It was anthracite that warmed millions in the growing cities, created jobs for immigrants seeking better lives, fueled the furnaces of industry, drove the growth of extensive transportation networks, spurred agricultural innovations that helped tame the west, and ultimately transformed American technology, engineering, manufacturing and business.

Leading the way in this historic transformation was the Lehigh Coal Mining Company, the predecessor of Lehigh Coal & Navigation, recognized as the very first anthracite coal company and the first to send significant shipments of anthracite from the coal region to the rest of the country.

Though discovered in 1760, it was decades before the "puzzle of anthracite" could be solved: how to mine it, how to ignite it, how to use it for industry and finally, how to transport it.

A number of farsighted entrepreneurs eventually solved the puzzle with:

• the use of the steam engine for pumping water from mines;
• the invention of an open air grate enabling the population to safely heat their homes with anthracite;
• the introduction of the "hot-blast process" to smelt iron and produce steel;
• the development of a transportation network, first by canal and later by rail.

Among the pioneers were the founders and early visionaries of Lehigh Coal Mining Company (1792*), mining and hot-blast furnace, and the Lehigh Navigation Company (1798*), canal building. The companies merged into the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company and during the 1820s and 1830s shipped hundreds of thousands of tons of coal via their own Lehigh Canal to the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, then to New York, Philadelphia and beyond.

The canal building not only unlocked the anthracite of the coal fields, it heralded the beginning of the transportation revolution in the United States as rivers were re-routed, waterways were dug and tunnels were blasted through mountains to create the nation's largest inland transportation network. The engineering feats and labor of the canal-building were the basis for another revolution: the building of the great railroads that eventually replaced the canals carrying ever-increasing shipments of coal throughout the country.

No less instrumental was anthracite's role in the production of iron and later, steel. Not only was the ability to make iron and steel fundamental to the production of rails and trains, it facilitated the development of both the iron plow and the steel plow, major advances in agriculture and westward expansion. The steel plow, alone, is credited for allowing the "sodbusters" to use the sharpness of the plow to farm the fields of the west.

It could be said that America had been in its infancy prior to the unlocking of the anthracite fields. The nation was primarily agricultural and relied on wood as its source of fuel, but there simply were not enough forests to power the hungry factories of the growing country. Anthracite, with its high carbon content and ability to burn hotter and longer, combined with its abundance and the technological advances it spawned, was the ideal solution for the emerging nation.

By the Civil War era, coal was king in the United States.
Coal powered the railroads that connected the major metropolitan cities and pushed expansion westward. Coal powered the machines that made the railroads and the rails, as well as the steam engines themselves. Coal advanced the technology, the engineering and the inventions that grew America. In short, it was coal…and anthracite, specifically…that fueled the Industrial Revolution and led the emergence of the United States as a fully industrialized world power.

* The Pennsylvania State Archives: Manuscript Group 311