Appalachian History Series – The Scranton General Strike of 1877 and the Shooting on Lackawanna Avenue
In the summer of 1877, Scranton was a young industrial city built on iron, coal, railroads, and hard labor. Smoke rose from the furnaces of the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company. Coal moved through the Lackawanna Valley by rail. Miners went underground, ironworkers stood at the mills, brakemen and firemen kept the trains moving, and families depended on wages that had already been cut thin.
At the time, Scranton was still part of Luzerne County. Lackawanna County would not be formed until the next year. But the city was already the center of a region with its own troubles. The Panic of 1873 had dragged the country into a long depression. Railroads reduced wages. Iron and coal companies complained of low prices and poor markets. Workers saw something simpler. The cost of living did not disappear just because wages fell.
Across the country, railroad men were reaching a breaking point. In July 1877 the Great Railroad Strike began in Martinsburg, West Virginia, then spread through Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Reading, Chicago, St. Louis, and other industrial centers. Pennsylvania saw some of the bloodiest scenes. Pittsburgh burned. Reading saw troops fire into crowds. By late July, the same national crisis had reached the Lackawanna Valley.
Scranton’s strike would become one of the most serious labor conflicts in Appalachian Pennsylvania. It was not only a railroad strike. It became a citywide stoppage involving railroad workers, miners, ironworkers, laborers, and men from nearby communities. It ended in gunfire on August 1, 1877, when armed citizens fired into a crowd and four men were killed or mortally wounded.
A General Strike in Scranton
The strike in Scranton began with railroad workers and quickly spread. In late July, workers connected to the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad demanded the restoration of wages that had been cut. The demand was not abstract. Men were trying to buy food, pay rent, and keep children alive in a depression.
The railroad stoppage threatened nearly everything in Scranton. Coal depended on rail transportation. Iron and steel depended on freight. If the trains stopped, the mines and mills could not continue normally. A labor struggle on the railroad became a labor crisis for the whole city.
Workers from the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company also walked out. Miners joined the movement. Reports described Scranton as nearly paralyzed, with most industries idle. The men asked for higher pay or the restoration of previous wages. Company leaders argued that markets were too weak to allow it. W. W. Scranton, manager of the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company, told workers that the price of iron and steel rails had fallen badly and that little work was better than none.
That answer did not satisfy men who had already been living on reduced pay. The official investigation later recorded that the company’s non-mining workers had been reduced around July 1, with reductions averaging roughly ten to twelve percent. Some common laborers, according to W. W. Scranton’s own testimony, were making less than eighty cents a day.
The miners had their own grievances. Some witnesses said the strike was not simply the work of one secret organization or one class of men. It drew together union men and non-union men, railway workers and miners, skilled and unskilled laborers. Some testimony described meetings where the men wanted to stay orderly. Other testimony described intimidation, threats, and efforts to stop men from working. The truth of the strike is found in that tension. It was both a protest against hunger wages and a frightening event for a city whose leaders feared Pittsburgh-style destruction.
Mayor McKune and the Citizens’ Corps
Scranton’s mayor in 1877 was Robert H. McKune. A Civil War veteran and local political figure, McKune tried to keep order as news from other strike cities poured in. He issued proclamations warning citizens against violence and urging calm. He also moved to organize a special armed force when it became clear that the city’s regular means of policing were not enough.
That force became known as the Citizens’ Corps. It was made up largely of local men, many from the city’s business and professional classes, and included veterans who knew how to drill and handle arms. Samuel C. Logan, writing in 1887 from the perspective of the Corps and its defenders, later presented the group as the city’s shield against mob violence. Labor historians and later critics have often viewed the Corps differently, as an armed force tied too closely to local capital and company power.
Both views matter because both reveal how divided Scranton had become. To the city’s elite, the Citizens’ Corps represented law, property, and public safety. To many workers, it looked like a private army standing with the coal and iron companies. The fact that the Corps used facilities connected to W. W. Scranton only deepened that suspicion.
In the final days of July, tensions rose and fell. Some railroad workers returned to work. Some miners remained out. Men were accused of working secretly. Mine pumps became a serious concern because flooded mines could cause long-lasting damage. Rumors traveled quickly. In a hungry and frightened city, rumor could be as dangerous as fact.
The Silk Works Meeting
On the morning of August 1, thousands gathered near the silk works in Scranton. The meeting was supposed to hear reports from committees and decide what course the workers would take. Witnesses later gave different estimates of the crowd, but several accounts placed it in the thousands.
