Article October 2, 1902 Issue

Coal Mines and Mining

Rosamond D. Rhone

Review of Reviews

Three ink blots on the eastern end of the map of Pennsylvania, between the Delaware and the Susquehanna Rivers, represent all the anthracite coal in the United States. They cover an area of four hundred and eighty-eight square miles, and produced last year 53,500,000 tons,—truly infinite riches in a little room. They are popularly known as the Wyoming, Lehigh, and Schuylkill regions. Their limits are so sharply defined that one can pass in five minutes through one of the notches in the surrounding mountain wall and find himself as much out of the "coal regions" as if he were a hundred miles away.

The coal measures lie on a floor of conglomerate rock, which rises about them on all sides like the sides of a basin, and is exposed on the slopes and summits of the mountains surrounding the coal regions. The coal measures which lie in this basin are composed of alternate layers of rock and coal piled upon each other like the layers of a jelly-cake, in which the thick layers of cake represent the rock strata and the thin layers of jelly the coal beds. The thickness of the coal beds varies from one foot to thirty-two feet, and that of the rock from a few feet to two hundred. The coal beds are pretty regularly distributed throughout the coal measures, and their presence in a certain place can generally be calculated upon, so that each bed bears its own name.

The theory of the vegetable origin of coal has many advocates, but the last word has not been said. The fossil plants in the coal measures, upon which so much has been built, are not found in the coal beds, but in the slate overlying them, which is not a species of coal, nor of vegetable substance in the process of changing into coal, but rock.

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