Outskirts Press, INC.

Port Carbon, Pennsylvania, November 26th, 1859: The battered body of a man was found in the sluice of an abandoned slack water channel of the Schuylkill Canal. It was determined by local authorities to have been a murder. But the victim, thought to be a local resident, went unidentified for almost six months. The mysterious affair and the unusual facts surrounding the murder of one Amos Schroeder was published in a series of four newspaper articles spanning from December, 1859 to May, 1860 that appeared in the Miners’ Journal, and Pottsville General Advertiser, the historical regional weekly newspaper of publishing magnate Benjamin Bannan of Pottsville. Details of Bannan’s investigation, however, are not known. The case was apparently solved, but never fully closed. The murderers, who had been identified through the efforts of Bannan, fled Schuylkill County before they could be brought to justice despite the reward offered by the County Commissioners. Bannan had opted not to publish the murderers’ names, as they remained at large. No historical record has been found to indicate that they may have been apprehended, nor ever publicly named. It was not until over a hundred and fifty years later when members of the family, while researching their coal region ancestry, stumbled upon the case of Amos Schroeder, who was discovered to be the brother of the author’s Great-Great Grandfather. The identities of the murderers, however, remain lost to history. This book is a fictional account of how the facts and the mysterious circumstances surrounding the murder of Amos Schroeder may have arrived on the pages of the Miners’ Journal. It is also a novel that takes a historical journey to the anthracite coal region of eastern Pennsylvania during the mid-nineteenth century when coal was king. It is a story of the hardships endured by the thousands of immigrant families arriving from Europe during the 1800s to work the mining operations and ply the waterways of the Schuylkill Canal. It is a story of the heritage both famously and infamously created by the wealthy coal barons, the industrialists, and the railroad magnates as they shipped incredible amounts of anthracite coal and commodities to Philadelphia via canal boats and rail to fuel the industrialization of a growing America in the northeast before the start of the Civil War.