1 Miners propping workspace
2 Delaware and Hudson Canal
3 Scranton Iron Furnaces
4 Miners working on tracks in gangway
5 Con-Acres
6 Jason Torrey historical map of Wayne County
7 Painting of lower barn (Jim Kilker)
8 The author’s father, Bill Conlogue
9 ICS Railway School instructors at work
10 Marvine culm banks burning
11 Mine subsidence
12 Natural gas drilling site in northeastern Pennsylvania
Maps
1 Northeastern Pennsylvania
2 Scranton
Preface: Homework
Not far from where I now live, beyond the Scranton grid, along Boulevard Avenue, on the other side of Green Ridge Assisted Living and Mike’s Scrap Yard, stands the Lackawanna Recycling Center, which occupies ground of the former Marvine colliery, on whose culm dump, once site of a fire that burned blue and red for years, sprawls a U.S. Armed Forces Reserve complex.
During the 1950s, my grandfather, a resident of West Side in Carbondale, worked as a conductor for the Delaware and Hudson Railroad, which hauled Marvine colliery coal. Although he had to start work in Wilkes-Barre, he refused to drive a car or to take a train, so every time he had to report to the rail yards, my widowed mother drove him, which meant managing two toddlers for the hour trip, one way, through a nest of narrow streets. Traveling a straight line to Oneonta, New York, and coming back the next day, the D & H train rumbled through Carbondale, passing a few blocks from their house. On the day of his return, he told my mother, she was to listen for the train’s whistle at the Seventh Avenue crossing, pile everyone into the car, and time her arrival in Wilkes-Barre with the train’s easing into the station. They practiced this commute while a mine fire burned beneath their home, threatening their displacement.
Over the Moosic Mountains, in Wayne County, we heated the farmhouse with anthracite, which came, like as not, from a Hudson Coal Company mine. A kid keeping the furnace alive, I nightly fed its fire with baskets of “rice,” which I dumped over the lip of a fifty-five-gallon drum attached to the stoker. The ashes I piled against the cellar’s fieldstone foundation, banking them for use on snow-filled mornings when the milk truck couldn’t make the hill.
I write about land use. The first example above suggests the ironies of spatial and temporal orientation, the second nods to how our patterns—in this case, fuel and travel—wear on others, and the third acknowledges the interconnections—for good and ill—between very different lands. To write about land use is to write about how different types of work create these ironies, patterns, and interconnections. Evidence of land-shaping work surfaces repeatedly in my home region’s literature and history, in my own interactions with these lands, and in my native places’ cultural and economic forms—the organization of farms and mines, for example.
I offer here my homework, a record both physical and textual. Whatever I do or read becomes, no matter how briefly, a part of my ordering of the world. Even when I read or labor alone, I’m in the company of another mind; I participate in conversations about the world that extend before and after me. With reading and lived experience so interdependent, I overlay in this book texts and contexts, near and far. I keep returning to the local, though, because good work dwells in the details, always.
Here and There refuses to back away from any kind of knowing, especially narrative. A lived experience, land use unfolds in place, over time. In revealing familiar tensions within this unfolding, I trespass freely across genres, chronologies, and disciplines. Anecdotes and footnotes may compete for your consideration in Here and There, but each asks only that you pay attention.
Acknowledgments
Many people and organizations helped me to complete this book: my debts exceed my capacity to repay them. Any errors in the book are mine.
Several people read and responded to early drafts. My Marywood colleagues Laurie McMillan and Mike Foley offered me detailed feedback that improved my arguments. I am grateful to Ian Marshall and Christine Cusick, who reviewed the manuscript for Penn State University Press; their responses sharpened the manuscript into a book. My coffee conversations with Virginia Kennedy, who read parts of the manuscript, renewed my faith in the project at key moments.
Mary Ann Moran-Savakinus, Director of the Lackawanna Historical Society, was always there with her tremendous knowledge of the history, people, and places of Lackawanna County. She often dropped what she was doing to help me find sources of information. Behind this book also stands the work and expertise of Gloria McCullough, research librarian at the Wayne County Historical Society, who guided me to important sources for Wayne County history; archivists Jim Sullivan, at Marywood, Sr. Anitra Nemotko, at the Scranton IHM Center, and Michael Knies, at the University of Scranton, who led me to key texts; and interlibrary loan specialist Becky Kohinsky, who aided me tremendously in accessing books and articles that I otherwise would not have been able to use. The staff at the Luzerne County Historical Society was very helpful to me in my research of the Jason Torrey Papers. All of these folks were very generous with their time and talents.
For all I learned in interviews with them, I am grateful to John Hambrose, Alliance Landfill; Dave Messersmith, Wayne County Extension Service; and Norma Reese, Forest Hill Cemetery. In our several conversations, Bernie McGurl, Director of the Lackawanna River Corridor Association, taught me much about many aspects of the Lackawanna Valley and the Lackawanna River. For their assistance, I thank art historian Darlene Miller-Lanning, University of Scranton; S. Robert Powell, Director of the Carbondale Historical Society; Paul Reining, Forestry Specialist, Wayne County Conservation Office; John Kameen and Patricia Striefsky, publishers of the Forest City News; and Brian Fulton, librarian at the Scranton Times-Tribune.
Several experiences inspired me in my research and writing. The 2002 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute “Regional Studies for Liberal Arts Learning: An Appalachian Exemplar” bolstered my confidence about the importance of writing about northeastern Pennsylvania. I thank NEH, Peter Crow, my institute colleagues, and Ferrum College for a great experience. A 2003 Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission summer grant to conduct research at the Anthracite Museum expanded my understanding of the richness of the region’s history. During my subsequent trips to the museum, Chester Kulesa and John Fielding, who always made me feel welcome, went out of their way to give me access to the Anthracite’s collections. Marywood University granted me a sabbatical that allowed me extended time to work on the book.
At Penn State University Press, I am in debt to acquisitions editor Kathryn Yahner and editorial assistant Charlee Redman, who made the submission and production process run smoothly, and to Nicholas Taylor, who copyedited the manuscript. I thank Erin Greb, of Erin Greb Cartography, for making the maps of Scranton and northeastern Pennsylvania.
I am grateful to Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment for permission to reprint “Merwin and Mining,” which appears here as chapter 2, and to the University of South Carolina Press for permission to reprint my essay “Other Places,” which is now part of chapter 5.
My extended family deserves credit for hearing about this project for several years. My greatest debt, however, is to my wife, Bridget, who made this book possible in more ways than she’ll ever know.