It was the first in the United States in which workers across the country united in an action against major companies. In many cities, the railroad workers were joined by other industrial workers in general strikes.
Background
Rock Street in Shamokin, where the 1877 uprising took place
Railroad workers and miners had perilous jobs in the late 19th century. More than 200 railroad workers and 1000 miners died in accidents every year. The companies often forced both groups to buy goods from company stores at inflated prices and work from sunup to sundown. Companies made engineers pay for all train damages, regardless of fault. Children tore their hands picking rocks from coal in collieries.
The first recorded strike in the anthracite coal region of Northeastern Pennsylvania occurred in 1842. More followed in 1849, 1869, and 1872. During the Civil War, the mine owners used cavalry platoons to arrest eight miners and evict them from company homes for striking in Locust Gap. At that time, the workers in Locust Gap formed the Miner's Benevolent Society, to provide accident insurance and demand better pay. It was one of the first unions in America.
The Workers' Benevolent Association, founded in St Clair in 1868, expanded to Northumberland County, including Locust Gap, on October 19, 1869. It built on the efforts of previous unions like the Miners Benevolent Society. It continued as one of the early ways that workers organized for mutual benefit.
By 1872, the Reading Railroad was the biggest mine company in the anthracite region. It used its monopoly on the railroads to take over 70,000 acres (280km2) of the best coal lands. The company's president was Frank Gowen. Gowen Street in Shamokin and even Gowen City were named after him. Gowen established a private police force, called the "Reading Coal and Iron Police." Between 1871 and 1875 Gowen borrowed $69 million to pay for his empire. But he and the other railroad barons had overestimated the demand for train service and over-invested. Debts forced them to fire many workers, resulting in a nationwide depression in the Panic of 1873.
In 1874 a third of Pennsylvania's workforce was unemployed. The Reading Railroad cut train workers' wages by 10%, resulting in an unsuccessful strike. In 1875 only 1/5 of American workers had full-time jobs. Some people vented their frustration by damaging tracks, trains, and mines. On May 11, 1875, the trestle at Locust Gap Junction was exploded. It is believed to have been a protest by unemployed men. The telegraph office at Locust Summit was burned. From 1860 to 1909 arson destroyed 25 collieries between Mount Carmel and Trevorton. Knoebels Amusement Resort has a Mining Museum with a mural of the twice-burned Locust Gap colliery.
The July 1875 Officers of the Miners' and Laborers' Benevolent Association for Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, included: Pres. John N. Evans Mt. Carmel; VP Dennis Coming Locust Gap; Sec. Ben Ressler, Excelsior; Treas. John L. Shanahan, Mt. Carmel. In the Mt. Carmel District the following officers were elected: Pres. Lewis Dietrich; VP Pat Donnal; Sec. John L. Shanahan; Treas. Julius Maure; Trustees Patrick Donlan, Patrick Nowlan, and Thomas Perry.
Overview of events
When Gowen lowered mining wages to 54% of their 1869 level, miners began the "Long Strike" of 1875. It started in January 1875 and lasted 170 days. But Gowen stored enough coal to outlast the strike and crushed the miner's union by firing its members.
In July 1875, Gowen presented "A List of Outrages in the Schuylkill and Shamokin Regions" to Pennsylvania's legislature, including:
March 25, 1875 – Locust Summit telegraph burned, 32 coal cars dumped on tracks at Locust Gap
March 26–29 – coal cars dumped at Locust Gap Junction
March 29 – coal trains stoned near Locust Gap
March 31 – between Locust Gap and Alaska stations, men stoned and fired upon a train. The men boarded the train, drove out the crew, damaged the engine, and blocked tracks
April 29 – provisions stolen from Mount Carmel freight depot
May 1 – flour and feed stolen from freight car in Locust Gap
May 6 – attempt to blow up trestle in Locust Gap
May 7 – hose cut from water columns at Locust Gap and Summit
Gowen accused leaders of the Irish community of running an alleged secret society called the "Molly Maguires" that killed mine officials. He used private police to investigate and company lawyers to prosecute. Catholics and Irish were excluded from local juries. Beginning in June 1877, 20 "Molly Maguires" were convicted and executed, often despite strong evidence of innocence.
The Reading Railroad lowered miners' wages 10–15% twice between 1876 and 1877. Many workers were reduced to having only bread and water for their meals. Some families killed and ate pets.
Gowen decreed that railroad workers had to leave their benevolent association and join the company's insurance plan, which covered them only when they were working. In response, the trainmen went on strike in April 1877. Gowen replaced them with scabs whose inexperience caused many accidents. Gowen refused to rehire the fired workers, and destroyed the Brotherhood of Railroad Engineers.
