9 Coal Mine & Museum

Great place to take the little bastard kids, to use as canaries. Just don’t light a match.
But truth be known, this is the better of the two area coal mines. Shame the website suck nards worse than that stupid $ 27 Hoover I bought at the Target.
Anysmeg, the tour is nice and long plenty of time on the mine train too; just watch your head. Not many ghosts, or farting drunks to worry about. And the giant mutant snakes are probably not real either.
It is cold in there so pack an alpaca sweater. Yeah it might be 101 outside but in the mine it’s like low 50’s.
Also note the tour is not a great place to being your dog. For some reason, dogs shy away from the mile pit area. Not sure why.
So, if you like coal and bats, come on by and if you don’t like coal, then why are you even reading this.

The No. 9 Mine and Museum is a must do when in the Lansford, PA area. It gives an first hand look at the lives and work of the miners and the difficulties they experienced underground.
The museum highlights the hold the Coal Company had on the workers. They were paid by the ton, but had to supply all of their own tools, explosives, tool repair, etc. at inflated prices from the Company Store. By the end of the month, they may have even ended up owing money to the company.
The museum is CLOSED on MONDAYS & TUESDAYS. Off season mine tours are limited. Check their website for current dates and hours. The brochures in local hotels and tour racks have the OLD PRICING. Museum with mine tour costs $ 10 per person (⁸⁄₂₀₁₅).
The tour of the mine is a MUST DO. Be sure to dress warmly — PANTS and a SWEATSHIRT. The walls in the mine are dripping water and leeching iron. If you touch or lean against the walls, you will stain your clothes.
The tour is really interesting. The mine car ride into the mine is noisy. Small children may want to bring earplugs or use their fingers.
The tour guides are very knowledgeable about the history of the mine, mining activities, methodologies, and miner organized labor.
Totally worth the time to get there. The museum is more like a giant attic collection of coal mining memorabilia. The displays are haphazard and disorganized. It helps is some of the staff walks around with you explaining things. There are some cool albums of images & death tolls. You are allowed to open the albums and binders of articles, pictures and records.
The floor in the mine shaft has been lined with large gravel. Not to friendly for walkers, wheelchairs or handicapped people.

ATTENTION: Cash only!
The building part of the museum is fairly decrepit and uninteresting. There’s a LOT of stuff to look at and it’s a little overwhelming because there’s absolutely no system or order to it.
Aside from that, the cart ride INTO the mine was AWESOME. Scary, insanely loud, a little dangerous feeling, but super cool.
Our guide was local and had family that worked in the mines, so his information was familial. I would have liked a more informative and historical approach to it, but I’m in a mine. That’s not a place you find yourself often, so I’m good with it.
If you get the chance to come here, do it. It’s an hour long tour inside the dark, dreary and dripping 52 degree mine, so wear a coat!

The best Coal mine tour I have ever been, and I’ve only been to one. John was our tour guide and so AWESOME. He was very friendly, entertaining, and knowledgeable about life as a coal miner back in the 1800’s.
Something very eerie and interesting about the place especially how they worked, lived, died, etc. This is not to be missed if you are visiting the Poconos. Entrance is only $ 10. The museums had so many great relics from inside the coal mine this depicts life and shows you the true hardships and how easy we have it now folks.

Great way to spend a few hours. Good for children and adults. I learned a great deal from reading in the museum and from the accounts of the staff sharing the stories of their grandfathers and great grandfathers working in the mine. The stories extended to the families and how they survived in the industrial revolution and being «owned» by the coal mine companies. Well worth the time and money.

