Appalachian History Series – The Day the River Entered the Mine: The 1959 Knox Disaster in Luzerne County
On a cold January morning in 1959, people in the Wyoming Valley watched the ice heavy Susquehanna roll past the coal breakers and company towns that lined its banks. By mid day the river was no longer just beside the mines. It was inside them.
Around late morning on January 22, 1959, the Susquehanna River broke through the thin rock roof over the River Slope workings of the Knox Coal Company near Port Griffith in Jenkins Township. A whirlpool opened in midstream and began to swallow railroad cars, coal waste, and anything else officials could dump into it. Underground, miners heard a roar and felt air and water rush through gangways as the river poured in. Twelve men never came home. The inundation flooded miles of interconnected anthracite workings and effectively ended deep coal mining in the northern field of Pennsylvania.
Today a state historical marker stands outside St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Port Griffith, not far from the collapsed workings. Its text links a very specific place in Luzerne County to the wider history of anthracite, corporate risk taking, and labor struggle across northern Appalachia.
Anthracite country at midcentury
By the 1950s the anthracite district around Pittston and Wilkes Barre was no longer the booming coal frontier of the late nineteenth century. Production had peaked around 1917 and then slid for decades as homes and industries shifted from hard coal to oil, gas, and electricity. Companies merged, closed collieries, or leased their remaining reserves to smaller “contract mines” that worked old pillars and thin seams for short term gain.
The River Slope Mine at Port Griffith fit that late era pattern. The Pennsylvania Coal Company owned the property but leased the workings to the Knox Coal Company, one of several contractors that operated in the Wyoming Valley after World War II. To maintain tonnage in a shrinking market, managers pushed crews into riskier areas, including ground under the river. A state law required at least thirty five feet of rock between the riverbed and any mining, and company maps marked “stop lines” beyond which work should not advance. In practice, later investigations found that the workings had crept well past those lines and that test drilling from the river surface had been incomplete or ignored.
Geology added another problem. The anthracite seam at River Slope rose toward the river in an anticline, so following the coal meant climbing closer to the surface. By the time the last headings were driven, the rock roof between the mine and the Susquehanna was only a few feet thick, far below both company proposals and accepted safety practice.
January 22, 1959: When the river broke through
On the day of the disaster about eighty one men reported for the morning shift at River Slope. A midwinter thaw and heavy rain had already raised the Susquehanna. Miners later remembered water dripping more heavily than usual and a sound like distant freight trains in the gangways.
Shortly before midday, the river finally punched through the weakened roof. In official reports and later reconstructions, investigators describe a column of water and ice tearing into the mine, scouring coal and rock, and forcing air ahead of it into distant headings. The breach quickly widened into an opening estimated at more than one hundred feet across. Above ground, residents watched as a whirlpool formed in the river channel and began to swallow cakes of ice.
Underground, the men had only minutes to decide which way to run. Some tried to reach familiar shafts only to find them blocked or already flooded. Others followed the sound of air currents toward less obvious routes. The exact numbers depend on which account one uses, but the pattern is clear. Dozens were caught below the breach. Sixty or more eventually reached the surface alive. Twelve disappeared in the rising water and were never recovered.
Two escape stories became part of local memory. Assistant foreman Myron Thomas gathered a group of miners and led them through chest deep icy water for hours, feeling along the gangways and repeatedly reciting the Twenty Third Psalm as they moved toward higher ground. They finally reached the abandoned Eagle Air Shaft, a narrow route that older maps still showed but few younger men had seen.
At the shaft another miner, Amedeo Pancotti, made a vertical climb of roughly fifty feet up old timbers and bracing to reach the surface. His shouts alerted rescuers, who helped widen the opening and haul dozens of men out. Pancotti later received the Carnegie Medal for civilian heroism.
Railcars in the river
While survivors struggled toward Eagle Shaft and other exits, mine officials and state engineers scrambled to keep the disaster from swallowing the entire valley. Water from the Susquehanna rushed into a network of interconnected workings under several towns between Exeter and Port Griffith. Contemporary engineering estimates suggest that around ten billion gallons of river water eventually filled those voids.
The first response was literal triage at the hole in the river. Crews cut one of the tracks on the Lehigh Valley Railroad line that paralleled the Susquehanna and bent it toward the breach. Then they pushed loaded hopper cars into the water, trying to jam the opening with steel and coal. Photographs and later reconstructions describe more than fifty railroad cars and hundreds of smaller mine cars being sacrificed this way, along with bales of hay, wooden ties, culm dirt, and stone.