In July 1877 the United States was deep in the depression. The previous year the total revenues of America's railroads fell by $5.8 million. But they raised profits to $186 million (up $0.9 million) by cutting wages. Most owners received 10% dividends. In July 1877 railroads across America conspired and lowered wages another 10%. Train brakemen and firemen's wages came to $30 per month.
Strike begins
When they found out about the wage cuts on July 16, trainmen in Baltimore left work, sparking the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Before the strikes ended, more than 80,000 trainmen and 500,000 other industrial workers from Boston to Kansas City also went out on strike, although there were not yet official unions.[citation needed] The workers joined in their grievances and the knowledge that the railroads affected everyone. In Pittsburgh on July 21 a National Guard unit from Philadelphia, ordered in by the Pennsylvania governor, fatally shot 20 unarmed strikers and bystanders, including women and three children, and wounded 29 more in an effort to suppress a growing protest against the Pennsylvania Railroad. The crowds retaliated by burning the railroad's buildings, more than 120 train engines, and 1200 freight cars; the south side of the city was burning for 3 miles (4.8km) in the railroad flats along the Monongahela River. The next day troops shot more protesters, raising the total of Pittsburgh's dead to over 40. In Pittsburgh and Saint Louis, Missouri, the railroad workers were strong enough to take over management, run trains, and collect tickets. In Hornellsville, New York, when scabs started a train up a mountain, strikers soaped the tracks. The train went up, slowed, stopped; the passenger cars were unhooked and slid back down the mountain.
In Reading on July 22, with the Reading Railroad 2 months in arrears of paying wages, crowds of women and children watched as strikers blocked the tracks. The governor again ordered National Guard units to the city. When people threw bricks at the troops, the soldiers opened fire in all directions, killing 10 and wounding 40, including 5 local police.
That evening in Sunbury, rumors circulated that a unit of the National Guard would pass through on the way to crush Pittsburgh's strike. An agitated crowd gathered at the railroad junction at 3rd and Chestnut streets. The soldiers took another route. When a freight train tried to leave, the railroad workers took it over and sent it back.
On July 23 the trainmen met at Red Men's Hall. They decided to join the national strike and continue blocking freight trains until the railroads lifted the 10% reduction. The next morning they ordered the shop mechanics to leave work too.
In Danville on the morning of July 23, the workers appointed a group to ask the Commissioner of the Poor for bread or work. The commissioner left it to the mayor to decide. At 3 PM a large crowd gathered at the weigh scales on Mill Street in the middle of Danville. One speaker said, "We will give the borough authorities until tomorrow at 10:00 to devise some action to give us work or bread. If at that time nothing is done for us, we will take [expletive] wherever we can find it." John Styer discussed their poverty and demanded government aid. The town newspaper reported unless the borough council banished starvation, "disorder would ensue. Men would take the law into their own hands."[citation needed]
The next day there was almost a bread riot. Citizens were on the verge of starvation. Grocers brought their flour inside for safety, and farmers left markets with half their goods sold. At noon crowds led by Ben Bennet and former constable Frank Treas took a few old muskets from an abandoned storehouse. They rushed for weapons known to be stored in the third story of the Danville National Bank on Mill and Northumberland streets. Police met them. One policeman tried to arrest Treas, for using incendiary language. But he could not get to Treas in the dense crowd. A sign on Bloom Street proposed a meeting of workingmen in Sechler's Woods on July 26. Following these events, the authorities gave food to those in need.
July 24, beginning of incident
In Shamokin on the morning of July 24, miners struck at the Big Mountain Colliery. Ten families in a row of houses had no food for 3 weeks, except a few scraps from their gardens. At 2 PM a large meeting of workers on Slope Hill demanded work or food.
The next day they repeated their demands at Union Hall on Rock Street. William Oram, the attorney for both the borough and the Mineral Railroad & Mining Company, told the crowd that the borough and wealthy citizens would give them street work for 80 cents a day.
The crowd appointed a Workingmen's Committee to negotiate with the borough council that night for a higher rate. The committee demanded $1.00 a day, and the borough agreed. But when the committee returned to Union Hall, the crowd rejected the $1.00 offer.
One thousand men and young people marched down Rock Street and Shamokin Street. When someone threw a stone through Shuman & Co.'s Store, the crowd surged forward into the Reading Railroad station and depot on Shamokin and Independence streets. (Now the site of a parking lot.) They broke the glass in windows and doors, took the freight from the cars and everything in the building, and gutted it. Next they crossed Liberty Street toward the Northern Central Depot on Commerce Street.
