The Murder of Amos Schroeder: A Novel of the Pennsylvania Anthracite Coal Region Before the Civil War

In late November of 1859, in the Borough of Port Carbon, Pennsylvania, the battered body of a man was found in the sluice of an abandoned slack water channel of the Schuylkill Canal. It was determined by local authorities to have been a murder. But the victim, thought to be a local resident, went unidentified for almost six months.

Port Carbon was one of the many boom towns in the six-county coal region of upstate eastern Pennsylvania. It was the northern terminal point of the 108-mile-long...