Ghosts of Industry: Export, PA

It saddens me to see what has happened to organized labor in America. Once a powerful advocate for the rights and dignity of all workers--not just union members--the movement has been beaten down by corporations and right wing politicians to the point where it's a shadow of what it once was. Most workers are once again on their own--and many are powerless in their dealings with employers. The unions, and the people who suffered and sacrificed to build them, are ghosts of industry.

Export, PA, where I grew up, played an important role in the history of organized labor, but I didn't learn about that until many years after I left, when Helene Smith published her fantastic book, Export: A Patch of Tapestry Out of Coal Country America. As part of her portrait of the history and culture of an iconic American coal town, she described the tough living conditions of the immigrant workers who toiled in the mines and recounted the two massive strikes, in 1910 and 1922. These were long, violent affairs that ended in the defeat of the workers when strikebreakers and militias crushed the strikes. Mother Jones came to Export and led protests by miners' wives.

Export's main drag today

The big employer in Export in those early days was the Westmoreland Coal Company, which operated the most productive coal mine in the country there in the early 1900s. The company was owned by Thomas Mellon, the progenitor of the Mellon family industrial dynasty, who grew up on a farm on the outskirts of Export not far from where I lived. (I later went to Carnegie Mellon University, so my life crossed paths with his a few times.)

The plaque in front of Thomas Mellon's childhood home

When I was growing up in Export, you could see the remnants of an old coal mine tipple at the end of the main street. I also remember a small log cabin alongside Route 22 near the center of town, which, I assume was connected with the coal mines or the railroad. My friends and I played in an old strip mine on the outskirts of Export, and on the banks of Turtle Creek, which flowed through town and had been poisoned by mining. It was yellow, from sulfur, and nothing lived in it.

I returned to Export recently for my 45th high school reunion, and shot these photos on that trip. I captured the faint remnants of coal country America.

Site of one of the Westmoreland Coal Co. mines

The mines have been covered over, but I found one last structure--which has been turned into a little shrine of sorts. On Harrison City Road, just above the new court building, there's a patch of grass shaded by trees where they've set up a couple of benches where you can sit and contemplate the coal industry's past. There's a plaque on the wall of the ruins of the fan house for Mine No. 2, which operated from 1897 to 1952.

When I graduated from CMU in 1974, we were in a major recession and good jobs were hard to find. I worked as a driver for Peoples' Cab Company in Pittsburgh, but I was looking for something more lucrative. One day when I was walking in downtown Export with a friend, we stopped in at a clothing store, where the proprietor told us that a company was planning on opening up the mines again--since the OPEC embargo was squeezing America's energy supplies and pushing up the price of coal. He said they would be paying miners $60 a day, which didn't seem like a lot of money for working really hard in a mine that was first excavated in the 1890s. I passed.

Here's the Moose Club Lanes, where my mother, Toddie Hamm, was the longtime holder of the record for highest score by a woman. I don't remember what her score was. The Westmoreland Coal Co. Mine No. 2 tipple was just to the left of the Moose Lanes, just across the road.

Here's the side of the Moose Lanes, where at one time the Italian Club had a Bocce court.

Export is one of those forgotten places. The population has been in decline for decades. The old company houses are worn out. The old miners are long gone. Helene Smith's book is out of print. Three decades from now, will anybody remember what happened here? Probably not, and, to me, that will be the greatest loss of all.