An example of a payment statement from the Short Mountain Colliery, Bear Gap, Lykens, Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, for the pay period from June 16, 1932 to the end of the month.
The statement is for the miner William E. Dietrich (1896-1977), who lived in Lykens Township, Dauphin County. This is the last pay statement found among William Dietrich’s papers and may not have been the last time he worked at the colliery which closed down completely in March 1933.
According to the colliery, it closed because the cost of labor did not make coal competitive with other fuels. The colliery would not publicly admit though that its safety record, particularly in the last year of operations, was poor and the required measures to mitigate and protect miners from accidents would have been very costly.
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News clipping from Newspapers.com.
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