IN THE WAY that official documents often bleach out visceral detail, my great-grandfather’s death certificate simply says “killed by a fall of rock.” The 1911 Department of Mines of Pennsylvania report—which notes fatalities’ nationality, occupation, age, and number of widows and orphans—says he and Charles Notari, a 23-year-old single Italian laborer, died at the chamber’s face, the frontline of digging.

An article in the May 4, 1911, edition of the Pittston Gazette said it took two hours for the “badly mangled” remains to be unearthed—“Mr. Walsh was a man of exemplary habits and was well liked by all who knew him”—and were given to “Undertaker O’Malley.” But according to family lore, officials from the Pennsylvania Coal Company unceremoniously left Walsh’s body on the kitchen floor, saying, “There he is.”

For miners who survived, economic fortunes were robust for only a few more years. The region reached its peak around World War I, when investors started buying up mining operations as tax shelters and assets for sale instead of production. Anthracite, which was already dangerous to reach because of its deep, narrow and twisted veins, became even more costly as workers had to burrow farther underground, leaving the market vulnerable to competition from oil, natural gas and hydroelectric power.

The textile industry provided an economic cushion at first, both for the region and for Catherine, who continued to work as a seamstress while widowed and wholly responsible for a toddler and baby. When her mother died in 1914, she and a brother inherited the family duplex, a rare safety net that perhaps saved them.

Florence grew up and married my grandfather, William Farrell, in 1937; by that time, men in northeastern Pennsylvania had started commuting to New Jersey to work at factories. My grandparents followed so William, a trained dental technician, could open a laboratory in East Orange and eventually raise four sons, including my late father, Thomas. A generation later, their nine grandchildren were on the way to achieving college degrees and white-collar jobs.

By the time I graduated high school in 2000, however, fewer than 1,000 miners were working to extract 4 million tons of coal that year, and surveys on health and well-being from agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ranked northeast Pennsylvania at the bottom of American metropolitan areas. According to U.S. Census data, Luzerne County today still has a higher disability and poverty rate than the national average, with a median household income that is 18% below and a nine-point deficit in residents with at least a bachelor’s degree.

That economic stagnation invited a political reckoning.

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