Ridge Valley: Living Life in a Coal Mining Town

Ridge Valley is the story of a mining town, located in the vast Connellsville Coke region in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Founded in the early 1900’s the Ridge Valley mine was worked by hundreds of European immigrants to extract its treasure.Growing up in the “Patch” in the late teens and early 1920’s are teenagers John, Jerry, Bull and Corky who soon face a calamity at the mine that immediately propels them into adulthood.In Carbon Hill, Alabama, Leroy Johnson, a Negro teen will accompany his father north. Willie and his son join them along with many other recruits from the south to work in the northern coalfields. Leroy will become friends with John and because of his father’s illness faces the reality of becoming the head of his family.The workers, in order to gain a fair wage; recognition of a union and a “checkweigh” man to work with the company weighmaster, face the dictatorial control of the Coal Barons, The miners go on strike and face the industrialists who use their power to hire their own Coal and Iron Police to help destroy any union organizational plans. John will be directly involved with the clash of wills between the two groups.Read about Patty the old miner, Bella the matriarch of the Johnson family, Willie, Dolly, Tony, Rufus and the people living, surviving, and dying in the coal mining ‘Patch” of RidgeValley.