One of the local mine bosses, John P. Jones, was murdered in Lansford, reportedly in connection with labor union strife, attributed to members of a secret society known as the Molly Maguires, many of whom were put on trial and hanged in Carbon and Schuylkill Counties during the mid-to late 1870s.

In the mid-1870s, there were numerous crimes and atrocities ( often labor related ) attributed to Irish secret societies, collectively known as the Molly Maguires.

Six Molly Maguires were hanged in Pottsville for murder June 21, 1877.

Location of the Coal Region | counties in northeastern Pennsylvania where the Molly Maguires were active

The Molly Maguires were accused of kidnapping and other crimes, largely because of the allegations of one powerful industrialist ( Franklin B. Gowen ), and the testimony of one Pinkerton detective ( James McParland ).

The Molly Maguires originated in Ireland, where secret societies with names such as Whiteboys and Peep o ' Day Boys were common beginning in the 18th century and through most of the 19th century.

" In some areas the terms Ribbonmen and Molly Maguires were used interchangeably.

However, some have drawn distinctions between the Societies of Ribbonmen, who were regarded as " secular, cosmopolitan, and protonationalist ", and the Molly Maguires who were " rural, local, and Gaelic ".

Most landlords and their agents were Protestant, while the Molly Maguires were Roman Catholic — an exacerbating factor that complicated relations.

Local Molly Maguires leaders were reported to have sometimes dressed as women, i. e., as mothers begging for food for their children.

Such disagreements over a period when " labor was at war with capital, Democrat with Republican, Protestant with Catholic, and immigrant with native " notwithstanding, the prevailing view is that the Maguires did exist and were affiliated with the AOH.

Kenny notes the leaders of the WBA were " always unequivocally opposed " to the Molly Maguires.

But there were no Mollys among the leaders of the WBA, who took every opportunity they could to condemn the Molly Maguires and the use of violence as a strategy in the labor struggle.

Many accounts of the Molly Maguires that were written during, or shortly after, the period offer no admission that there was widespread violence in the area, that vigilantism existed, nor that violence was carried out against the miners.

Today, Black Jack's tavern in Girardville, The Hibernian House, continues to be operated by his great grandson, Joseph Wayne and is a popular destination for historians, genealogists, and tourists searching for information on the Molly Maguires, the coal region culture, and their Irish roots.

When Hugh Dubh appealed for aid against his son to the Maguires, Manus made an alliance with the O ' Neills, by whose assistance he established his hold over Tyrconnell.

Dewees, a contemporary and a confidant of Gowen, wrote that by 1873 " Mr. Gowen was fully impressed with the necessity of lessening the overgrown power of the ' Labor Union ' and exterminating if possible the Molly Maguires.

Joseph G. Rayback, author of A History of American Labor, observed: The charge has been made that the Molly Maguires episode was deliberately manufactured by the coal operators with the express purpose of destroying all vestiges of unionism in the area ...

On ‘ Ulster Day ’ 28 September 1912 over five hundred thousand Unionists signed the Ulster Covenant pledging to defy Home Rule by all means possible, drawn up by Irish Unionist leader Sir Edward Carson and organised by Sir James Craig, who in January 1911 had spoken of a feeling in Ulster that Germany and the German Emperor would be preferred to the ‘ rule of John Redmond, Patrick Ford ( veteran Fenian ) and the Molly Maguires '.

" Others argue that Gowen would have diligently prosecuted numerous cases but for his suspects uniformly being furnished with alibis by fellow criminals, some of whom he brought to justice two decades later as Mollie Maguires.

" Other notable instances included his closing argument as prosecutor in the 1876 murder trial of John Kehoe, vilified at the time as the " King of the Mollie Maguires ," in which he portrayed the murders and other crimes attributed to Mollies as being an evil unparalleled in all human history, and as not locally motivated, but driven by orders from other places — Pittsburgh, New York — even other lands — England, Ireland, Scotland ; and his three-hour argument in 1881 before a gathering of outraged stockholders of the bankrupt Reading Railroad, inside Philadelphia's Academy of Music, by which he turned open hostility into enthusiastic rounds of applause One twentieth-century commentator described Gowen's oratory skills thus:

James McParland who infiltrated the Molly Maguires for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency | Pinkerton Agency. Pinkerton's detective agency was already an established presence in the coal fields, having been active supervising the Coal and Iron Police, a private police force authorized by the state of Pennsylvania in 1865, paid for by railroad, mining and iron interests.