The whirlpool slowed but did not stop. Only after engineers diverted the river around Wintermoot Island, built cofferdams, and pumped out the section of channel over the breach could they properly seal the opening. Crews dumped loam and clay over the hole and then capped it with concrete placed through boreholes in the riverbed. Only when that work was complete could the cofferdams be removed and the Susquehanna restored to its normal course.
Searching for the missing
Once the breach was sealed well enough to limit additional inflow, attention shifted below ground. Pumps worked around the clock to lower the water level in parts of the mine that could be reached safely. Federal investigators from the United States Bureau of Mines joined state inspectors in documenting the scene while families waited for news.
Photographs reproduced in later reports show warped mine cars, twisted rails, and gangways filled with mud and debris. The force of the initial inrush had scattered everything that was not bolted down. Even after months of pumping and inspection, searchers never found the bodies of the twelve missing men. They remain entombed somewhere in the flooded workings beneath Port Griffith and its neighboring communities.
Trials, corruption, and the “Knox Mine Murders”
As the pumping continued, state officials convened legislative hearings and a Luzerne County grand jury to investigate how the disaster had happened. Testimony from miners and engineers quickly focused on pressure from Knox Coal Company management to keep driving headings toward richer coal even when maps and state law said to stop. Union officials and company executives blamed one another.
In the end seven men, including Knox executives, a superintendent, a foreman, and two engineers from Pennsylvania Coal Company, were indicted on charges of involuntary manslaughter. August J. Lippi, the powerful president of United Mine Workers District 1, also faced charges after evidence emerged that he was a secret co owner of Knox, a clear violation of federal labor law. Some defendants were convicted at trial, but appellate courts later overturned the manslaughter verdicts.
Separate proceedings exposed a wider pattern of bribery and corruption. Twelve individuals and three companies were convicted of giving or accepting bribes, violating the Taft Hartley Act, or committing tax offenses connected to the mine. Several company officials and union leaders served prison sentences. Payment of death benefits to the widows of the twelve victims was delayed for more than four years while legal battles dragged on.
For many families, the lack of clear criminal accountability stung more than the technical findings in the reports. In an oral history interview cited by historian Robert Wolensky, one victim’s daughter said she preferred the phrase “Knox Mine Murders” because it captured what she saw as deliberate disregard for the miners’ lives.
The end of deep mining in the northern anthracite field
The Knox Mine Disaster struck an industry already weakened by decades of market decline. What made it decisive was the way water traveled through the old workings. The River Slope tunnels were connected to a web of collieries that stretched under much of the Wyoming Valley. When the Susquehanna poured into one branch, it eventually flooded them all.
Within months of the disaster, major companies began withdrawing from the anthracite business in northeastern Pennsylvania. By the 1970s no large underground mines were operating in the northern field. Remaining coal production shifted to small surface operations, culm banks, and strip mines, or moved south and west into other parts of Appalachia.
For towns like Pittston, Jenkins Township, and nearby boroughs, the flood of 1959 marked the start of a long economic transition. Census and Appalachian Regional Commission data from later decades describe Luzerne County shifting from a coal and manufacturing economy to one centered on warehousing, distribution, and service industries. The culm banks, subsidences, and abandoned breakers that surrounded the river became both environmental hazards and historical landmarks.
Memory along the Susquehanna
In the years immediately after the disaster, stories about Knox lived mainly in family circles, local newspapers, and union halls. Over time, survivors and descendants began to work with historians, museums, and community groups to preserve a more public record.
The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission sponsored a major study, The Knox Mine Disaster: January 22, 1959, by Robert, Kenneth, and Nicole Wolensky, which drew on official reports, company records, and interviews. A second volume, Voices of the Knox Mine Disaster, collected oral histories from miners, family members, and community leaders. Together they gave the event a documented place in both labor history and public memory.
At the local level, the Anthracite Heritage Museum in Scranton and regional groups such as the Anthracite Heritage Foundation helped organize annual remembrance programs. Retired miner Joe Stella and others spoke to school groups about following old maps to find the Eagle Shaft, and about the mixture of fear, endurance, and luck that shaped their escape.
Photographers and documentarians also took up the story. An oral history project with photographer George Harvan preserved his reflections on photographing the Knox scene alongside another mine disaster. Modern preservationists associated with the Underground Miners group have documented shafts, subsidences, and the remains of the river control works on their web site, tying contemporary images to Bureau of Mines photographs from 1959.
The state marker at Port Griffith, dedicated in 1999, condensed these threads into a few hundred words. It emphasizes not only the flood and the death toll but also the role of contract mining, the disregard for stop lines and roof thickness, and the way the disaster “ended most deep mining in the Wyoming Valley.”
