In my apartment in Paris, on a shelf reserved for my most precious books, I have a copy of Pottsville’s Sesquicentennial Celebration Souvenir Program from 1956. The booklet, held together with yellowing tape, celebrates “150 years of progress.” I remember the event. Some readers may as well.
My childhood memories are of my father’s beard, grown specially for the occasion, and of a sesquicentennial beer glass that gave its bearer access to unlimited beer. I also remember ladies wearing bonnets and ankle-length full skirts. We children were proud to display commemorative buttons pinned to our polo shirts.
In the souvenir program, I can find photos of men who, just like my father, sport an old-fashioned beard. They also wear a string tie that looks a lot like the one worn by Gary Cooper in the 1952 western “High Noon.”
There are other photos: downtown Pottsville in 1956 at a time when not a single storefront was empty, Garfield Square, Tumbling Run, and the world’s largest anthracite breaker, the Saint Nicholas, belonging at that time to the Reading Anthracite Company. I like to look at the photos but I treasure the booklet for the words it contains in an essay entitled “Pottsville’s Picturesque Past.”
Overflowing with facts, style and humor, the essay was written by Edith Patterson, born in 1878, who served as head librarian of the Pottsville Free Public Library from 1918 to 1950. My Aunt Jean worked for her back in the late 1940’s and I think Miss Patterson was one of the persons she loved best.
In her short but succinct history, Miss Patterson dares an audacious comparison between the founding of Pottsville and that of Rome, both spread out across seven hills. To silence any protests against the pairing of the two cities, she immediately follows with a quote by a respected 19th century Pennsylvania historian:
“For anyone from Cape Cod to New Orleans, to say he had not heard of the renowned town of Pottsville would sound as marvelous as if an Arabian were to declare he had never heard of Mahomet.”
Writing in 1844 about the anthracite “coal rush” of the 1820’s, I. Daniel Rupp, a prolific writer and translator whose histories of many Pennsylvania counties are available on-line, goes on to describe the Buckley Basin, Pottsville’s canal port, once located where Claude A. Lord Boulevard intersects Norwegian Street:
“From this port…, there is a fleet of more than four hundred vessels—a fleet more formidable than that which bore the Greeks to the Trojan War…”
Back in those days, Pottsville was quite a place and could certainly bear comparison to the “grandeur that was Rome.” The city was the gateway to the “anthracite region,” whose coal fired America’s industrial revolution and made the nation great.
Then, a few years later, after World War I when anthracite production peaked, the US fuel market began to change. In the Kingdom of Coal, decline set in, just as in ancient Rome.
Of course, history is not so simple yet, having just returned from a trip to Rome, I can’t help feeling that somehow Miss Patterson got it right. Rome does remind me of Pottsville and, while exploring the Eternal City, I often find myself thinking about “home.”
It has something to do with so much of history happening underground.
When my mother was still alive and had a house on Third Avenue, we sat atop history: the Mammoth Vein, right beneath our house, the richest vein of anthracite in the world, tortured, twisted, impossible to extract. In the 19th century, miners lost their lives trying and entrepreneurs hoping to hit the jackpot went bust.
I used to think about the Mammoth Vein a lot, standing on our back porch, looking north, able to see the co-gens on Broad Mountain and the giant strip mine near Wadesville.
In Rome, I went underground to explore the history of Christianity. Walking along the Appian Way (and alive to tell the tale—the more than 2000 year-old cobble-stone road remains a major highway where Roman motorists travel at top speed, hell-bent on picking off a pedestrian or two), I made my way to the catacombs of the martyred saints Callixtus and Sebastian.
In these vast underground burial grounds that today belong to the Vatican, Rome’s first Christians met to worship in secret at a time when belief in Christ was punishable by death. In earlier times, these same underground galleries were part of mines and quarries that supplied the volcanic stone used to construct the public buildings of Rome.
When the mines were transformed into catacombs, “berths” were carved into the soft reddish-brown stone, each one long and high enough to contain a body. On the walls, in the dark passageways, Christian iconography began to take form: the fish as a symbol of the Eucharist, the dove as the Holy Spirit, the anchor as a symbol of hope. Carved into the rock, painted on the walls, many are still visible today.
Above ground, nothing betrays the presence of these underground cities. Yet all of Rome is like that. No matter where you walk, you can be sure that beneath your feet there are layers of history, just like in and around Pottsville, I might add, taking my mother’s house as an example.
In Rome, the past also has a tendency to “pop up.” Ancient Roman columns or tablets with Latin inscriptions are as natural a part of Roman parks and gardens as a flower bed or a shade tree in the USA.
But in and around Pottsville, the past pops up as well, a past so ancient that it defies the mind.
At the Yorkville end of Sharp Mountain, the sector I know best, I’ve often admired enormous outcrops of Pottsville conglomerate, sandstone, quartz, and shale pressed together 300 million years ago during the Pennsylvania period of geologic time. Around Pottsville, I’ve searched for the fossils of trilobites and tropical plants, local inscriptions of a far-distant past.
In the end, Miss Patterson’s comparison may not be as unlikely as it first seemed. True, no other city in the world can boast the concentration of beauty and splendor of Rome, but Pottsville too has a glorious past, inscribed on the earth’s surface and underground.
Very solemnly, then, let’s raise an ice-cold glass of Yuengling lager to the grandeur that was Rome and the past glory of Pottsville.