Some speculated that his death was the result of action by the apocryphal Molly Maguires in retaliation for his earlier activities against them.

On the ruins of the old kingdom of Uladh they founded a new kingdom — of Airgíalla — which was henceforth for nearly a thousand years to play an important part in the history of Ireland, and which was possessed afterwards by their descendants, the MacMahons, O ' Hanlons, O ' Carrolls, and Maguires .”

Later in his career, as film-stocks became faster and more sensitive, Howe would continue to experiment with his photography and lighting techniques, such as shooting one scene in The Molly Maguires solely by candlelight.

* Burke, William H, Anthracite Lads: A True Story of the Fabled Molly Maguires.

Information passed from the Pinkerton detective, intended only for the detective agency and their client — the most powerful industrialist of the region — was apparently also provided to vigilantes who ambushed and murdered miners suspected of being Molly Maguires, as well as their families.

The industrialist standing to gain financially from the destruction of the striking union acted as prosecutor of some of the alleged Molly Maguires at their trials.

In Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, historian Kevin Kenny traces " some institutional continuity " from the Molly Maguires, back to the Ribbonmen, and previously, to the Defenders.

Pinkerton's published account of the meeting depicts Gowen laying out in some detail the existence, background and nature of a criminal secret society called Mollie Maguires, transplanted from Ireland to the coal region of Pennsylvania.

* The Labor Wars ( New York: Doubleday, 1973 ): the struggles of the labor movement from the Molly Maguires to the 1930s

* The Molly Maguires, a clandestine society of Irish miners who engaged in a violent confrontation with Pennsylvania mining companies in the 19th century.

" Samuel L. French, who was Burgess of Plymouth when this letter was published, mentioned the Molly Maguires in his history, Reminiscences of Plymouth, Pa., writing that " one of their number named Dunleavy was mysteriously shot one evening in a saloon on East Main Street, which incident had the effect of putting a quietus on the band in Plymouth.

Black Jack has gone down in history as a member of the Molly Maguires, a group of Irish immigrants who allegedly committed acts against the mine and railroad owners for their own gains and was hung along with 19 other alleged Molly Maguires in a series of trials that today would be considered travesties of justice.

The prosecution had depended heavily on the investigative work of James McParland who, acting as an operative for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, had helped convict the Molly Maguires three decades earlier, and felt confident that it would convict all three.

Kevin Kenny, an author who has written extensively on the Molly Maguires, believes the most likely explanation is simply the practice of men dressing up like women and taking a female name both as a disguise and simple form of social transgression.

* Franklin B. Gowen, president of the Reading Railroad who served as the lead prosecutor in the trial to break up the Molly Maguires.

The Irish sept O Corragain who had their stronghold in County Fermanagh, as a branch of the Maguires is in fact, the origin of those named Corrigan, Carrigan, Courigan, Corgan, and Currigan.

The castle was the stronghold of the junior branch of the Maguires.

The borough was a major center of anthracite production and the region was embroiled in the Molly Maguires incidents.

The area was incorporated as a borough in 1866 and was a famous hotbed of activity during the era of the Molly Maguires in the 1870s.

During the 1860s and 1870s, Tamaqua was the geographic center hub for the Molly Maguires.

The Molly Maguires was a 19th century secret society of mainly Irish-American coal miners.

Another organization — the Ancient Order of Hibernians ( AOH ), with which the Molly Maguires have sometimes been associated — was founded in the United States, and is properly described as a fraternal organization.

In Labor's Untold Story, Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais put the responsibility for creating the Molly Maguires on industrialist Franklin B. Gowen, claiming :" A good number of historians now concede that there was never any organization in Pennsylvania known as the Molly Maguires — although any militant miner might have been called a Molly Maguire after the newspapers had spread Gowen's charge far and wide ".

But the strategy of the trade union was indirect, gradual, peaceful, and systematically organized across the anthracite region, while that of the Molly Maguires was direct, violent, sporadic, and confined to a specific locality.