Flames and Embers of Coal: A Historic Novel of the Anthracite Region.
first edition
1990 · Washington, DC
by Roberts, Ellis Wynne.
Washington, DC: National Welsh-American Foundation, 1990. First Edition. Octavo, white & brown cloth (hardcover), gilt letters, viii + 371 pp. Very Good, with bookplates; in a Good+, mylar protected dust jacket with edgewear. From dust jacket: In 1877, the United States was in flames from a financial panic and a national railroad strike. The cities of Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Philadelphia burned as police and soldiers battled with railway workers. In Scranton, striking railroad workers induced the iron workers and miners to join them. Scranton became paralized by the threatening situation. Voices of sanity in this tinderbox were those of Owen Roderick and Rhondda Hall. Owen was the son of a migrant Welsh family and a young survivor of the Avondale breaker fire. Rhondda had arrived in the anthracite region as a seventeen-year-old Quaker, induced indirectly by Asa Packer to teach the children of coal miners. Owen and Rhondda’s commitment to nonviolence was challenged in the national and local struggles of 1877. The lives of Owen Roderick and those of his parents and Rhondda Hall, the dedicated Friend, parallel the growth of the anthracite region from the post-Civil War era to the next century. As residents of Hyde Park, a Welsh enclave in Scranton, their personal lives are reminiscent of those of thousands of immigrants of every nationality who came to northeastern Pennsylvania to mine coal. (Inventory #: 61083bd)