TABLE 132.-Strikes, suspensions, and lockouts in the Pennsylvania anthracite region, 1919-1923 The use of undercutting machines, now so general in the bituminous-coal mines, has made little progress in the face of the greater natural difficulties in the anthracite mines. Machines are employed only in the gently dipping beds of the Wyoming region and Sullivan County, and the total mined by machine in 1923-1,079,055 tonswas only 1.4 per cent of the breaker output. Strip mining, on the other hand, has assumed greater importance in relation to the total output in the anthracite than in the bituminous-coal mines. The anthracite mined by stripping in 1923 was 2,020,623 tons, or 2.6 per cent of the total breaker product; the corresponding figure for bituminous-coal mining was 2.1 per cent. TABLE 133.-Pennsylvania anthracite mined by machines, 1921–1923 TABLE 134.-Pennsylvania anthracite recovered from steam-shovel strip pits, In 1923, 60 dredges reported to the Geological Survey a production of 853,900 gross tons, with a value of $811,065. The figures are possibly incomplete. The output of the dredges is shown in the tables of this report, apportioned between the Schuylkill, Lehigh, and Wyoming regions, but this apportionment is necessarily arbitrary, for many of the dredges are working at points distant from the The recapitulation by rivers in Table 135 will indicate more clearly where the dredge coal is recovered. The seasonal nature of dredging is shown by the table of number of employees in each month (Table 136). In June, when the maximum was reached, the number of men at work was 504, or two and a half times as many as the minimum in January. TABLE 135.-Anthracite produced by dredges, 1923, by rivers TABLE 136.-Number of employees on pay rolls of anthracite dredge operations on the first day of each month, 1922-23 In Pennsylvania, as in Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, the amount of coal raised in 1923 made the fourth best record in the annals of the State. The years in which a greater tonnage was mined were 1913, 1917, and 1918, but 1923 was unusual in that every county showed an increase, the output of wagon mines alone falling off. The production rose from 113,148,308 tons in 1922 to 171,879,913 tons in 1923, a gain of 58,731,605 tons, or nearly 52 per cent. There was but one State that showed a greater percentage of increase in production-Maryland and one other that approximated this percentage Ohio. In Maryland the value also showed a larger rate of gain. The total value in 1923 was $472,217,000, which was $120,440,000, or 34.2 per cent, greater than in 1922. The spot prices in the Somerset, Clearfield, and Pittsburgh districts for a series of years and for the months of 1923 are charted in Figure 57. Since 1918, when the rate per ton was the same for the coals of the Somerset and Clearfield districts, the curves for these districts have run practically parallel. The Pittsburgh price generally ran lower than that for the Clearfield district; but in 1921 it exceeded the Clearfield price by 1 cent ($2.25 as compared with $2.24), and in September and December, 1923, by 7 cents and 14 cents, respectively. In Pennsylvania, as in other States, prices were falling throughout most of 1923. Because Pennsylvania has a much greater productive capacity than any other State, its output can not be plotted on the same scale as even Illinois and West Virginia; hence the break in the diagram of average daily production. In 1918 the average was 580,000 tons, and in 1922 as a whole it was 369,000 tons. In January, 1923, transportation disability limited the output of coal, but this obstacle was overcome in the following months, and production rose steadily till August, when the top notch was reached at a daily average of 622,000 tons; then the lack of a market caused operations to slow down, and the graph shows a precipitate decline to the end of the year. The average for 1923 as a whole was 562,000 tons. |