"In the 1880s, Seattle became a major coal port in the United States. By 1908, Puget Sound was the third-largest coal port, after New York and Baltimore. For Seattle, the major coal mines were in Issaquah, New Castle, Renton, and Black Diamond, with many other smaller mines throughout King County. Until the petroleum revolution, Seattle exported most of its coal to San Francisco. Because of coal, Seattle became a center for skilled engineers, machinists, and miners for the maritime, manufacturing, mining, and railroad industries, differentiating itself from other lumber towns on Puget Sound. Seattle's Coal Legacy is the story of a frontier town going through an industrial revolution in its own time. The skills and knowledge developed during the coal era--engineering, finance, transportation, manufacturing, etc.--made Seattle the major city it is today."-- Provided by publisher.

Cultural historian Jeff Biggers takes us to the dark amphitheatre ruins of his familys nearly 200 - year - old hillside homestead that has been strip - mined on the edge of the first federally recognized Wilderness Site in southern Illinois. In doing so' he not only comes to grips with his own denied backwoods heritage' but also chronicles a dark and missing chapter in the American experience; the historical nightmare of coal outside of Appalachia' serving as an expos of a secret legacy of shame and resiliency.

This monograph provides an international perspective on pit lakes in post-mining landscapes, including the problem of geogenic acidification. Much has been learned during the last decade through research and practical experience on how to mitigate or remediate the environmental problems of acidic pit lakes. In the first part of the book, general scientific issues are presented in 21 contributions from the fields of geo-environmental science, water chemistry, lake physics, lake modeling, and on the peculiar biological features that occur in the extreme habitats of acidic pit lakes. Another chapter provides an overview of methods currently used to remediate acidic pit lakes and treat outflowing acidic water. The second part of the book is a collection of regional surveys of pit lake problems from three European countries and Australia, and case studies of various individual representative lakes. A final case study provides an innovative approach to assessing the economic value of new pit lakes and balancing the costs and benefits, a valuable tool for decision makers.

Excerpt from A Legacy of Coal: The Coal Company Towns of Southwestern Pennsylvania Recognizing that a true portrait of these communities would best be revealed by example, detailed monographs on three individual coal towns were also incorporated into this volume. The three towns-star Junction, Windber and Colver-were chosen to represent the South western Pennsylvania coal company town because each possessed the five major traits (see figure 1 However, each town also had certain unique features of its own. For this reason, they should be seen as representatives of a broad trend, and not as the best or most exemplary of the region's coal towns. The primary goal of this project was to formally establish these characteristics through a literature search, interviews with local residents and wind shield surveys of actual towns. While some of these characteristics may be found in other forms of settlement, the occurrence of all five together is typical of Southwestern Pennsylvania coal company towns. Through the course of this investigation several other physical traits were recognized. These include: a grid or linear plan; a company store; open sewer systems; narrow, deep housing lots; individual gardens; unpaved streets; and electric light. In addition to these striking physical similarities, this study found that these towns have strong social, political, economic, ethnic and cultural parallels, suggesting that company towns have a uniformity that transcends mere planning and architecture. Star Junction is the oldest of the three towns. Located in Fayette County, Star Junction's economic livelihood depended upon the produc tion of coke, a metallurgical fuel derived from raw coal. The town and its coke works were built in 1893 by the Washington Coal and Coke Company and reflected housing problems that were peculiar to the coke industry. Windber was founded in 1897 by the berwind-white Coal Mining Company along the northern border of Somerset County. Intended to serve as a regional head-quarters for the company's western mining operations, Windber consists of an independent urban center surrounded by eleven dependent mining settlements. As the largest and most complex of the three company towns, Windber reveals the special considerations required by a corporate center. Colver, on the other hand, is a small, self-contained community. Built by the Ebensburg Coal Company in 1911, Colver developed almost two decades after Star Junction and Windber and, therefore, incorpor ates more of the industrial housing reforms promoted during the Progressive Era than its older counterparts. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.