Church in Clarks Summit, Steam locomotives, Coal Mine tour, and Priesthood Restoration Site

Today was a non-stop day, full of activities. I attended church at the Clarks Summit branch in Clarks Summit, Pennsylvania -- a few miles northwest of Scranton. After church, I visited the Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, and rode a steam train and walked around in the roundhouse and museum. Then I drove to the Lackawanna coal mine, also located in Scranton, and took a tour into the coal mine. After that, I drove north to Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, where I visited the LDS church's Priesthood Restoration Site. Finally, I drove to Vestal, New York, and spent the night there.

-- Morning Church --

The Clarks Summit branch is a small congregation, and the people were really friendly. I enjoyed listening to the first speaker. She likes music, and is both the church organist and plays the piano for the children in Primary. She grew up in the Methodist church and mentioned some of her favorite childhood songs: "Jesus Loves Me, This I Know", "Jesus Loves the Little Children", and "I Asked the Lord" by Kate Smith.

The second speaker talked about living a life of spiritual integrity.

Congregations in the LDS church are typically called wards, but small ones are referred to as branches. The Clarks Summit branch is trying out a novel way to reach out to people who haven't been attending church lately. They printed some "pass-along" cards (about the size of a business card) with a QR code on the back, and will give them to members who haven't been attending.

The QR code takes you to a site with the weekly bulletin, which has announcements of upcoming activities and a zoom link to the weekly Sacrament meeting for anyone who wants to watch it remotely. I thought that was a good way to reach out. They also posted the QR code in a few places around the building.

Below are the front and back of a pass-along card, and the sign they put in the window next to the meetinghouse door. The QR code takes you here.

   

-- Steamtown National Historic Site --

After church I went to the Steamtown National Historic Site. I wanted to get there by 11:30 so I could catch the scheduled ride on a steam train.

The 40-acre Steamtown National Historic Site is in the Scranton railyard of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad (DL&W) -- one of the first rail lines in the northeastern Pennsylvania.

Northeatern Pennsylvania coal mines produce a high quality coal called anthracite. Anthracite is hard and burns clean without producing a lot of soot, which made it so popular. The DL&W railroad was a major carrier of anthracite. 

George and Sheldon Scranton were in the iron business, and created the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad railroad by combining 3 other railroads. The DL&W wasn't the only railroad that had lines coming into Scranton, though.  The Central of New Jersey, the Delaware and Hudson, the Erie, and the New York, Ontario and Western also ran through Scranton.

Most of the steam locomotives, freight cars, and passenger cars on-site were collected elsewhere by a private collector. After his death, they were purchased and moved to this location. 

Fans of the monopoly game will be familiar with the Reading Railroad. Reading is a town in Pennsylvania, and it is pronouned "Redding", not "Reeding". Remember that next time you play monopoly! 😃

The park offers a few excursions a day on a steam train, and bought a ticket for the 11:30 am train. The ride was an out-and-back that lasted about a half hour. The train and my ticket are shown below.

The train passed by the Scranton mansion, among other places.

Aftr the train ride, I enjoyed walking through the roundhouse and seeing where some of the engines were in the process of being restored. A tool board is visible in the lower right of the third photo, below.

The museum had a couple of cars visitors could walk through. One of them was the mail car pictured below.

One of the rooms had stations describing train-related workers and other people found around a railyard -- station master, master mechanic, condutor, engineer, fireman, brakeman, porter, baggage handler, newsboy, tycoon, hobo, etc.

The park had a lot of good information and was fun to visit.

-- Lackawanna Coal Mine Tour --

Next on the today's agenda was a visit to the Lackawanna Coal Mine, located in Scranton's McDade Park. The Lackawanna mine produced high grade anthracite coal. The park offers tours of the mine, and I signed up for the 2:45 pm tour.

While waiting for the tour to start, I watched a video on the mines. It was sad to see how the mine owners exploited the miners. The railroads and mining comanies were profit driven and had little care for the workers.

