Historic objects on display during Saturday’s History Fair at the Fairlane Village Mall. PHOTOS BY LINDSEY SHUEY
Originally published in the Pottsville Republican-Herald on February 13, 2022.
FRACKVILLE - Fred Phillips is an artist with dirt.
A member of the Schuylkill Historical Model Railroad Club, Phillips used dirt to add gritty realism to his highly detailed scale model of Dandos' coal breaker, which stood in Llewelyn until it burned down in 1985. Faceless miniature workers, with dirt where their faces should be, were dwarfed by mountains of shiny blackness in bulky model railroad cars.
"It's made of dirt and coal," Phillips said. "I get dirt and I sift it so that it's fine. I get old slush down at the mine, and I sift it."
The model breaker took four years to build and was completed in 2015. On Saturday, Phillips proudly showed it off at the 2022 Schuylkill County History Fair. On the day of the Fair, the Fairlane Village Mall became the domain of yellowed newspaper clippings, embroidered sweaters and curling photographs of fires, parades and the insides and outsides of coal mines.
Mining memorabilia from the No. 9 Coal Mine and Museum in Lansford was on display.
"It's all about coal mining, and we have parents and aunts and uncles who all worked in the coal mine," said Ruthie O'Dell, a member of the Patchtown Players historical reenactment group. "It's all part of our heritage."
O'Dell was dressed as a 19th-century miner's wife. Her friend JoAnne Zynel was a miner's widow, dressed all in black.
"I'm in mourning," Zynel said, smiling.
All kinds of ephemera was on display at the Fair, such as vintage ashtrays from Eiler's Sandwich Shop in Schuylkill Haven. The ashtrays allowed diners to stick their cigarette butts onto the exposed flesh of drawn pin-up girls.
The most enigmatic were the portraits of people without names or dates, only the studio where the photo was taken. Who are these people? What was going through their minds when they sat down for their portrait? On the rare occasions that they are smiling, are their smiles genuine? These mysteries are what makes them so intriguing.
The most exciting of all are the postcards. They are snapshots of a single moment in time, told through both writing and images. Postcards offer a glimpse into the life and love of their sender, who and what they about at that moment so long ago. The writers of postcards are separated from their loved ones physically, but not emotionally.
"It's a capture of the history," said Darrell Kunkel of Orwigsburg, looking through reams of postcards. "[The message] ties down the picture."
Kunkel's vintage postcard collection numbers in the hundreds.
"Many a time I take 'em and don't take the time to analyze 'em," Kunkel said, "sad to say. I save 'em for a nice winter day, and the winter day never comes."
Tina Liem, a volunteer at the Frackville Museum, made a display chronicling the history and demise of the Schuylkill Mall. She covered an Elmer's poster board with photos of now-historic names like Pomeroy's, Sears and Radio Shack. Ironically, the nightclub Memory Lane, which later became Davita Kidney Dialysis, is now a part of memory lane. There were photos of events once held at the mall, like Lithuanian Days, the Pierogi Bowl and the Puppet Festival of August 1988.
She also offered "Schuylkill Mall trivia," such as the fact that President Jimmy Carter was invited to the mall's grand opening in 1980, but didn't come.
"It was a sad day when the mall closed," Liem said. "A lot of people from this area worked at the Schuylkill Mall at some point, including myself. I grew up in Frackville, everybody loved going to the mall. I wanted to do something to preserve the history of the mall."
Phillips also displayed his model of the old Reading Company Passenger Station in Pottsville, which had its own model railroads in its second-story window - miniatures within miniatures. He showed his worn binder of heavily-annotated photos and blueprints, which he used to construct the Dandos' breaker model. Having grown up in Minersville, he painstakingly recreates the places he was familiar with.
"This is how I express my interest in history, my heritage," said Phillips. "Do you realize how important Schuylkill County was, a hundred years ago?"
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