Looking through the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Printed Books and Graphic Arts Collections, I am struck by the near ubiquitous presence of coal in 19th-century printed materials. Coal was both a common, everyday material and a cultural presence that signified progress and modernity.

Coal is still a primary source of energy across the globe, but now it stands for the opposite of modernity. Aware, as we are, of the disastrous effects that extracting and burning coal has on the environment, coal has been practically banished from the visual/cultural landscape. Out of sight and out of mind?  But coal is full of portent. It is a bellwether material of the Human/Nature/Time relationship which deserves our attention.

In this essay I examine three images that document 200 years of digging for coal in one Pennsylvania location. Historical documents serve an important function by transmitting images of past-place into the present so that we can “see” the passage of time. They provide perspective on changes that unfold incrementally over generations, changes that would be otherwise invisible. Drone photography and satellite imagery literally transform our worldview by extending our vision 100s or 1000s of feet above the surface of the earth, providing an otherwise unseeable perspective on coal sites. Together they demonstrate how the visual places us within a wider context of being – to better understand the world as it is, as it was, and as it might be in the future.

Coal Mine at Mauch Chunk, published circa1837 by C.G. Childs shows a proto-industrial surface coal mine in Pennsylvania. Nineteenth- and 20th-century documents place the mine about eight miles West of Mauch Chunk, called Jim Thorpe today. Over time, the mine has been variously identified as the Great Mine, the Summit Hill mine, or the Old mine. It is located in the coal-rich area of the Southern Anthracite Field, 90 miles North of Philadelphia. Here, geological strata called the coal measures rose from the depths by geological compression to create the ridged, hogback mountains characteristic of the region. At Pisgah Mountain, where Mauch Chunk hunkers at the Eastern end, a massive, 35-70 foot thick coal vein, appropriately named the Mammoth vein, lay practically exposed across the spine of the mountain.

The 4 x 6 inch picture, above, an instructive landscape, portrays a busy coal mining scene happening on a piece of land that has already been drastically altered by extraction. The mine is arranged in carved out  “benches” that descend into a multi-tiered, straight-edged pit. In the background, forested hills of the Pennsylvania Appalachian Mountains extend to the horizon. In contrast, the mine land has been cleared of trees, only stumps and tufts of grass remain. In the foreground, a man wearing a waist-coat stands with his back to the viewer. He gestures with his left arm, pointing towards a group of twenty-five workers in front of him. The men climb, dig, carry and stand on a mound of coal, a section of the exposed coal vein. Beyond them, vast mine lands extend into the middle distance. A railway trestle bridge spans a large gap, and a few work sheds dot the cleared land. Railway tracks cross the work site. Two coal wagons stand ready to be filled near the mound, two more sit at a lower level of the pit, and four are stationed at the far end of the railway bridge.