Why the Knox Mine Disaster matters for Appalachian history
Luzerne County sits at the northeastern edge of the Appalachian region as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission. Its ridges, river valleys, and company towns form part of a longer chain that runs through central Pennsylvania into West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, and beyond.
The Knox Mine Disaster connects that geography to several themes that run through Appalachian history more broadly.
It highlights how geology and engineering decisions shape entire communities. Mining too close to a river in order to extract a few more pillars of coal led to a collapse that wiped out an entire field of underground operations. Similar overreach appears in stories about strip mining on unstable slopes or the siting of coal waste dams above hollows.
It exposes the complicated relationship between workers, unions, and employers in a declining industry. District 1 of the United Mine Workers had once been a bulwark of anthracite labor power, but by the 1950s some leaders were financially entangled with the very companies they were supposed to regulate. The resulting conflicts of interest damaged the union’s credibility and deepened the sense of betrayal among miners’ families.
It also shows how disaster can accelerate regional economic change. The anthracite belt had already been losing population and jobs, but the sudden flood of 1959 forced both companies and communities to confront the end of deep mining sooner than many expected. The warehouses and distribution centers that line modern highways around Pittston sit on ground shaped by that shift.
Finally, the way northeastern Pennsylvania remembers Knox mirrors how other Appalachian communities remember mine explosions in Kentucky, West Virginia, and Alabama. Oral histories, memorial services, and roadside markers frame disasters not just as moments of grief but as windows into systems of risk and responsibility. The Susquehanna River running past Port Griffith is a reminder that water, capital, and labor have always been intertwined in the mountains.
Sources & Further Reading
United States Bureau of Mines. Report of Investigation 5487: Report on the Inundation of the Knox Coal Company’s River Slope Mine, Port Griffith, Pennsylvania, January 22, 1959. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1959. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015095035643
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. “Knox Mine Disaster.” Pennsylvania Historical Marker (Dedicated 1999). https://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=1-A-9E3
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. “Behind the Marker: Knox Mine Disaster.” ExplorePAHistory. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://explorepahistory.com/story.php?storyId=1-9-0
Wolensky, Robert P., Kenneth C. Wolensky, and Nicole H. Wolensky. The Knox Mine Disaster: January 22, 1959: The Final Years of the Northern Anthracite Industry and the Effort to Rebuild a Regional Economy. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1999. https://archive.org/details/knoxminedisaster00wole
Wolensky, Robert P., Kenneth C. Wolensky, and Nicole H. Wolensky. Voices of the Knox Mine Disaster: Stories, Remembrances, and Reflections of the Anthracite Coal Industry’s Last Major Catastrophe. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 2005. https://archive.org/details/voicesofknoxmine00wole
United States Congress, House Committee on Education and Labor. Investigation of the Knox Mine Disaster. Hearings, 86th Cong., 1st sess., 1959. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.$b644576
National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. “Mining Disasters: Knox Mine Disaster, 1959.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/mining/miningdisasters/knox.html
Underground Miners. “Knox Mine Disaster (River Slope Mine), Port Griffith, Pennsylvania.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.undergroundminers.com/knox.html
Licht, Walter, and Thomas Dublin. The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801489183/the-face-of-decline/
Anthracite Heritage Museum (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission). “Knox Mine Disaster Collection.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.phmc.pa.gov/Museums/AnthraciteHeritage/Pages/Collections.aspx
Times Leader (Wilkes-Barre, PA). “Remembering the Knox Mine Disaster, 1959.” January 22, 2019. https://www.timesleader.com/news/749502/remembering-the-knox-mine-disaster-1959
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “The Day the River Rushed In: Knox Mine Disaster Remembered.” January 22, 2009. https://www.post-gazette.com/news/state/2009/01/22/The-day-the-river-rushed-in-Knox-mine-disaster-remembered/stories/200901220211
Susquehanna River Basin Commission. “History of Mining Impacts in the Wyoming Valley.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.srbc.net/programs/abandoned-mine-drainage/
Appalachian Regional Commission. “County Profiles: Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.arc.gov/county/luzerne-county-pennsylvania/
National Register of Historic Places. “Port Griffith Historic District (Context: Anthracite Mining and Knox Mine Disaster Landscape).” National Park Service. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/SearchResults/Port%20Griffith
Author Note: This story is painful but essential, because disasters like Knox reveal how decisions made far from the working face shape the lives of entire communities. I hope reading it honors the twelve men who never came home and the families who carried the weight afterward.