The meeting changed when a letter was read aloud. The letter was said to contain a statement by W. W. Scranton that workers could be made to labor for thirty-five cents a day and live on mush, molasses, or similar poor fare. The exact wording varied by witness. The effect did not. Men in the crowd grew angry.
Scranton later denied the statement and called the letter a forgery. The state investigation recorded that denial. Some witnesses at the meeting also doubted the letter’s authenticity, believing it had been written to inflame the crowd. But by the time doubts could matter, the damage had already been done.
A cry went up to go to the shops. The crowd moved away from the meeting ground toward the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company works and other industrial sites. Some men who had returned to work were driven out. Some workers were called “blacklegs,” a common strikebreaking insult. Testimony described stones being thrown and workers forced from the shops. Other witnesses remembered less violence or said they did not see certain attacks. Like many events in 1877, the Scranton shooting survives through competing memories, sworn testimony, angry newspapers, and official language shaped by the politics of order.
The Mayor Is Struck
Mayor McKune went toward the crowd. The official report states that he tried to understand and quiet the situation. He was recognized, cursed, struck, and injured. The investigation described him being hit between the shoulders by a club or heavy weapon, struck by a stone, and later hit in the face so badly that his jaw was broken. Father Dunn, a Catholic priest, helped him through the crowd and away from immediate danger.
This attack became one of the central facts used by defenders of the Citizens’ Corps. To them, the assault on the mayor proved that the gathering had become a riot and that force was necessary. But even here, the testimony was complicated. Some witnesses said parts of the crowd tried to protect the mayor. Others described a violent rush, threats, and weapons. The crowd was not one mind. It contained angry men, frightened bystanders, strikers, observers, and likely some who came looking for trouble.
As McKune was helped away, armed members of the Citizens’ Corps moved through the streets. The two forces, crowd and Corps, came together near Lackawanna and Washington avenues. It was there that the confrontation turned fatal.
Shots on Lackawanna Avenue
The official state report’s summary claimed that stones and missiles were thrown at the special police, that threats were shouted, that pistol shots were fired from the crowd, and that the order to fire was then given. According to that version, the Citizens’ Corps fired after being attacked.
Other testimony was not so clear. One witness said he did not see stones thrown or hear pistol shots from the crowd before the firing. Another remembered the armed men being called vigilantes and said the crowd filed in behind them before the first shots from the Corps rang out. The state investigation preserved both kinds of testimony, even though its own conclusions praised the mayor and the armed citizens.
The firing scattered the crowd almost immediately. Men ran in every direction. Bodies were left in the street. The dead and mortally wounded were Charles Dunleavy, Patrick Lane, Patrick Langan, and Steven Phillips. Dunleavy, Lane, and Langan were killed at or near the scene. Phillips died later from his wounds.
The number of wounded was uncertain. Different sources give different figures, often ranging from around sixteen to more than fifty. What is certain is that the shooting turned a labor strike into a local trauma.
The Citizens’ Corps and its supporters believed they had saved Scranton from destruction. Many workers and their families saw murdered men in the street. The city now had blood on both its labor history and its civic memory.
Martial Law in Scranton
After the shooting, Mayor McKune called for aid. State troops arrived in Scranton on August 2. The city was placed under military control, and troops guarded streets, rail lines, company property, and public order. The presence of soldiers changed the balance of the strike. Workers who had challenged companies and local authorities now faced organized military force.
Governor John F. Hartranft and Pennsylvania military officers treated Scranton as part of the larger statewide emergency. Pittsburgh, Reading, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, and other places had already shown how quickly labor unrest could become open conflict. Scranton’s shooting confirmed the fear that the anthracite region could erupt as well.
The state investigation later praised Scranton’s mayor and special police force, arguing that without their action the city might have suffered as Pittsburgh did. That conclusion must be read carefully. It reflects the viewpoint of officials who valued order and property above almost everything else. But the testimony inside the report also shows the deeper causes of the unrest: wage cuts, unemployment, hunger, distrust of companies, and the anger of working people who believed they had little left to lose.
Arrests, Trials, and the Dead Men
The shooting did not end with the smoke clearing. A coroner’s jury issued warrants against members of the Citizens’ Corps. Those charged included prominent local men. They were accused in connection with the deaths of Charles Dunleavy, Steven Phillips, Patrick Langan, and Patrick Lane.