«You load sixteen tons, what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store»
Tennessee Ernie Ford may have made those lyrics popular but this is the place where for 117 years (the longest operating coal mine in the world 1855 – 1972) those same lyrics were a fact of daily life for the miners who worked and in some cases gave their lives digging for black diamonds.
You got three separate things going on here.
Number one is the museum/​gift shop. The gift shop is very small and quite honestly is full of crap. Somehow the one thing the lovely wife suckered me into buying here was some Polish/​Slovak cookbook that came from a local church for five bucks.
Number two is the museum. The Wash Shanty Museum houses the region’s largest collection of mining memorabilia. This museum is the Panther Valley’s «family attic» filled with equipment and artifacts of the anthracite coal industry.
The museum itself is almost better than the mine simply because of the shear volume of actual records, pictures and equipment. You’re not doing yourself or the place justice if you don’t give it a good 30 – 45 at minimum look through.
Number three is the mine. As discussed by other Unilocalers you’ll be taken via mine train 1600 feet horizontally, not vertically like the mine in Scranton, into the mine and then you’re guide will show you around. You’ll see the old elevator, a couple hundred feet down to where the current water level is, the muleway, the hospital, where the mine had a cave in twenty-​ish years ago from other mining that was going on near by plus a lot of other neat things.
Our guide «Chris» (not his name, it’s a long story) was great. He was funny & sarcastic but extremely knowledgeable about the mine, the area and his family’s connection to both.
As for the song lyrics that I started with, your guide with give you at the beginning the simple explanation of mining Economics 101 where sure you would get a job and sure you would get a «free company house» but between the injury rates and needing to buy everything from the mining company store it was a perpetual debt cycle that you couldn’t escape from and even when the miner died it would carry to the next generation or else you’re family would be homeless.
I still like the mine in Scranton a bit more but No. 9 is Lansford is a winner that should definitely be on everyone’s list of attractions to visit.
If you go:
Mine Tour & Museum — $ 10.00 per person (Age 11 to Adult)
Mine Tour & Museum — $ 6.50 per person (Child Age 5 to 10)
Child Age 4 or Under —- FREE
School Groups of 20 or More —– $ 6.50 each
Adult Tour Groups of 20 or More —– $ 7.50 each
Museum Only — $ 3.00 per person
October Haunted Mine Tours — $ 15.00 per person
CASH ONLY!!!
Tours run from May to October on the hour from 11am-​3pm mostly Friday-​Sunday only but Wednesday & Thursday tours occur June-​August and the museum is open year round.

8÷28÷2013
A good tour that takes you 1600 feet into the mine. The talkative, fun and knowledgeable tour guide takes you through parts of the mine describing life in the mines. Well worth the price. The train ride in and out, however is a bit bouncy and rough on the innards. Jackets are recommended; clothes that you don’t mind getting dirty are a good idea too since it is dirty in the mine.
This coal mine is the real thing. Few others do it as well. The tour guide describes the working life in the mines, the dangers of it, child labor, reasons for the closure of the mine … all with anecdotes related by hearing stories from family and ancestors that worked in the mine.
The museum is also well organized and quite interesting. Spend some time here.

I very much enjoyed the authentic tour of an actual anthracite tunnel which had its start in the 1850s coal mining boom. The feeling of entering the below ground excavation area for the first time by train car is something I’ll always remember. Our helpful volunteer tour guide (Chris) was a masterful storyteller and was able to not only inform the group of nine that made our way into the deep dark mine, but also helped us to imagine a hard work life of an original miner, and their original mining apparatus, all paid for out of their dues. They also have state certified inspectors check the mine daily for stability, so it is as safe as any underground structure could be. I highly recommend this tour and it is worth a trip.
The museum and mine were combined only $ 8 for a complete tour which took a little over an hour. The museum has a light budget, but fortunately they are able to heat the place perpetually through winters using a stash of coal they sold out to a distributor. The museum has artifacts that are preserved and cased in glass enclosed exhibits with a thin layer of coal dust, untouched for who knows how many years. Unlike many modern museums which attempt to exhibit information in clean glass cases using typed signage with everything in a certain order, this showroom display was much more accessible than that. It looked more like somebody’s personal notes from years ago were attached to everything such as the actual payroll records from the 1950s and all that made the collection feel even more genuine as it had been left all alone in its original state rather than made fancier to show.