A photograph dated July 15, 1931, of a miner operating an air-driven drilling machine.
From a series of articles that appeared in the Pottsville Republican and Herald in 1998:
The Salem Colliery was located at the eastern end of Pottsville at what was known as Young’s Landing.
The original operators were the Young Brothers who, in 1830, opened a water-level drift and worked it to 1835, when they sold their interests to a Mr. Milnes.
Milnes did very little work on the drift, realizing that a slope was necessary to make a success of the mine, as there was little coal to remove from the drift.
In 1837, Milnes began sinking the slope and completed it to the first level in 1838. With gangways driven east and west, the east gangway in 1841 connected with the slope workings from Charles Elliot‘s Port Carbon Colliery and the east side of the Greenwood Colliery slope workings.
In 1842, Milnes took in a partner, Benjamin Haywood, and under the firm of Milnes & Haywood, the slope was sunk a total of six levels.
In 1846, the west gangway was driven 4,000 feet to Sixth Street in Pottsville. The lower levels of the colliery had reached westward beyond Centre Street in Pottsville by 1950 and connected eastward with the Port Carbon Colliery workings.
Milnes & Haywood built a short canal from the Navigation Canal basin to its breaker, where the coal was loaded directly into the canal boats at its dock.
It operated the colliery until 1851 when due to financial troubles, it was sold to Waddington & Ogden, which operated the mine to 1854, when it was succeeded by John O. Hewes. Hewes mined until 1855, when the colliery was flooded and abandoned.
The total length of the slope was 1,030 feet, with the foot of the slope located under the bed of the Navigation Company dam on the Schuylkill River.
In driving the gangways at the foot of the slope in 1855, a fissure in the rock strata was encountered so suddenly that a large body of water was drawn into the mine, downing it out so that nothing could be saved except the mules. No lives were lost.
The total shipment from the Salem Colliery was 260,156 tons of coal.
The machinery and improvements cost $70,000.
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Article by Frank Blase, Historian, Reading Anthracite Company Historical Library, Pottsville Republican & Herald, July 25, 1998. Obtained from Newspapers.com.
Corrections and additional information should be added as comments to this post.