The arrests themselves became another crisis. Officials feared that accused members of the Corps could be attacked if taken openly. Troops helped manage the situation. The legal proceedings that followed eventually ended with the accused acquitted.
For defenders of the Corps, the acquittals confirmed that the shooting had been a justified act of public defense. For many working families, the result likely felt like another reminder that law and power did not weigh all lives equally. Four working men were dead. Armed citizens went free. The strike had not restored wages. The city’s laboring class had learned a hard lesson about how far local authority would go to keep industry moving.
The Strike’s Political Afterlife
The Scranton General Strike did not win its immediate demands. Workers returned under pressure, and troops helped restore industrial order. Yet the event did not disappear. It shaped Scranton politics, labor organization, and memory.
The next year, Lackawanna County was created from part of Luzerne County, with Scranton as its county seat. Local writers later connected the strike crisis to the argument that Scranton needed a closer center of government and law. The city had learned that distance from the old county seat mattered during emergency.
In 1878, Terence V. Powderly, a major figure in the Knights of Labor, was elected mayor of Scranton on a labor-backed ticket. His victory showed that the strike’s defeat in the streets did not erase working-class political energy. Powderly would later become one of the most important labor leaders in the United States.
The Citizens’ Corps also lived on. It became part of the Scranton City Guard and later the Pennsylvania National Guard structure. In the memory of its supporters, it was born from necessity in 1877. In the memory of labor, it remained tied to the day armed citizens fired into a crowd of strikers.
How the Story Was Told
The sources for the Scranton General Strike do not agree with one another, and that is part of the story. The official Pennsylvania investigation contains sworn testimony and valuable details, but its framing often favors order, officials, and armed citizens. Samuel C. Logan’s A City’s Danger and Defense is essential because it preserves the Citizens’ Corps version of events, but it was written to defend that force and celebrate its legacy.
Newspapers carried the story to readers across the country. Some described a terrible riot. Others focused on the poverty and distress of the miners. Illustrated newspapers such as Frank Leslie’s showed the Citizens’ Corps firing on strikers, giving the public an image of the event that was dramatic but not photographic. Later historians have interpreted the strike through different lenses: law and order, labor rebellion, class conflict, ethnic tension, industrial capitalism, and the long struggle to organize anthracite workers.
The most careful reading holds all of those pieces together. Scranton in 1877 was not simply a city attacked by a mob, nor was it simply a peaceful strike crushed without cause. It was a coal and iron city under economic pressure, divided by class, frightened by news from other strike centers, and full of men who had been pushed to the edge by wage cuts and hunger. On August 1, rumor, fear, anger, and armed force met in the street.
The result was four dead men and a memory that still unsettles the city.
Why the Scranton General Strike Matters
The Scranton General Strike matters because it shows how the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 reached beyond railroad yards. In the Lackawanna Valley, it became an anthracite labor struggle, an ironworker struggle, a city government crisis, and a test of who held power in an industrial Appalachian community.
It also foreshadowed later coalfield conflicts. The region would see new organizing efforts, the rise of the Knights of Labor, and eventually the great anthracite strikes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The same questions returned again and again. Who controlled the mines? Who controlled the police? How much could workers endure before they stopped work? How much force would owners and officials use to restore production?
On August 1, 1877, those questions were answered with rifles on Lackawanna Avenue. Charles Dunleavy, Patrick Lane, Patrick Langan, and Steven Phillips became part of the long history of American labor violence. Their deaths belong not only to Scranton, but to the wider story of Appalachian industry, where coal, railroads, wages, and power shaped the lives of whole communities.
Today a historical marker in Scranton remembers the shooting in plain terms. Armed citizens fired on strikers. Four were killed. Many were injured, including the mayor. Behind that brief marker stands a larger story of depression, wage cuts, mass meetings, forged words, armed citizens, frightened officials, and working families who wanted enough pay to live.
The Scranton General Strike was defeated, but it was not forgotten. It remains one of the defining labor conflicts of northeastern Pennsylvania, a moment when the coal city’s streets revealed the cost of industrial America.
