Based on contemporary newspaper accounts and genealogical records, Digging Dusky Diamonds tells the story of the people who made the anthracite coal mining industry a major economic force in Pennsylvania in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
How the miners and their families lived and worked, loved and died is recorded in old newspapers and reveals their daily concerns, their diversions, social attitudes and prejudices. The accounts reveal what was different about those people and what has remained constant in us, their descendants.
Though the focus is mainly on Northumberland and Schuylkill counties, similar conditions prevailed across the anthracite mining region.