Luis came to Shenandoah looking for work and found the town friendly enough that he invited his mother to visit him from Mexico one year. I had come to Shenandoah to tell the story of how residents were so frightened by immigration that a young man named Luis Ramirez ended up dead.
Shenandoah was once the most congested square mile in America, according to "Ripley's Believe It or Not!" The population has dropped to just over 5,600 in the 2000 census. The mines shut and the men stopped coming down from the hills. Shenandoah was decimated by the end of the anthracite coal industry after World War II. Pennsylvania has many of these stories of wrenching endings: the death of steel in Pittsburgh, the closing of the Breyers ice cream plant in Philadelphia. towns undone when industries, like manufacturing, collapsed or went away. These are the kinds of towns journalists used to write about during the last economic decline: thriving U.S. The oldest residents still smile at memories of the prosperity of that time, when evening drew the miners down from the hills to greet their wives and children and have a drink. From the time it was incorporated in 1866 to the 1920s, the population boomed to nearly 30,000. Shenandoah was settled by Eastern Europeans, who were drawn by the discovery here of anthracite coal. Empty front porches face empty front porches with broken stairs, there are few open businesses and much of the town seems to have been painted and repainted in industrial white. Enormous metal windmills punctuate the empty landscape as you drive into Shenandoah and you realize you're not entering one of those picturesque American towns that sells taffy and still has rotating barbershop poles on Main Street.Įverywhere you look in Shenandoah there are signs of a better past: an arrow pointing toward a defunct Tastee Freez, a shuttered shop for precious antiques, out-of-date announcements for places where you used to be able to dance. Few mining towns are what you'd call beautiful, but it's especially hard when the earth is cold and colorless. The mountains were brown and the trees were bare. (CNN) - The morning I drove to Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, the air was crisp with the end of winter. Published by arrangement with Celebra, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. The following is an excerpt from "Latino in America" by Soledad O'Brien with Rose Marie Arce.
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