Man operating a mine haulage train

In 1854, the Westmoreland Coal Company began mining coal in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, primarily for sale to steelmakers, railroads, and coal gasification plants. Within a few decades, the company was providing coal to fifty-eight gasworks along the east coast. Today, the company is one of the coal industry’s oldest independent companies.

The company's biggest growth period occurred after World War I, when it began a period of acquisition and expansion well beyond its original Westmoreland County fields, beginning with a 1917 merger with the Penn Gas Coal Company and the Manor Gas Coal Company. 

This ca. 1935 photograph is from the company's colliery in Stonega, Virginia. The colliery was originally part of the Stonega Coke & Coal Company, a company on founded in 1902, for the purpose of acquiring an operating a colliery plant leased the Virginia Coal & Iron Co., a land company partly owned and managed by John S. Wentz, a coal magnate who was also a major shareholder in the the Westmoreland Coal Company.

Patents and patent models represent one person's unique solution to an everyday problem. When we think of nineteenth-century inventions, we tend to picture things like the locomotive, the steam engine, or the telephone. But these represent only a tiny fraction of the innovations that emerged during the Golden Age of Inventing. Nineteenth-century Americans used inventing to improve every aspect of their lives, turning to machines and industrial processes the way modern Americans turn to the internet, apps, or AI to make life easier, cheaper, or safer.

As we head into October and the year's "spooky season," many of us will begin to contemplate our Halloween costumes. No doubt a popular choice will be the timeless classic: witch. Unfortunately, witches, and the women who have been accused of being them, have a fraught history in the United States, as well as around the globe. Let's take a look at one such case highlighted by a film in Hagley's Cinecraft collection:

View of Solon Plant with employees and executives on the site of Harris Farm

This week's Hagley Vault is visiting Ohio to take a look at the Austin Powder Company's mills under construction in Glenwillow, Cuyahoga County, on the southern end of Solon, Ohio.

The company, now the oldest manufacturing enterprise in the Cleveland area, produces industrial explosives and detonators, as well as blasting services. But back when it was founded in 1833 by brothers Daniel Hudson Austin (1804-1878), Alvin Austin (1806-1872), Cyrus Austin (1809-1842), Lorenzo Buchard Austin (1812-1886), and Linus Austin (1817-1887), it produced black powder explosives.

A man in an apron stands by a horse-drawn delivery wagon labeled "RAYNOR & BRO."

This week's Hagley Vault delivery comes with a side of old beef; the reverse side of this photograph, taken on February 23, 1897, notes that Raynor had "reputation of being a fast talker and a short weigher".

Raynor & Bro. was a butcher shop that operated out of a storefront at 4465 Frankford Ave. in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the city's Frankford neighborhood. Raynor & Bro. was founded and operated by Orlando Raynor (1851-1908) and Samuel Webster C. Raynor (1853-1910). On February 10, 1853, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported brothers were charged with peddling "bogus butter" for having been busted by detectives from the National Dairymen's Association for selling oleomargarine without paying appropriate taxes and licenses to do so.

This photograph was taken in the mill village of Cedar Grove, around two miles away from the Raynor & Bro. business, which delivered to the village on a weekly basis. The mill village was located in what is now the Olney neighborhood of the city. 

Subscribe to