While on the tour, our tour guide told us that when a miner died in the mine, the miner's wife was told she had to get her family out of the company housing by the next morning unless she had someone in the family who could replace her dead husband in the mine. Our tour guide recommended we watch the movie "The Molly McGuires", if we want to get a better picture of what it was like for the miners.

We put on hard hats and entered the railcar. The train gave the appropriate whistles, and we descended 300 feet down into the mine in the caged railcar.

Our tour guide explained that the coal is deposited in layers. The black shiny material is coal, and the dull  gray material is rock.

Our guide was really good, and provided us with a lot of detailed information as he led us on a 1/2 mile walk through the mine. The miners were paid by the weight of the coal they extracted, and they had apprentice helpers who they in turn paid. Any ancillary work to get to the coal was unpaid. They also had to supply their own tools and fuses for the explosives.

The work was dangerous. Cave-ins were a possibility.  When they used explosives, they first had to drill mutiple holes for the black powder or dynamite, using a huge drill bit, turning it a quarter turn at a time, and pounding it with a sledge hammer. The drill bits were large and heavy. Some spiral drill bits are leaning against the wall in the photo below.

Before lighting a fuse, the miner had to look both diretions and yell fire in the hole, then quickly run around 2 corners to avoid being hit by rock shooting or ricocheting from the blast.

There was a peg board outside the supervisor's office, indicating which miners were in the mine and which had left, so he could search for missing miners and make sure everyone was out of the mine at the end of the day. 

The mines had fans blowing fresh air into the mine. and of course a canary to detect bad air. They used doors to block off areas that didn't need air when nobody was working those areas. Small boys, as young as 8 years old, were paid to sit by the doors, waiting to open and close them when railcars needed to pass through.

In case of a runaway railcar, the boys had sticks they could wedge between the spokes of the railcar wheels. In some cases, they lost fingers in the process.

Going down into the coal mine was a good esperience, and it was great having a knowledgable guide to tell us about the life of the miners. We each got a certifiate at the end of the tour.

-- Priesthood Restoration Site --

About an hour north of Scranton, in the town of Susqehanna (formerly Harmony, Pennsylvanis), the LDS church has a Priesthood Restoration Site and visitor center.

The site is on the banks of the Susquehanna river. Joseph Smith met and courted his wife Emma Hale there. Her father, Nathan Hale, had a farm, and that is where Emma grew up. The original house no longer exists, but a replica has been built on the site.

Nathan Hale was opposed to his daughter's marriage, but the couple eloped and temporarily lived elsewhere. Sometime afterwards, Nathan sold Joseph and Emma some of the property. They constructed a home similar to the replica pictured below, and grew buckwheat.

Joseph translated around 70% of the Book of Mormon in the house, at a table in a room similar to the one shown below. Emma was his scribe at first, and then a schoolteacher named Oliver Cowdery took her place as scribe.

While translating the Book of Mormon, they came across passages that talked about baptism. Joseph and Oliver went to the woods and prayed about it, and had a vision where they were given priesthood authority by the resurrected John the Baptist, who then instructed them to go into the river and baptize each other. They baptized each other in the nearby Susquehanna river.

The river water looked pretty muddy today. I'm not sure if it is usually that way, or if is an after effect of all the rain this past week from Hurricane Debby. The tour guide told me there had been some flooding on the property this week.

 

Joseph and Oliver later had another vision where Peter, James and John appeared to them and gave them more priesthood authority. The two visions and resulting restoration of priesthood authority are commemorated by statues.

It started raining while I was there, but it stopped as I was leaving. Below is a photo I took of the susquehanna river, from a bridge north of the visitor center, looking south, in the diretion of the Smith and Hale properties.

I crossed the border into New York, and spent the night in the TGI Fridays parking lot in Vestal, New York -- a small town near Binghamton. 

When I asked at Walmart, I was told the Vestal Walmart didn't allow overnight parking, but there was a red line painted on the parking lot, and if I parked on the TGI Fridays side of that line, I shouldn't be bothered. So that is how I ended up parking at TFI Fridays tonight! I parked right next to the red line, under the assumption it was somewhat of a "no man's land".