morning.
Coal and rail barons solicited non English speaking miners to labor here, especially Eastern Europeans like my maternal grandparents. They intended to divide the increasingly powerful labor union movement - but failed to. The miners found housing within walking distance of the mines in boarding houses, and if they lived long enough and saved enough - in row houses or modest wooden houses north and south on both sides of the colliery - on the lower east side of the river. The front doors of all of their houses next to the river faced the river, including mine. We were downwind of the burning culm dumps that peeled the paint off the siding. When the wind blew in our direction - windows closed to try and block the nauseating smell of sulfur - even in summer, air conditioning wasn't an option, fans in windows just pulled in the smell. In winter we pulled sleds up culm dumps that weren't on fire - the boys stood on those raised wooden platforms- and flew down the hills - early forerunners of snowboarders.
Each house along the east side of the river contained within its yard it's own miniature country. When their yards overflowed with flowers they crossed the dirt road and filled the river bank with roses and lilacs, lilies and forsythia, a riverbank they had all helped build with the tons of ash from their coal stoves and with the dirt they had hauled out when they dug their basements. The riverbank became a long narrow public park for anyone to walk through. Something so contrastingly beautiful next to a river that had become devoid of fish, so polluted it once froze so solid we built a fire in the middle of that river.
Dirt cellars were best on the east side. When the river flooded, and it did so often, it was easier to clean up. Early on there were no furnaces or washers and dryers in the basement only coal in a coal bin for the stoves upstairs. That changed. People wanted finished basements, furnaces and automatic washers like the people on the west side. They wanted better flood protection. It came with a new levee-- but all the houses next to the east side of the river had to go - and so did the gardens. They had been there for the better part of a century, lasting longer and past the demise of the major coal mining industry that had first brought the miners there. The gardens survived because of care and nurturing, the mines - developed and ended with greed.
The churches on the west side changed denominations, the schools closed. The owner's mansion became the most prestigious funeral parlor to be buried from before it was abandoned and demolished. Businesses and restaurants opened and closed. There appeared omens of the end of coal mining - gas stations, auto parts stores, auto repair shops. No buildings on the west side of the river faced the river. They faced the street: traffic and business not water. The embankment to the river behind and below them became a dumping ground for whatever debris they created. Part of the abandoned west side railroad bed along the river was filled in by one business, ironically, by a warehouse built to store artificial flowers. In 1959, most appropriately, it was a river that finally ended the coal mining industry . Mine owners, wanting every inch of coal, had the miners cut too close to the riverbed above. The river broke through and filled the mines. Today, the remaining deposits of iron ore, once the magnet for the early steel industry, leech into the water staining the river red orange. No fish can pass through the oxygen depleted water that once teemed with fresh water mollusks, eel and shad. Within less than a century- within the time span of the riverbank garden - the fresh water mollusks, shad and eel that had teemed and existed and fed human beings for millenia - completely disappeared - they will not return unless we call them back by healing the river and ourselves.
---for my grandmother, Magdalena and my aunt, her daughter, Nellie, who accompanied the wooden coffin of my grandfather in the back of a pick up truck. Years later, Magdalena and Nellie departed for the same cemetery in a hearse from the portico of that most prestigious funeral home, a home that had originally been the mansion of the coal baron who had owned the mines my grandfather, worked in. The trip to the cemetery was made possible by the diligence and devotion of their daughters, Mary and Clare - respectively.