Scranton, Pennsylvania

The Coal That Built an Irish City

Scranton grew because of anthracite coal. The Lackawanna Valley sits atop one of the richest seams of hard coal in the world — a resource that powered the industrialising American economy of the mid-19th century and required a workforce willing to do the most dangerous work that American industry offered. The Irish immigrants of the Famine generation, arriving in America with almost nothing, took the work that almost no one else would take. They went underground.

The anthracite mines of northeastern Pennsylvania operated differently from the bituminous coal mines of western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The coal seam ran at odd angles through the rock, requiring hand drilling and blasting in confined spaces. The miners were paid by the ton — which meant that the skill of the individual miner, his knowledge of the rock and the gas and the angle of the seam, determined his earnings as much as the hours he worked. Irish miners, who had learned underground skills in the British mining industry before emigrating, were particularly valued for this knowledge.

By 1860, Scranton's population was dominated by Irish immigrants and their children. The Catholic parishes proliferated: St. Patrick's, St. Peter's, St. Brendan's, St. John's, St. Rose of Lima — each one the centre of a specific neighbourhood, often drawing from the same Irish county. The practice of county clustering, which shaped Irish-American neighbourhoods across the country, was intensified in Scranton by the mine company's practice of organising work crews by county of origin, on the theory that men who spoke the same dialect and shared the same social network would work more efficiently and fight less frequently.

Green Ridge and Dunmore: The Middle-Class Irish Neighbourhoods

The first generation of Irish miners in Scranton lived closest to the collieries — in the company-owned patches, rows of identical houses built by the mining company to house its workers, with the rent deducted from wages. As the second and third generations achieved economic mobility — moving from underground labour to foreman positions, to the supervisory ranks, to the professions — they moved up the slope of the valley to the residential neighbourhoods that were further from the mines and from the soot and noise of the industrial operation.

Green Ridge, in the northeast of Scranton, became the destination for the Irish middle class — the families of supervisors, contractors, small businessmen, and professionals whose fathers had come up from the patches. The houses in Green Ridge were substantially better than anything available near the mines: two-storey frame and brick houses with front porches, on streets laid out with shade trees. The parishes of Green Ridge — St. Paul of the Cross, St. Mary of Assumption — were the parishes of the Irish who had made it far enough out of the mines to need a new church, one that reflected their new position.

Dunmore, directly adjacent to Scranton's eastern boundary, followed a similar pattern. An independent borough rather than a Scranton neighbourhood proper, Dunmore was nonetheless part of the same Irish Catholic social world. The Biden family — President Joe Biden's grandparents — settled in Scranton's Irish community before his parents moved to Wilmington, Delaware, when Biden was ten. Biden's identity as a "Scranton kid" has been central to his public persona for fifty years; the family's Scranton roots are in exactly the Irish Catholic working-class-to-middle-class trajectory that Green Ridge and Dunmore represent.

The Molly Maguires and the Unions

The labour history of Irish Scranton is inseparable from the history of the Molly Maguires — the secret society of Irish miners accused of industrial sabotage and murder in the 1860s and 1870s, and the subsequent trials that resulted in the execution of twenty men. The Molly Maguires are one of the most contested stories in American labour history, with Irish-Americans and labour historians still debating whether the executions were justice or judicial murder engineered by the Pinkerton detective agency on behalf of the mine owners.

What is not contested is that the conditions that produced the Molly Maguires were real. The mines were extraordinarily dangerous. The mine owners were extraordinarily powerful. The Irish workers had no legal protections. The Workingmen's Benevolent Association — the predecessor of the United Mine Workers — was the legitimate organising vehicle; the Mollies were accused of being its violent arm, or alternatively of being a separate organisation whose actions gave the mine owners the pretext they needed to destroy the legitimate union.

The United Mine Workers of America, founded in 1890 and based in the anthracite fields, was the organisation that eventually won the eight-hour day, the check-off system, and the right of miners to be paid by weight rather than by the company's estimate. It was led, in its early years, by Irish-American miners whose community networks — the AOH, the parish sodalities, the county associations — provided the organisational infrastructure for a union that the government and the mine owners did everything in their power to destroy.

St. Peter's Cathedral and the Parish Network

St. Peter's Cathedral on Wyoming Avenue, completed in 1884, is the mother church of the Diocese of Scranton and the most visible monument to the Irish Catholic community that built the city. Its construction was financed by the donations of working miners and their families — men earning a few dollars a day who committed a portion of those earnings to building a cathedral of dressed stone with a spire visible from most of the valley.

The diocese of Scranton, established in 1868, was from its founding an Irish diocese. Its first bishop was William O'Hara, born in County Donegal. The priests who served the Lackawanna Valley parishes came from Ireland, many from the same counties as their congregations. The institutional church and the immigrant community were so closely identified that Scranton's Catholic history and Scranton's Irish history are effectively the same history, told from different angles.

The parishes were not only religious institutions. They ran schools, maintained parish records that constituted the community's vital statistics, organised the annual festivals and the St. Patrick's Day parade (one of the oldest in Pennsylvania), and served as the network through which employment, housing, and political connections were distributed. To be Irish and Catholic in Scranton was to be embedded in a web of institutional relationships that provided both social support and social obligation.

Scranton Today: The Biden Connection and Remaining Heritage

Scranton's population peaked in 1930 and has declined since as the anthracite industry collapsed. The city that once had 140,000 people now has fewer than 75,000. The decline of the mines took the economic base; the decline of the urban industrial economy took the rest. The Irish-American families who achieved mobility moved to the suburbs of Clarks Summit, Dalton, and South Abington — the same suburbs their grandparents had aspired to reach.

But Scranton retains its Irish character in ways that outlasted the migration. St. Patrick's Day in Scranton remains one of the most significant events in the city's calendar. The Ancient Order of Hibernians maintains active chapters. The county associations — the County Mayo Society, the County Galway Society — still hold annual dinners. The Democratic Party machine that Irish immigrants built in the late 19th century still shapes the city's politics, though the ethnic identity that powered it has faded into heritage rather than political mobilisation.

The Biden connection — extended, discussed, occasionally disputed but fundamentally real — has given Scranton a national profile in recent years that the city's Irish-American community has embraced. The childhood home at 2446 North Washington Avenue has become a heritage site. The family's Scranton story is the story of Irish-American working-class ascent, which is why it has retained its political meaning across a century of telling.

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