Pennsylvania Anthracite Heritage Museum

02/10/2026

30/09/2026

🍂 Fall at the Furnaces continues with 2026 Scranton Fringe Festival Launch Party!

Join Scranton Fringe at the historic Iron Furnaces on October 1 and 2 for two free evenings of live preview performances, local artists, food, and a 3D projection show. It’s a chance to see what’s coming to stages across Scranton during this year’s festival.

📅 Thursday, October 1 & Friday, October 2
⏰ 6–9 p.m.
📍 Scranton Iron Furnaces, 159 Cedar Ave.
🎟️ Free and open to the public

Friday’s celebration also falls on First Friday Scranton! Explore the full festival lineup and show tickets at www.scrantonfringe.org.

30/09/2026

26/09/2026

How do we remember labor struggles? Who tells the stories of working people?

Join us on Saturday, Oct. 24 at 2PM for "Working Memory: A Conversation on Labor Journalism, Art & Music." From Central Appalachia's black lung crisis to Western Pennsylvania's troubled bituminous industry, this wide-ranging conversation will link anthracite heritage to present-day labor issues across America's coal lands.

Journalist Kim Kelly, artist Zach Horn, and musician Brian Reese will share their work to document labor issues and reflect on the challenges - and the urgency - of telling labor's story.

This program honors John Mitchell Day and is generously supported by Comfort Suites Scranton Near Montage Mountain.

25/09/2026

Pennsylvania is one of several states where Sept. 25 could become a new commemorative holiday. "9 to 5" Day would honor country music icon Dolly Parton, who lamented the daily grind in her 1980 hit of that name.

In the anthracite coal region, the 8-hour workday was long sought and hard won. An 1868 state law urged an 8-hour day but did not mandate it. Throughout the 19th-century, most miners' workdays stretched on for 10 to 16 hours. Negotiations following the 1902 Coal Strike reduced the standard day to 9 hours, and subsequent contracts made incremental reductions. It was not until May 1, 1916, that anthracite miners finally saw the 8-hour day cemented in a new contract between the UMWA and anthracite operators.

Today, working 9 to 5 seems like an ordinary part of American life. For Pennsylvania's anthracite miners, it was the product of decades of organization and negotiation.

Image: "Three Generations of Employes" photographed by John Horgan at the Marvine Colliery, Scranton, PA (c. 1917). From AHM's John Horgan collection.

19/09/2026

The Scranton Iron Furnaces are getting in costume for a FREE show tonight!

Join the Scranton Shakespeare Festival for its September Serenades event, featuring family-friendly Broadway musicals performed by vocalists and an orchestra. This event will take place at the Iron Furnaces on Saturday, September 19th, starting at 6:00 PM, and is part of the Fall at the Furnaces event series, presented by Valley In Motion.

17/09/2026

⛏️🔍From the Stacks

This simple cotton undershirt was purchased from George and Laura Davis's Centralia, PA, store in 1948. Originally opened as a pharmacy, the store expanded to meet consumer demand in a bustling mining community, selling clothing, candy, decorations, and flowers. It even had a soda fountain.

Centralia declined rapidly after an underground mine fire was detected in 1979. A community of nearly 2,000 people when this undershirt was sold, Centralia had just 63 residents by 1990. George and Laura Davis's store, along with hundreds of other buildings, were razed in the 1980s following a federally funded buyout and relocation program.

11/09/2026

10/09/2026

On this day in 1897, nineteen unarmed, immigrant anthracite miners were killed and dozens were wounded in what was then the deadliest outbreak of labor violence in American history.

The Lattimer Massacre culminated weeks of protests as the United Mine Workers tried to establish a union foothold in the anthracite region. The morning of the conflict, about 250 mineworkers walked off the job at Harwood and marched five miles to shut down the colliery at Lattimer, near Hazleton, gathering strikers along the way until their numbers approached 400. At Lattimer, they encountered a sheriff's posse of 150 armed deputies, who fired into the crowd without warning.

Sheriff James F. Martin and his deputies were tried for murder but acquitted after five weeks. News of the killings and lack of legal repercussions galvanized union support, however, prompting tens of thousands of miners to join the UMW over the next four months. The strikers at Lattimer had been foreign-born Polish, Slovak, and Lithuanian miners, disproving the stereotype that immigrant workers could not be organized. In the months and years following the conflict, the UMW became the fastest-growing union in the country, uniting the Coal Region's ethnically diverse mineworkers in shared struggle.

Today, we remember the miners who lost their lives at Lattimer, exposing the dangerous conditions, ethnic divisions, and unequal power that shaped life in Pennsylvania's hard coal fields.