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Chapter 8
A Coal-Fired Dream World
Wanting coal we could not have smelted the iron needed to make our engines,
nor have worked our engines when we had got them. But take away the
engines and the great towns vanish like a dream. Manufacturers give place to
agriculture and pasture, and not ten men can live where now ten thousand.
— Thomas Huxley (1875)
Coal introduced a new race of men who work with machinery instead of their
hands, who cluster together in cities instead of spreading over the land, men
who trade with those of other nations as readily as with those of their own
town...men whose market is no longer the city or country but the world itself.
— Henry DeBeers Gibbins (1903)
Coal At The Bottom Of Things
Where I grew up the hand of coal was everywhere. Great paddle-wheel boats pushed it up and
down the river every day, driven by the heat of coal fire. Columns of barges—eight, ten, twelve to
a steamboat—were as common a sight to me as police cars are to the modern Manhattan where I
live a half-century later. Those barges glide majestically through my memory, piled high with coal
gleaming in the sunshine, glistening in the rain, coal destined for steel mills, coke ovens, machine
works, chemical plants, coal yards and coal chutes everywhere. Long before we saw the lead
barges push the river aside, we saw plumes of smoke shoot above the willows on the riverbanks.
As the big paddle-wheel went crashing by, orange clouds of sulfuric rip surged up in waves from
the depths of the deep green river, an angry reminder that this wasn’t just water we were playing
with.
On certain days the town sky darkened from coal smoke, the air so dark automobiles used
headlights at midday. Some favorite games we played circled around coal: one called simply
"walking the railroad ties" gave way naturally to its successor "walking the rails" as a fellow got
better at the thing. But whether you hopped along the creosoted wood or teetered on the polished
steel stretching in the mind to infinity, the object was to gather up black diamonds spilled from the
coal cars.
At night we played ghostly games in and out of long rows of abandoned beehive coke ovens,
which looked for all the world like Roman tombs. I can still hear the crunch of a battered shovel
digging into the pyramid of coal in our basement and the creak of the cast-iron gate on the
furnace door opening to accept another load into the flames. Squinting through medieval view
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