The arrival of "King Coal" made a vast and permanent change in North Huntingdon Township. Railroads were built to transport coal. The towns of Irwin, Larimer, Hahntown, Westmoreland City, and others were built near the mines to house the incoming miners.
In 1860, North Huntingdon Township was a farming community of 3,000 people, but by 1900, over 10,000 people lived here, with 1600 working in the coal mines. In 1914, at the peak of employment, 28,686 coal miners were employed in Westmoreland County, over one in every ten people, and thirty-three tons of coal were mined.
Coal was first used in this area by British soldiers at Fort Pitt before 1760. The Guffeys mined coal and shipped it in flatboats down the river to be sold in Pittsburgh as early as 1819. Small surface mines were operated by local farmers to supply their own needs. The coming of the railroads allowed coal to become a major product. It allowed coal to be cheaply transported to cities to generate energy and make life more comfortable.
The first railroad was built in the township in 1852. The first coal mine was opened in 1854 by Thomas A. Scott, who later became the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad. The old "North Side" or "Oak Grove" was the first mine. It was a slope mine, sloping into the coal seam on the hillside of North Irwin, just to the north of the Irwin railroad station.
In 1854, the Westmoreland Coal Company's Larimer slope mine was opened. Pulling two-wheeled carts out of a slope mine was a slow way of removing coal. A faster method was drilling a shaft straight down some 200 feet to the coal seam and hoisting the coal out with steam power, as was done in Wales, England. The first mine shaft sunk in the Pittsburgh coal region was east of Irwin at Shafton.
In 1857, Hays, who owned the land east of the Union Cemetery, Warden, who owned between the cemetery and Irwin, and Shaw, who owned the land North of Brush Creek, formed the Shafton Coal Company, which was sold to the Westmoreland Coal Company in 1880. The "Penn Shaft" of Shafton was located on the North side of the present Route. 993, about 200 feet east of Lime St. Other shaft mines were quickly opened.
After the mines were opened, men were needed to work in them. They came from many countries; first from England, Wales, and the German mines. These first miners were generally made bosses because they spoke English and knew mining. Later, around 1890, the Irish and Scandinavians came here.
Tenth Street in Irwin had a Swede Lutheran Church. With jobs to be had in the "New World," a flood of immigrants came from southern and eastern Europe to work in the mines. Passage was cheap. In 1904, passage to America was ten dollars, and Coal Companies paid agents two dollars per man to get workers. The work was hard. Miners were only paid for the usable coal they dug. Life in Europe was harder, and most miners stayed to help build America.
Wages were low compared to modern wages, but they were better than in Europe for most miners. In 1854, wages were thirty cents per ton of usable coal, loaded into a twelve-and-a-half bushel (half a ton) mining car. Miners did not get paid for slate or coal powder. 1872 the wage went up to seventy-five cents per ton, but the panic of 1873 and the oversupply of coal cut the wages to fifty cents per ton or two cents per bushel in 1876.
Early miners were singers. There were long periods of waiting underground for the coal train to come, and singing helped to kill the loneliness of working underground. Typical was a song they sang about the 1876 wage cut.
In 1889, the average daily wage for a Pennsylvania soft coal miner was $1.85. Miners did not work a full year; at times, they worked less than 100 days. The coal miner laborer was paid ten cents per hour for this twelve-hour day. In 1900, the day was reduced to ten hours, and in 1912, to an eight-hour day.
The political power of the mine owners in North Huntingdon Township cannot be overestimated. By 1900, over half of the male voters (no female voters) worked in the coal mines. There were no organized mine unions, and no federal laws protected the workers. The coal company owned the newspapers, so the mine owners' policies prevailed.
An example of the politics of that era is the fact that many miners got their first ride in a gasoline automobile in the 1908 elections. They would be carried from one mine town to another in an open car, told what name to sign in the voting place, vote for the mine owner's choice, then ride in the motorcar to the next mine town.
A long struggle freed the miners from the owner's yoke. Strikes came in 1894, 1897, 1910 (which lasted one and a half years), 1919 (when President Wilson jailed John L. Lewis), and in 1922 from April 1 to August 7. Large wage gains and improved working conditions resulted under President Franklin Roosevelt's administration with the passage of favorable union laws.