As announced in my previous piece, I took a writer's road trip on Friday to visit Pottsville,  Schuylkill County's seat and home of its historical society. My object was to discover what holdings in the historical society might be of use in reconstructing my mother's world, and to get what information I could about the Braun School of Music, where my mother was a student in the early 30s.

Businessman John Pott founded the city in 1806 near the site where Necho Allen discovered anthracite coal in 1790. Construction of a canal along the Upper Schuylkill River and later rail development led to the opening of more mines and an influx of immigrant labor to work them. By the end of the 19th century Pottsville was a boom town with a peak population of about 30,000. The area weathered the Depression because of the demand for coal. After World War II, however, recession hit the coal industry hard. Mines shut down and a bypass routed traffic away from downtown, and Pottsville, like other towns in "The Region," changed.

My mother, Rose Dwyer, was born in Mahanoy City, a mining village about fifteen miles north of Pottsville. Both of her grandfathers were miners who had come to this country in the great wave of Irish immigration depicted in the film "Far and Away." Her father, Michael Dwyer, began his working life at the age of twelve as a slag picker, a dirty, unskilled job usually assigned to slender children. Not satisfied with the miner's life, he tutored himself in English and mathematics and was able to pass the examinations which made him a mail carrier.

My mother left Mahanoy City in 1935 for a government job in Harrisburg, the state's capital. When her father died in 1940, she moved her mother to Harrisburg as well. There she married and began her family. Her brother had left home for Philadelphia while my mother was still in high school. In the early 50's her sister moved to Harrisburg as well. The result was that I grew up knowing where my mother was from, but visiting the area only for funerals.

To me the very names of the settlements "up home" had a hick town quality -- Pottsville, Minersville, Ashland, Carbondale. I was 11 when I visited Mahanoy City for the first time, and I could see that it was not a city at all, but a dusty bowl of wooden row houses ringed by hills of coal dotted with seventeen cemeteries. Before the interstate (marked with a blue line on the map above) the trip took nearly two hours, my mother chain-smoking all the way in a car without air conditioning.

We went up to Mahanoy City only to bury the latest departed elderly cousin or visit the graves of relatives I didn't know, one summer making the circuit no fewer than seven times. Even though these trips nurtured my abiding fascination with cemeteries, I regarded them as an ordeal.

Thus I arrived in Pottsville Friday afternoon with certain assumptions already tucked into my notebook. I assumed I'd find a moribund town not unlike Mahanoy City, full of old people and decaying buildings. I didn't hold out much hope for what I'd find at the historical society -- I thought it would be something like Mahanoy City's library, which has no children's section, no public bathroom, and serves its patrons chiefly through inter-library loan. I was certain the Braun School of Music was a thing of the past, but I hoped some person or document at the historical society could at least pinpoint its location.

Imagine my surprise, then, to discover a town whose population is scarcely smaller now than in the coal industry's heyday. Elegant 19th century architecture abounds on the  well kept streets, and only an ATM hung on the bank's columned facade tells you this is not 1935. The Egyptian revival gate and the fenced burial plots I could see beyond at the Charles Baber Cemetery set my taphophile's heart to racing.

The historical society occupies cramped quarters in an old fire hall -- the splendid Female Grammar School is undergoing renovation for the society's eventual occupancy and expansion. I was able to read a brief history of the Braun School of Music which included several notations of my mother's career there, and was delighted to learn that the building which housed it during her day is still there, protected by historical site status.

As a writer and a historian, I'd made a mistake. I'd gone with assumptions that proved false and that took time and effort to shed. Had I gone with an open mind, the trip would have been more pleasant and more productive.

I left for the 50-minute zip down the interstate to home eager to return for the self-guided walking tour, for an exploration of the cemetery and my mother's old school, for Molly Maguire weekend in June. And when I do, my journey will be so much easier for my leaving excess baggage behind.