Sources & Further Reading
Pennsylvania General Assembly. Report of the Committee Appointed to Investigate the Railroad Riots in July, 1877. Harrisburg: Lane S. Hart, State Printer, 1878. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42766/42766-h/42766-h.htm
Logan, Samuel C. A City’s Danger and Defense; or, Issues and Results of the Strikes of 1877: Containing the Origin and History of the Scranton City Guard. Scranton: J. B. Rodgers Printing Co., 1887. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008718910
Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency. “Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency Reports on the Scranton, Pennsylvania, Riots, 1877.” Penn State University Libraries Special Collections. https://libraries.psu.edu/about/collections/pinkertons-national-detective-agency-reports-scranton-pa-riots-1877
Scranton Public Library. “The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and Mayor Robert H. McKune, Series Part 1.” Lackawanna County Library System. https://lclshome.org/great-railroad-strike-of-1877-and-mayor-robert-h-mckune-series-part-1/
Scranton Public Library. “Great Railroad Strike of 1877: Notable People in Mayor McKune’s Papers, Series Part 2.” Lackawanna County Library System. https://lclshome.org/great-railroad-strike-of-1877-notable-people-in-mayor-mckunes-papers-series-part-2/
Scranton Public Library. “The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and Mayor Robert H. McKune: Continued Troubles, Series Part 10.” Lackawanna County Library System. https://lclshome.org/the-great-railroad-strike-of-1877-and-mayor-robert-h-mckune-continued-troubles-series-part-10/
Gibbons, Phebe Earle. “The Miners of Scranton.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 55, November 1877, 916-927. https://archive.org/details/harpersnewmonthl55harp
Martin, Edward Winslow. The History of the Great Riots and Full History of the Molly Maguires. Philadelphia: National Publishing Co., 1877. https://archive.org/details/TheHistoryOfTheGreatRiotsAndFullHistoryOfTheMollyMaguires
Dacus, J. A. Annals of the Great Strikes in the United States: A Reliable History and Graphic Description of the Causes and Thrilling Events of the Labor Strikes and Riots of 1877. Chicago: L. T. Palmer & Co., 1877. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/77297
Pennsylvania Adjutant General’s Office. Report of the Adjutant General of Pennsylvania. Harrisburg, 1877. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000499896
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. “Railroad Riots.” Our Documentary Heritage. https://www.phmc.state.pa.us/portal/communities/documents/1865-1945/railroad-riots.html
ExplorePAHistory.com. “Railroad Strike of 1877 Historical Marker.” https://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=1-A-1C1
Historical Marker Database. “Coal Miners’ and Laborers’ Strike.” https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=67774
Library of Congress. “The Start of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877.” This Month in Business History. https://guides.loc.gov/this-month-in-business-history/july/great-railroad-strike-1877
Bruce, Robert V. 1877: Year of Violence. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959. https://archive.org/search?query=1877+year+of+violence+robert+v+bruce
Foner, Philip S. The Great Labor Uprising of 1877. New York: Monad Press, 1977. https://archive.org/search?query=Philip+S.+Foner+The+Great+Labor+Uprising+of+1877
Aurand, Harold W. From the Molly Maguires to the United Mine Workers: The Social Ecology of an Industrial Union, 1869-1897. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1971. https://www.worldcat.org/title/From-the-Molly-Maguires-to-the-United-Mine-Workers
Blatz, Perry K. Democratic Miners: Work and Labor Relations in the Anthracite Coal Industry, 1875-1925. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. https://sunypress.edu/Books/D/Democratic-Miners
Miller, Donald L., and Richard E. Sharpless. The Kingdom of Coal: Work, Enterprise and Ethnic Communities in the Mine Fields. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. https://www.worldcat.org/title/Kingdom-of-coal
Stowell, David O. Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo3631510.html
Azzarelli, Margo L., and Marnie Azzarelli. Labor Unrest in Scranton. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2016. https://www.arcadiapublishing.com/products/9781467119205
Stowell, David O., ed. The Great Strikes of 1877. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p074776
Johnson, Dennis M. “An Investigation into the Scranton Railroad Riots of 1877.” M.A. thesis, University of Scranton, 1969. https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=%22An+Investigation+into+the+Scranton+Railroad+Riots+of+1877%22
Hirsch, Mark G. “Coal Miners and the American Republic: Trade Union Ideology in the Anthracite Region of Pennsylvania, 1875-1902.” Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1984. https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/
Author Note: This article is written as a careful reconstruction of a divided event, using official testimony, local memory, and labor history together. The goal is not to flatten the story into heroes and villains, but to remember the working families, city leaders, and dead men caught in Scranton’s 1877 crisis.