In England coal was produced by coal from Wales, where the most practical modern methods developed. 

The Welsh and other British immigrants were instrumental in establishing the American coal industry and in shaping it into the engine of the American industrial revolution. The Welsh were and are invisible in American historiography.

​Welsh immigrants were among the most skilled in NEPA mines. In 1837 two Welshmen discovered how to use anthracite coal to smelt iron ore using the “hot blast” method. One of them, David Thomas, was brought to the US to establish an iron furnace in Jim Thorpe and assisted ironworker Burt Patterson in Pottsville in 1839.

American capitalists began to recruit Welsh miners in the mid-nineteenth century to establish the coal industry; as a result the Welsh dominated the emerging American coal industry. The overwhelmingly agrarian Americans recognized early on that the Welsh possessed a superior knowledge of mining and the idea readily mutated into the myth of the Welsh as masters of the mines.  But just at the moment when the number of miners peaked in Wales coalminers acquired the status of distinctive subterranean proletarians, their Welsh colleagues in America found themselves in a losing struggle to maintain their privileged position in the industry.

In his popular book “The American Commonwealth” (1888), James Bryce claimed that the English, Welsh, and Scottish migrants “absorbed into the general mass of native citizens” intended to lose their identity almost immediately” in the United States. Although they numbered in the millions, their political footprint was invisible because they had “either been indifferent to political struggles or have voted from the same motives as an average American. Andrew Carnegie went even further in ”Triumphant Democracy” (1886) claiming that the British held a privilege position in America because they played a leading role in building the country. British immigrants not only created the industries, like the Welshman, David Thomas, credited as “father of the anthracite iron industry in America,” but as industrial workers performed much of the labor as well.  Carnegie claimed the British immigrants had a monopoly on industrial invention and the skills to run those industries. In the nineteenth century almost half of the manufacturing workforce was British, while Americans were primarily engaged in agriculture. Moreover, this near monopoly in manufacturing and the skilled trades was passed on to their children.

Along with their English, and to a lesser extent Scottish colleagues, Welsh miners first came to the anthracite fields of eastern Pennsylvania as those fields began to open in the 1820’s. English miners became more prevalent in the new southern anthracite fields and the Welsh in the northern anthracite fields of the upper Schuylkill and Susquehanna Valleys from Pottsville to Forest City. Scranton became the largest single Welsh population center in America. In the words of one authority this was the epicenter of Welsh America.

The 1900 census recorded the Welsh in every state of the union but, they were concentrated in several particular states. Out of a total of 267,000 Welsh immigrants and their children in the United States (93,744 immigrants and 173,416 children of immigrants) 100,143 of them lived in Pennsylvania alone. Pennsylvania contain the largest Concentration of Welsh in the coal and iron districts. More than 40,000 lived in adjacent Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties. By the end of the 19th century conditions in the American coal industry became less favorable as technology began to undermine traditional manual skills, and unskilled eastern and southern European immigrants were preferred to British miners who insisted on protecting their status and higher pay.

“The Fire Down Below” by  Jack McDonough, 2002

“Welsh Americans: A history of assimilation in the coalfields” By Ronald L Lewis. 2008.