Meanwhile, Mayor William Douty gathered a citizen posse or militia outside City Hall in response to a prearranged signal - a bell ringing at his Presbyterian church. Douty managed his family's coal mines and collieries at Big Mountain, Doutyville, and Shamokin. He also persecuted the Molly Maguires. Douty's militia marched down Lincoln and Liberty streets armed with muskets and revolvers. They told the crowd to leave, and when that failed, shot into it. They wounded 12 people and killed two, neither of whom were involved in the uprising. Mr. Weist was shot dead while closing his candy store on Liberty and Independence streets; Levi Shoop was the second fatality. The crowd escaped to the town's outskirts. The mayor's militia took back control of the train stations and patrolled the town. According to rumors, after retreating, the workers tore up the tracks a few miles east of town.
In November, Phillip Wiest, wounded in the militia shooting, was tried for leading the riot. Despite having received serious injuries, he was imprisoned for 8 months in the Northumberland County jail. In addition, James Richards, Peter Campbell, Christian Neely, and James Ebright were convicted and imprisoned for 7, 6, 4, and 3 months, respectively, on charges of rioting and burglary.
In Shenandoah on July 25, 800-1000 workers paraded down the streets with flags and a drum corps. When they got to the baseball field at 10 PM, they could see that arsonists had set fire to the mining stables in nearby Lost Creek. On July 27, Shenandoah's miners brought business of all kinds to a standstill.
Elsewhere railroads and local and state authorities crushed the strike using coal and iron police, militia, and state units of the National Guard. Across the United States, these "forces of order" killed more than 100 people. It was not a complete defeat for the strikers, however. The strike showed the conflict of interests between working people and management. If corporations pushed people too far, they would react out of desperation. And the strike showed that if workers acted together, they could challenge the corporate system. By organizing into unions, workers could mobilize their strength.
Mount Carmel is a borough in Northumberland County, located in the Coal Heritage Region of Central Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River Valley, United States. The population was 5,725 at the 2020 census. It is located 88 miles (141 km) northwest of Philadelphia and 71 miles (114 km) northeast of Harrisburg, in the Coal Region. It is completely encircled by Mount Carmel Township.
Shamokin is a city in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, United States. Surrounded by Coal Township at the western edge of the Anthracite Coal Region in central Pennsylvania's Susquehanna River Valley, the city was named after a Saponi Indian village, Schahamokink. At the 2020 United States census, the population was 6,942.
The Molly Maguires was an Irish 19th-century secret society active in Ireland, Liverpool and parts of the Eastern United States, best known for their activism among Irish-American and Irish immigrant coal miners in Pennsylvania. After a series of often violent conflicts, twenty suspected members of the Molly Maguires were convicted of murder and other crimes and were executed by hanging in 1877 and 1878. This history remains part of local Pennsylvania lore and the actual facts are much debated among historians.
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Franklin Benjamin Gowen served as president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, commonly referred to as the Reading Railroad, in the 1870s and 1880s. He is identified with the undercover infiltration and subsequent court prosecutions of Molly Maguires, mine workers, saloonkeepers and low-level local political figures who were tried for multiple acts of violence, including murder and attempted murder of coal mine operators, foremen, workers, and peace officers.
The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) is a labor union founded in Marshall, Michigan, on 8 May 1863 as the Brotherhood of the Footboard. It was the first permanent trade organization for railroad workers in the US. A year later it was renamed the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers. The B of LE took its present name in 2004 when it became a division of the Rail Conference of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT).
Pennsylvania Route 61 is an 81.8-mile-long (131.6 km) state highway that is located in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the United States. The route is signed on a north–south direction, running from U.S. Route 222 Business in Reading northwest to US 11/US 15/PA 147 in Shamokin Dam.
Pennsylvania Route 54 is a state highway which runs for 82 miles (132 km) in eastern Pennsylvania in the United States.
The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, sometimes referred to as the Great Upheaval, began on July 14 in Martinsburg, West Virginia, after the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) cut wages for the third time in a year. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 was the first strike that spread across multiple states in the U.S. This strike finally ended 52 days later, after it was put down by unofficial militias, the National Guard, and federal troops. Because of economic problems and pressure on wages by the railroads, workers in numerous other cities, in New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland, into Illinois and Missouri, also went out on strike. An estimated 100 people were killed in the unrest across the country. In Martinsburg, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and other cities, workers burned down and destroyed both physical facilities and the rolling stock of the railroads—engines and railroad cars. Some locals feared that workers were rising in revolution such as the Paris Commune of 1871, while others joined their efforts against the railroads.
