"It positively cannot be explained," said Dan Messinger – an independent deep miner in the Ashland area. "I tell everyone that when I go in tomorrow, I'll drill that face up, and when I blast that big pile of coal out, I'm the first guy that has ever seen it."

Messinger has a point. When the Appalachian Revolution transformed soft coal into anthracite over 300 million years ago, no human walked the earth. He and thousands like him have been uncovering pieces from the earth's beginnings and its transformations toward maturation.

The Appalachian Revolution was a period of mountain building when the shifting forces of great plates within the earth converged to create one of the oldest mountain ranges on earth—the Appalachians.

In northeastern Pennsylvania, as the colliding plates uplifted the earth creating the mountains, what remained of the inland Appalachian Sea drained and its layers of millennium-deposited sediments of decayed plant material folded into layers of anthracite coal, creating a 472-square-mile area of the most concentrated deposits of anthracite on earth.

Over two centuries have passed since the first anthracite was discovered and its value was realized. For over a century, northeastern Pennsylvania anthracite coal fueled the American Industrial Revolution. Toward the turn of the last century, oil and soft coal began to replace it. As the energy train moved on, subterranean coal mine cities of pillars and gangways and a mining family culture were left in its wake, and once prosperous coal mining and transport towns began failing.

Anthracite Coalfields
Nearly all the anthracite production of the United States is concentrated in several counties of northeastern Pennsylvania. The balance is produced in Arkansas, Colorado, Virginia and New Mexico.

Pennsylvania anthracite is mined in four coal fields: the Northern Field in the Wyoming and Lackawanna Valleys with Scranton and Wilkes-Barre as its urban centers, the Western Middle Field in Northumberland, Columbia, and Schuylkill Counties with Shamokin as its urban center, the Eastern Middle Field in Luzerne County with extensions in Schuylkill, Carbon, and Columbia Counties, with Hazleton as its urban center, and the Southern Field, the largest area in size, occupying 180 square miles, extends northeast-southwest in Schuylkill, Carbon, Dauphin, and Lebanon Counties with Pottsville as its urban center.

The Appalachian Revolution convoluted the anthracite coal beds in each of these regions, depressing some veins thousands of feet below the ground and others breaking through the crust of the earth. In these outcroppings, when the overgrowth was pushed aside, the coal was visible at the surface.

Stories dating back to 1710 indicate that some native tribes in the Pennsylvania colony knew of the black stone, some even were aware that it could burn. Local mining historian Dave Kuchta tells a story about Indians asking a gunsmith to repair their flintlocks.

"The gunsmith told the Indians that he had run out of charcoal and couldn't fire up his forge," said Kuchta. "The Indians supposedly left in a hurry, only to return a few hours later with a bag of what appeared as black stones. By using a wood fire, the Indians ignited the black stones, in the blacksmith's forge. The fire was so intense that the blacksmith was able to do his metal repairs. The Indians wouldn't relinquish any information as to the source of this mystifying fuel."

Kuchta suggests this took place in the Wyoming Valley and the mysterious black stone was later to be called anthracite coal. The name anthracite is believed to have come from the Greek word for coal, anthrakitis.