Top: Bituminous coal fields

Center: Northeast Fayette County

Bottom: “Patch” town in coal fields

Below: Coking, beehive ovens

Uniontown and Fayette County, Pennsylvania, 1880s

Up until the 1870s, Fayette County remained isolated and too rugged for large-scale manufacturing or even agriculture. But the exploitation of the underlying bituminous coal seams, especially the Connellsville seam, changed all that. Connellsville coking coal was the best coal in the country for making coke, essential fuel for the growing iron and steel industry. The first great mines and coke yards sprang up in the 1870s and 1880s. The H.C. Frick company became the county’s largest operator.

Population growth followed; three-fourths of the county’s workforce worked in mining or coke-making. Immigrants from England, Ireland, Wales, and from southern and eastern Europe flooded the area.

Coal fortunes funded mansions in Uniontown, while coal companies built scores of “Patch” towns to house labor. At one time, Uniontown boasted more millionaires per capita than any other city in the country. The coking process, which “cooked” coal in beehive-shaped ovens which covered the hillsides, and mines honeycombing the mountains and valley, generated not only wealth for a few but labor turmoil, anti-immigrant strife and environmental degradation.

Slope entry mine

Harry Robinson as a young man

LaVerna Rebecca Smith Robinson as a young woman

The Characters — Real or Fiction?

An Irish Wife is based on my great-grandfather’s family. The story of Niamh, her brother and husband is fiction, but Harry and his friends and family are real.

Harry

Harold Lee Robinson was born Harrie Lee to Agnes Canon and Dr. Jabez Robinson in 1864. He spent his first years on a Montana homestead, somewhere along the Gallatin River near Bozeman. When he was four his mother returned to her childhood home in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, where they lived the rest of their lives among her family.

Harrie changed his name to Harold because he thought Harrie too feminine. He grew up living with his mother and her siblings in Uniontown. After graduating from West Virginia University with a Bachelor of Arts (philosophy) in 1884, he taught school for a year, then returned to earn a Bachelor of Laws in 1886. He became a prominent Uniontown lawyer, businessman (railroads, telephones, coal), newspaperman and politician (Prohibition Party), married LaVerna Rebecca Smith, and raised seven sons and one daughter. He died of cancer on July 15, 1930.

Harry and LaVerna’s Uniontown home, built in 1908

Harold Lee Robinson in later years

LaVerna Robinson in later years

Agnes Canon Robinson

Mary Canon

Isabella Canon

Sarah Canon

Agnes and the Canon Family

Agnes Canon Robinson’s story is told in AGNES CANON’S WAR, and most of the details are true. Feisty, smart, confident, she lived on her own terms and continued to make her mark. She set up a successful real estate business to support herself and her son (Harry took it over when she died; it didn’t flourish under his management) and bought two properties on Fayette Street, one of which housed all her siblings until, one by one, they died. Family lore has it that Senator Sturgeon did in fact want to marry her, though it’s difficult to suss out the timeline, but she rebuffed him, though he supposedly provided the funds for her return trip from Montana. There’s another novel in there, somewhere.

She lived to be 83 years old, though she was an invalid the last few years of her life, and died on June 12, 1908.

The Siblings

Agnes’s sisters are . . . well, mostly fact. Their birth and death dates are a little off, and Joanna is a special case. I have no surviving pictures of them, so I chose random pictures from the Internet to spark their personalities as I wrote.

Mary: The eldest in the book, she was actually the fifth sister. 1827 – 1900.

Agnes: The second in the book, fourth in life. 1824 – 1908

Isabella: Second in life, she dies before the book begins. 1820 – 1851

Sarah: Eldest in real life. 1819 – 1895

Elizabeth: Third in real life, sixth in the book. 1823 – 1898

Martha (Mattie): Youngest in book and life. 1829 – 1915

Joanna: Joanna is a fabrication but is based on the only male in the family: John Canon. John was the eldest (1817 – 1896). He never married, either, and lived his life with his sisters, dying of old age in Agnes’s house in Uniontown. The story required that there be no males, so poor John was transformed.

The Lincoln-Robinson cemetery in Bethelboro, northeast of Uniontown. Agnes, Harry and many of their relatives are buried here.

Senator and Dr. Daniel Sturgeon

Elizabeth Canon

Mattie Canon

Joanna Canon