Origins Under the DL&W

The Continental Mine did not begin as an independent operation. In 1851, the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad organized a Coal Department to extract anthracite from lands the railroad had acquired across Lackawanna County. The DL&W opened the Continental Mine in 1860, sinking a shaft 528 feet into the earth in Lackawanna Township, just north of Scranton’s city limits.

The shaft cut through half a dozen coal seams on its way down. Workers extracted anthracite from the Clark Vein, Dunmore No. 1, Dunmore No. 2, and the Monkey Vein using the room-and-pillar method. Miners carved out rooms of coal, leaving pillars of unmined rock to support the ceiling. As a section was exhausted, they pulled the pillars and let the roof collapse behind them.

By 1885, the Continental Shaft operated under superintendent Benjamin Hughes as one of several DL&W collieries in the Scranton area. The railroad ran its mines like any other division of the company. Miners worked for the railroad, lived in railroad housing, and bought supplies from railroad stores.

The Human Cost

Mine accident records from the 1870s give a raw accounting of life underground. On February 25, 1875, John Hull, 25 years old, was killed at the Continental Mine. In 1877, more workers died or were injured. Some were as young as fourteen.

These casualties were not unusual for the anthracite region. Scranton-area mines in this period killed and maimed workers at a steady rate, and the Continental was no exception. The records list causes of death in blunt terms: falls of coal, falls of rock, premature blasts, runaway mine cars. Safety regulation existed on paper after the 1870 Pennsylvania Mine Safety Act, passed in response to the Avondale disaster. Enforcement was another matter.

Separation from the Railroad

In 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the DL&W’s direct ownership of coal operations constituted an illegal monopoly. The decision forced the railroad to divest its mining holdings. In 1921, the DL&W sold its coal operations to the Glen Alden Coal Company, which became one of the largest anthracite producers in the world.

Around 1903, the Continental Coal Company had been incorporated as a separate entity, though the exact corporate relationship between Continental and the DL&W during the transition years is not entirely clear from surviving records. What is known is that Continental continued to mine the same site after the Glen Alden acquisition.

In 1939, the Continental Coal Company opened the No. 190 Slope, a new entry into the mine that would become the company’s primary working. Slope 190 descended at an angle into the mountain, reaching the same coal veins the original vertical shaft had accessed decades earlier.

Peak and Decline

The Continental operation hit its peak production in 1904, when 457 men mined 246,560 tons of anthracite. That same year, the anthracite industry was still recovering from the Great Strike of 1902, which had shut down mines across the region for five months. Production numbers in the years after the strike reflected both pent-up demand and the operators’ determination to make up for lost output.

The decline came gradually. Oil and natural gas displaced anthracite as home heating fuel through the 1930s and 1940s. Glen Alden, which had controlled much of Lackawanna County’s coal land since the 1921 DL&W sale, began abandoning its operations in the county by the mid-1940s. In 1953, Glen Alden sold its remaining Lackawanna County land and coal reserves to the Moffat Coal Company, owned by Robert Moffat Sr.

By 1964, Continental’s annual production had dropped to 51,870 tons. Twenty years earlier, that figure would have represented a few weeks of work. The mine employed a fraction of its former workforce.

The Last Deep Mine

In November 1966, Continental Coal Company ceased operations. The closure made it the last deep anthracite mine in Lackawanna County. An industry that had once employed tens of thousands of men across the county, that had built Scranton and the surrounding towns, that had fueled the industrial expansion of the eastern United States, ended its Lackawanna County history at a single slope on the northern edge of the city.

The mine site sat idle for more than a decade. In 1977, a six-person crew began rehabilitating the No. 190 Slope for a different purpose. Tom Supey Sr., Tom Supey Jr., Andy Supey, Louis Maranchick, Joe Vavrasek, and Andy Wrubel spent months reinforcing timbers, clearing debris, and making the old workings safe for visitors. Federal funding of $2.5 million supported the conversion. The land became McDade Park, and the mine opened to the public in 1985 as the Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour. Visitors descend 300 feet into the same tunnels where Continental’s miners once cut coal by hand.