As Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais recounted in their 1955 book "Labor's Untold Story," the 1868 Avondale Mine Disaster was one of those exceptions, and it may have been a pivotal moment in the development of what was to become the myth of the Molly Maguires.

Labor's Untold Story

According to their account, 179 miners, most of them poor Irish immigrants, perished when the Avondale mine caved and a fire erupted. The men had been doomed the moment the mine collapsed, Boyer and Morais wrote. "Because the mine owners had refused to spend the comparatively few dollars needed to construct a second entrance, or escape exit, the men were dead, as so many others would be in Luzerne, Schuylkill and Carbon counties"

John Siney

According to Boyer and Morais, among the thousands who had gathered around the mine entrance when the bodies were finally removed days after the disaster was John Siney, an Irishman who was head of the of nation's earliest unions, the Workingmen's Benevolent Association, which had been formed the previous year in Schuylkill County. Siney, they wrote, "his face contorted with grief," leaped atop a wagon, and over the keening of mourning women and children, began to speak.

"Men," they quoted him as saying, "if you must die with your boots on, die for your families, your homes, your country, but do no longer consent to die like rats in a trap for those who have no more interest in you than in the pick you dig with."

That day, Boyer and Morais wrote, thousands of miners joined the WBA and became union men.

It was not the first time that miners in America had tried to band together. In 1842 and again in 1848, miners had attempted to form a union, and in both cases, the mine owners and their agents had brutally suppressed the movement. The law, it seemed, sanctioned that brutality. As Boyer and Morais put it, "the powers of the time regarded unionism as a conspiracy in violation of the law, a conspiracy as criminal as a plan to rob a bank."

Ancient Order of Hibernians' letterhead

But the lure of unionism was strong, particularly among the Irish miners, many of whom had already banded together under the auspices of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a semi-secret society dedicated to the advancement of the Irish in America. Among those who counted themselves as loyal members of the AOH were many who would become leaders of the union movement and others, men like Kehoe and Campbell, Donohue and Kelly, who would later be targeted as leaders of the Molly Maguires.

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