Before you start to read this section, I feel as though an explanation is due as to what it is and how it came about. First this section is taken, as close to verbatim as we could make it, from THE BLOSSBURG ADVERTISER, the local Blossburg weekly newspaper at the time. The papers, that we used, ran from December 9, 1898 through December 1, 1899. The strike of 1899 - 1900 took place from June 13, 1899 until February 1900. Although the papers do not cover the entire stike, they do cover the major portion as well as the months leading up to it. I was very fortunate in finding these papers and it was not by the usual method such as searching university libraries. As it happened, a friend and I were talking and he wanted to know what project I was working on. I mentioned that I was searching for information about W.B. Wilson and any local coal strikes in the late 1800s. He told me he had a bunch of OLD NEWSPAPERS at home and I was welcome to look in them for any information I could glean. Well as you will see it was a gold mine of information. After reading the newspapers and re reading W.B. Wilson's Annals of an Immigrant I soon learned that the owner as well as the printer were friends of his. The businessmen of Blossburg were as captive to the coal company as the miners, due to the high freight rates they paid the railroad, as the railroad owned the coal company.

Thanks, Jim, for saving some of our history.