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Old Dominions and Industrial Commonwealths: The Political Economy of Coal in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1810–1875

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 February 2015

Sean Patrick Adams
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Extract

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Great Britain utilized its extensive coal reserves to emerge as the world's leading industrial power. “If a patch of a few square miles has done so much for central England,” one British writer pondered in 1856, “what may fields containing many hundred square leagues do for the United States?” In the story of American coal, the two most important states on the eve of the nineteenth century were Virginia and Pennsylvania. Virginia was endowed with bituminous coal reserves in both the James River Basin and its western counties, while Pennsylvania enjoyed a virtual monopoly on American anthracite coal as well as a massive bituminous region west of the Allegheny Mountains.

Type
Dissertation Summaries
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 1 , Issue 4 , December 2000 , pp. 675 - 682
Copyright
Copyright © Enterprise and Society 2000

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References

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2. The physical distinction between ‘hard’ anthracite coal and ‘soft’ bituminous coal is that the former has a higher carbon content than the latter. Anthracite was employed in the making of iron and steel after 1839, and the fact that it burned cleanly made it a desirable household fuel. Bituminous coal, although dirtier when ignited than anthracite, was easier to light and was used quite extensively to make coke, the major fuel source of the steel industry.

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