A certain Ensign Holler, of the fort’s garrison, wrote that in the winter of 1758 the house was heated by stone coal brought down the river from near Nanticoke and that a wagon load had been brought from a place six leagues from Fort Augusta, which point must have been at or near either the present Shamokin or Mount Carmel. Anthracite had been used in the Wyoming Valley before 1755, and during the Revolutionary War it was shipped down the Susquehanna for the use of the arsenal at Carlisle. On November 25, 1780, the Congress “Resolved, That all the artificers in the department of military stores in Pennsylvania be removed to Carlisle and that in the future only an issuing store and an elaboratory fixing ammunition be kept in Philadelphia.” Immediately thereafter Colonel Blaine was directed to prepare stores, etc., for the troops, and during the month of December of 1780 nearly all the artificers were sent to Carlisle. There is no doubt that coal from Wyoming was there used in the casting of cannon, as it could have been more readily brought down the Susquehanna in bateaux than hauled from the seaports for that purpose. It is also well known that provisions were taken up the Susquehanna, and as coal was then known and probably mined, the bateaux in returning evidently conveyed the fuel to Kelso’s ferry, opposite Harrisburg. The barracks erected by the Hessian soldiers captured by General Washington at the battle of Trenton, and sent to Carlisle as prisoners of war, later became one of the historic buildings of Pennsylvania. The building was one long used by the Carlisle Indian School and is still standing on the Government reservation there. Pittsburgh, too, had used fuel dug from a high bluff before the town. Coal was known to have existed near the present City of Pottsville as early as 1790, when Nicho Allen is said to have discovered some of the black stones and tested their burning qualities. An act approved by the Legislature of Pennsylvania, March 15, 1784, was “for the purpose of improving the navigation of the Schuylkill so as to make it passable at all times, enabling the inhabitants to bring their produce to market, furnishing the county adjoining the same and the City of Philadelphia with coal, masts, boards,” etc. In 1766 a company of Nanticoke and Mohican Indians visited Philadelphia and reported to the Governor that there were mines in Wyoming. A survey of Wyoming in 1768 notes “stone coal” near the mouth of Toby’s Creek. One of General Sullivan’s officers in 1779 records the presence of “vast mines of coal, pewter, lead and copperas.” Obadiah Gore used coal in his blacksmith forge as early as 1769. He also used it in nailing in 1788. The Conestoga wagons might have transported the products of the farm to market for many years more had not Philip Ginter, the hunter, in 1791 discovered “stone coals” under the roots of a fallen tree nine miles west of Mauch Chunk.