Hard Coal: Last Of The Bootleg Miners

Comments · 507

• BC

  @bctw9004 · 1 year ago

  Think this was around 2002. Amazing watching it in 2025.

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• RO

  @Rottingboards · 1 year ago

  My grandfathers on both sides coal miners.  One grandfather worked the mines for the company until he could buy land.  Built a house and started digging out back until he hit coal.   Dug it for himself and had 12 kids.  Some worked the mine with him.  Hard times with just a little reward.

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• RO

  @RobVollat · 1 year ago

  Many won't understand it - but if you do hard days work and get paid well for it, for an honest man, that's one of the best feelings in the world.

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• ST

  @starionslider2116 · 1 year ago

  “Sometimes you gotta work a delicate situation to keep going”. Damn i get that.

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• RO

  @robertpayne6781 · 1 year ago

  I grew up in a tiny former mining village of about 60 people tucked away in the northern Appalachians of southwestern PA. My buddies and I grew up riding quads and dirt bikes on old boney piles, and flyfishing in the headwaters of a small river that ran orange with Sulphur when my parents were growing up. You could still see the infrastructure where the old mines loaded coal onto train cars along the tracks that ran through town and even a few feeder springs that still ran orange with iron ore. As a young kid I remember helping my dad haul buckets of coal down into the basement for the furnace. My first job was in a coal testing lab for the few remaining mines and power plants in the area. This is like watching a documentary about the world I lived in.

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• MA

  @MarcAnthony435 · 1 year ago

  The 73 Torino with the Axle as the Winch is the Most PA thing I’ve seen in a while! Born and raised there in 63 left in 85. Hard workin bunch!

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• 0P

  @0ptimal · 9 months ago (edited)

  This is one of the best documentaries I've ever seen. It's still so pertinent to today.

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• TO

  @tonys4638 · 1 year ago (edited)

  My great grandfather migrated from the Ukraine to East Central PA back in 1908, we were a coal mining family for 4 generations.  My grandfather mined coal for over 50 years, he had three sons which became miners but after my Dad died in the mines, my one uncle eventually retired to sell used cars, the other went on to work heavy machinery, my grandfather retired and sent me to college instead.  This brings back a lot of memories.

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• FI

  @firewalker1372 · 1 year ago

  Some of family came from Poland and Czechoslovakia in the early 1900s. From Ellis Island they made their way to West Virginia to become U.S. citizens. There in W. Virginia they worked in the coal mines for most of their life.

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• JE

  @jenkenstein3D · 6 months ago

  That one dude said "I don't work in thunderstorms" in Pennsylvania Dutch

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• RO

  @ron1836 · 1 year ago

  Watching stuff like this makes me feel so homesick. Homesick not for a place. But for a time. I was born in the 80&apos;s. Which wasn&apos;t all that long ago. Yet the entire country, it&apos;s people and an entire environment and way of life that I grew up in has all but vanished. If you go out in public and look around now it to me feels something approaching a technological brain washed prison. All culture or family or kinship or independence is gone. Common sense and knowledge are gone. And all the remains is sickness. In mind body and soul. Isolated purely hollowed out consumerism. Where anyone and everyone will step on you for a dollar. And dollars barely even exist. It&apos;s only digital numbers in some computer. Nothing is left that people hold in their hands. Be it money be it property or be it values that until very recently were passed down. <br><br>Someone or something has nearly devoured humanity on all levels. And for me everyday I wake up is another day that I pray to God I be taken away from all this madness. What makes it even worse is knowing that all things will only get worse. And the horror I feel at watching my people and country slip away has not even reached a high point yet. <br><br>I honestly cannot take it.

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• TH

  @TheDroppedAnchor · 1 year ago

  My mother’s family is four generation Washington County, western PA farmers and coal miners.<br>THIS film changed my attitude. &nbsp;My contempt for strip mine owners has always been strong and now is even stronger.<br>The United Mine Workers Union has been co-opted by the greed and corruption of Washington D.C.

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