Morewood Massacre
East Huntingdon Township, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
On April 2, 1891, at the nearby Morewood Mines of the H.C. Frick Coke Co., sheriff's deputies killed seven strikers; two more died later. These were among some 16,000 workers striking for higher wages in the coke region. Thousands of mourners attended the funeral of the original seven victims, who were buried in a mass grave in St. John's Cemetery, Scottdale. By late May the strike had collapsed, & the organizing of coke workers suffered a severe blow.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In the spring of 1891, the coke fields of southwestern Pennsylvania erupted as some 16,000 workers walked off the job demanding higher wages. On April 2, sheriff's deputies opened fire on strikers at the H.C. Frick Coke Company's Morewood Mines, killing seven that day and two more later; thousands filled the roads to mourn the men buried together in Scottdale. By late May the strike had broken, dealing a hard setback to the fledgling effort to organize the region's coke workers.
Why it matters
The Morewood killings mark one of the bloodiest chapters in America's industrial labor struggles, a reminder of the human cost paid in the coal and coke country that fueled the nation's steel age.
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Related events
- · Morewood Massacre
- · Coke region strike of 1891
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Henry Clay Frick
East Huntingdon Township, PA · est. 1946
Here in the Pennsylvania countryside near West Overton, one of America's most formidable industrialists began life in a modest homestead tied to the Overholt distilling family. Henry Clay Frick rose from these rural roots to build a coke and steel empire, partnering with Andrew Carnegie and turning the region's coal into the fuel that fired the nation's furnaces. The preserved Overholt home now interprets both the whiskey-making family that raised him and the Gilded Age fortune he went on to amass.
Standard Shaft Mine & Coke Works
Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 2007
From 1883 to 1931 this site was one of the world's greatest centers for making coke, the coal-derived fuel that fed the blast furnaces of American steel. H. C. Frick Coke Company fired more than 900 beehive ovens here, burning thousands of tons of coal a day, and proudly displayed a scale model of its Standard Shaft No. 2 at Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. A largely immigrant workforce, famed for its productivity, gave the region much of its enduring character.
Mammoth Mine Explosion
East Huntingdon Township, PA · est. 2000
On January 27, 1891, an explosion tore through the Mammoth No. 1 Mine of the H.C. Frick Coke Company, killing 109 coal miners in one of the deadliest disasters the bituminous fields had ever seen. Seventy-nine of the dead — many of them immigrant laborers — were laid together in a mass grave in nearby St. John's Cemetery. The catastrophe shocked Pennsylvania into strengthening its mine-inspection laws, part of the long, hard-won struggle for safety in the coal country that powered American industry.
Norvelt
Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 2002
In the depths of the Great Depression, the federal government carved a planned community out of the Westmoreland County countryside, laying out 250 homes in April 1934 for unemployed workers and their families. Originally "Westmoreland Homesteads," this New Deal experiment offered not just housing but work and a fresh sense of community when the industrial economy had collapsed. In 1937 residents renamed it "Norvelt" — stitching together the last syllables of Eleanor Roosevelt's name in gratitude for the First Lady's personal interest in the project.