Fact or Fiction: Clearfield County, Pennsylvania was the coal mine county where Vicky Winner, later Kairos’ wife grew up. She was the daughter of Jakubek Hirschfield aka Jake Deerfield, which is a pseudonym. She really did grow up in a mining community in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, but her father was a paymaster, while her grandfather was the Jewish-Polish immigrant who died in a mining accident.

At the time, this multi-cultural community of miners that the young Vicky grew up in often consisted of those who had fled poverty and pogroms back home; the Scottish might have lived on Scotch Hill and the blacks on Colored Hill, the Italians in Dago Street, the Germans in Hun Town, and the Irish on Murphy’s Patch. However, all were “owned” by the Coal Barons, who also owned the general store, the houses the miners rented, and the mines they worked in.

The kind people at the Coalport Area Museum in Coalport, PA have a wealth of information about what life must have been like for the young Vicky Winner and her ancestors. See: https://www.coalportmuseum.org/

Sociologist and political activist Lewis Hines took hundreds of pictures of child laborers in the mines to help shine a light on the abominable working circumstances and the lack of child labor laws at the time in the USA.

* * * * *

Now there is not much left of the place where Vicky Winner grew up; it is barely a hamlet in the middle of nowhere, but from 1883 when the railroad reached the area until before WWII, the entire area was booming. Just in Clearfield County alone, there were four bituminous coal mines.