created: August 17, 2001

Eckley Village was a coal company town that has survived virtually intact from the Turn-of-the-Century. The town serves as an open air museum of community life in Pennsylvania's Anthracite Region. It is perhaps most famous as the setting for the folk classic movie The Molly Maguires, starring Sean Connery and Richard Harris.

Public funds support the back-dating of coal miners' homes to demonstrate how living conditions changed over time. The scene above shows the rear of a typical duplex company house as originally built. Small building and lean-to behind the main house housed two kitchens and fuel. Later, these out buildings were absorbed into large lean-to extensions to the main house.

"The Company Store" has entered American folklore as the focal point of turning coal miners into wage slaves. The store at Eckley Village serves as both a museum within a museum and as a souvineer shop. Note the railroad siding and freight platform to the left of the store.

The Methodist church, sits at the foot of the street among the homes of the miners.

This replica of a coal breaker was constructed as a prop for the movie, The Molly Maguires. Only those parts of the structure that showed in the movie scenes were built, which left it in a half-built condition. It appears to have not been maintained since filming ended; in 1999 it was a dilapidated relic.

In the 1870s, when the half-mythical Molly Maguires terrorized non-Irish folk in the Anthracite Region, the Reading Coal & Iron Company and its parent Reading Railroad hauled coal to market in 4-wheeled cars called "Jimmies." This is one of a short string of replica "Jimmies" spotted under the tipple at the Eckley breaker. It is a reasonable facsimile of cars actually used by the Reading Co. and matches the cars in the coal train blown up in the movie by the characters played by Connery and Harris.

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