08/25/2026
If you want to truly understand how Pennsylvania's coal miners lived, there is a place where you can walk right into their world 🏘️ Eckley Miners' Village, in Luzerne County, is a preserved patch town, one of the hundreds of small company built mining communities that once dotted the anthracite region.
A patch town was a settlement built by a coal company right beside the mine, filled with rows of nearly identical simple wooden houses for the workers and their families. Eckley, founded in the 1850s, has been remarkably preserved, its dirt streets, modest homes, company store, and churches still standing much as they were. It even served as a film set in the 1960s, which helped save it, and today it operates as a living history museum 🎬
Walking through Eckley, you get a genuine sense of the hard, close knit life these mining families led, the cramped homes, the ever present breaker, the tight community bonds. It is one of the most authentic windows into Pennsylvania's coal heritage that exists anywhere 🍂
