Eckley Miners' Village

The story

Eckley is a coal 'patch town' — the company villages that anthracite operators threw up beside their mines across northeastern Pennsylvania. Founded in 1854 on land owned by the Coxe family and named for young Eckley B. Coxe, it housed immigrant miners and their families and laid out their world by rank: laborers' double houses at one end, mine bosses and the doctor at the other, churches and a company store in between.

As anthracite faded through the twentieth century the patch emptied and would likely have been bulldozed — except that in 1969 it was chosen as the set for the film 'The Molly Maguires,' about the region's secret miners' society. The production restored buildings and even erected a wooden coal breaker. The state stepped in afterward, and since 1970 the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission has run Eckley as a museum of immigrant mining life.

It is now considered the most complete nineteenth-century company town in North America, and a handful of descendants stayed on as residents under agreement even after it became a museum — one of the reasons the village never feels like a stage set.

What remains today

Dozens of original structures — miners' double houses, the 1861 Immaculate Conception church, the doctor's office, mine bosses' homes — plus the coal breaker built for the 1970 film.