Return to Bitumen

Bitumen, Pa. Was abandoned in 1929, when Cook’s run Coal Company finally closed its mines with the company, the striking miners, and the coal seams all nearly exhausted. Roday, there is only a rock-chip road, two or three converted company houses, and the remaining section of one of Bitumen’s three churches, recently refurbished as the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. On July 2, 1978, several hundred residents, former residents, family members, and friends gathered to attend Mass and talk about the past. The talk was frequently of childhood –of the Swedes and the Irish and the Czechs who built their homes on Monkey Street, of “my first day in the mines” and “the nook” at the company store, of Pop getting drunk on a church holiday and the strikebreakers of last years, of Momma still baking bread as the family was being evicted and the passage into adolescence in a 19th century coal town, of moving away to Cleveland and New Jersey and the ensuing births and deaths and marriages, and, finally and always, of the RETURN TO BITUMEN-NOTE: this program is part of RADOC –the Rural America Documentation Project of Penn State Television. RADOC was organized to produce an extended series of documentary films in a particular geographic area- rural Northcentral Pennsylvania- over a period of years, with the twin goals of preserving selected samples of contemporary rural life and of following the diverse social changes likely to take place within this area during the last quarter of the 20th century. RADOC also includes a collection and cataloging effort, in cooperation with Audio Visual Services and Penn State University, which assembles media resources concerned with Rural America from a variety of sources for national distribution.