Harmar Coal - 10x8" Print

Photograph by Don Henderson. Digital photograph of Terrace Drive and Harmar Mine, 10x8" glossy. When I was kid, my dad, a Korean War Veteran and a boilermaker, with money from the G.I. Bill, moved the family from the Oakland section of Pittsburgh to the suburbs of Harmar Township in the Allegheny Valley, northeast of Pittsburgh. This is Northwest Appalachia. We lived in a suburban plan of mostly ranch style homes, 2 miles up the hill from the massive Harmar Coal Mine that dominated the small mining town of Harmarville. Most of the people in Harmarville had some connection to the mine that opened in 1915. Many of the kids that I went to school with lived in former company houses along Guys Run Road, Terrace Drive and Freeport Road. Many of my classmates after high school went to work at Harmar Mine or at the nearby and infamous Harwick Mine. Mining was in their DNA and as the boys came of age, they went to work at the mine like generations of their families had done before them. The girls married miners, had kids that grew up to be miners and the cycle continued. Mining wasn't part of my heritage, my family was railroaders, boilermakers and soldiers. Although I admired them all, I was none of the above, I was desitin for other things like art & photography which brings us to this photo. This is Terrace Drive in Harmarville, it ran parallel to Guys Run Road and sat in the shadow of the mine that was then run by Consol Coal Company and was nearing mined out and closed in 1980. I took this photo in the Winter 1976 while I was graphic design student at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. This was taken in front of my friend John Stoeff's family's row house looking towards the mine. It was taken with a Pentax Spotmatic SPII on Kodak Tri-X film.     Printed from an Epson Expression XP-15000 printer using Claria Hi-Definition Ink on a 8.5x11" Epson glossy digital photo paper. Mailed in flat, rigid envelopes to prevent damage or curling, and are ready to frame. * Watermark will not appear on physical print.