"GIBBSVILLE CONGLOMERATE," ANTHRACITE STRIKES, AND INFLUENZA: JOHN O'HARA ON THE COAL GEOLOGY AND MINING HISTORY OF "THE REGION"

John O'Hara (1905-1970), born in Pottsville in the heart of northeastern Pennsylvania's anthracite fields, was one of the most prolific writers of fiction in the American literary canon. Though he permanently moved from his hometown in 1928, six of his thirteen novels and at least 53 of his 402 short stories and novellas are based in “The Region,” the author's designation for the country surrounding Pottsville (“Gibbsville”). Two of his early works, Appointment in Samarra (1934) and “The Doctor's Son” (1935), have some insightful observations on the geology and mining history of The Region.

In a rhetorical digression in Appointment, O'Hara first presents his over-simplified view of the geology of the Pottsville area, with its “Point Mountain” being “the delight of geologists who come from as far away as Germany to examine Gibbsville Conglomerate” which is found at the eastern face of the mountain. Furthermore, that “geological squeeze…that produced anthracite coal…did not go south of Point Mountain, and coal is found on the north slope of Point Mountain, but not on the south side…” Clearly, these geologists are delighting in the Pennsylvanian Pottsville Conglomerate along the south edge of the Southern Anthracite field—though they certainly knew that the tectonic “squeeze” affected rocks much farther south than there.

Later in this Appointment digression, O'Hara laments the economic problems wrought by the anthracite strikes of 1922 (163 days) and 1925-26 (170 days) on The Region's coal industry: By 1929 the mines at “Gibbsville were working on a three-day week,” and the giant colliery whistles were no longer “heard rolling down the valleys every morning at five and six o'clock. The anthracite industry was just about licked.”

In the partly autobiographical “The Doctor's Son,” O'Hara (whose father was a physician) describes the devastating effects of the worldwide 1918 influenza pandemic on workers in The Region's collieries: “Men who for years had been drilling rock and had chronic miner's asthma never had a chance against the mysterious new disease….” That anthracite production reached its historic high in 1917 (100,445,299 tons), rather than in 1918 at the height of America's involvement in World War I, was due in part to the temporary shutdown of numerous collieries in the severe second (fall) wave of the pandemic.