The Shamokin Valley Railroad is a short line railroad that operates 27 miles of track in southern Northumberland County, Pennsylvania in the United States. It is part of the North Shore Railroad System.
Pennsylvania Route 901 is a 26.4-mile-long (42.5 km) state route located in eastern Pennsylvania. The western terminus of the route is at PA 61 in the Coal Township hamlet of Ranshaw. Its eastern terminus is at PA 183 in Cressona. PA 901 runs northwest-southeast through forested mountains in the Coal Region within Northumberland and Schuylkill counties. The route runs concurrent with PA 54 between Locust Gap and Merrian in Mount Carmel Township before it leaves Northumberland County for Schuylkill County. PA 901 has an interchange with Interstate 81 (I-81) and continues southeast to Minersville. The route runs concurrent with U.S. Route 209 to Pottsville before it splits south and continues to PA 183.
Centre Turnpike, also known as the Reading-Sunbury Road, was an early United States turnpike located in Pennsylvania. It followed the path of the King's Highway, which had been surveyed in 1770 by Francis Yarnall. Running from Reading to Sunbury, it was 75 miles (121 km) long, was started in 1808, and was completed around 1814 at a cost of US$208,000. The final toll was collected near Bear Gap in Ralpho Township in 1885. The general path of the original turnpike is now covered partly by Pennsylvania Route 61 and Pennsylvania Route 54. It was maintained and controlled by the Centre Turnpike Road Company, which was formed on March 25, 1805.
Shamokin Creek is a tributary of the Susquehanna River in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, in the United States. It is approximately 32.4 miles (52.1 km) long and flows through Mount Carmel, Mount Carmel Township, Coal Township, Shamokin, Ralpho Township, Shamokin Township, Snydertown, Upper Augusta Township, and Sunbury. The watershed of the creek has an area of 137 square miles (350 km2). It experiences significant impacts by abandoned mine drainage and many abandoned mine drainage discharges are in its watershed. Various other impairments also affect parts of the creek's watershed. Shamokin Creek is in the Appalachian Mountains section of the Ridge and Valley physiographic province. Rock formations consisting of sandstone, shale, and anthracite deposits occur in the watershed.
The Lebanon and Tremont Branch of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad was a railroad line in Lebanon and Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, built to tap the coal fields in the West End of Schuylkill County and send coal southward to Lebanon.
The Reading Railroad Massacre occurred on July 23, 1877, when strikes in Reading, Pennsylvania, led to an outbreak of violence, during which 10 to 16 people were killed and between 20 and 203 were injured. It was the climax of local events during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 towards the end of the Long Depression of 1873–1879, following arson and riots against local facilities of the Philadelphia and Reading Railway.
The 1877 St. Louis general strike was one of the first general strikes in the United States. It grew out of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. The strike was largely organized by the Knights of Labor and the Marxist-leaning Workingmen's Party, the main radical political party of the era.
Coal Run is a tributary of Shamokin Creek in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, in the United States. It is approximately 4.7 miles (7.6 km) long and flows through Mount Carmel Township, Coal Township, and Shamokin. The watershed of the stream has an area of 6.25 square miles (16.2 km2). The stream is designated as an impaired waterbody due to metals from abandoned mine drainage. It is an ephemeral stream. Virtually all of the watershed is in coal mining regions.
The Scranton general strike was a widespread work stoppage in 1877 by workers in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which took place as part of the Great Railroad Strike, and was the last in a number of violent outbreaks across Pennsylvania. The strike began on July 23 when railroad workers walked off the job in protest of recent wage cuts, and within three days it grew to include perhaps thousands of workers from a variety of industries.
The Pittsburgh railway strike occurred in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania as part of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. It was one of many incidents of strikes, labor unrest and violence in cities across the United States, including several in Pennsylvania. Other cities dealing with similar unrest included Philadelphia, Reading, Shamokin and Scranton. The incidents followed repeated reductions in wages and sometimes increases in workload by railroad companies, during a period of economic recession following the Panic of 1873.
The Baltimore railroad strike of 1877 involved several days of work stoppage and violence in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1877. It formed a part of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, during which widespread civil unrest spread nationwide following the global depression and economic downturns of the mid-1870s. Strikes broke out along the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O) on July 16, the same day that 10% wage reductions were scheduled.
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