We were up in coal country last week — Ashland, right over the hill from smoldering Centralia. It's one of those older Pennsylvania towns that time seems to have passed by. The homes are mostly period pieces, the population a fraction of what it once was. Who lives here? Those who have always lived here, since the days of King Coal.

The story of Pennsylvania's coal country is fascinating for those interested in the economic history of our country and in the history of organized labor. Here was an epicenter of the labor movement. We visited an old coal mine; it's easy to see why.

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The Pioneer Tunnel Coal Mine and Steam Train takes you 1,800 feet into Mahanoy Mountain, the cars rattling through the dripping darkness. Miners were barely able to see a few feet in front of their faces, and were faced daily with the prospect of deadly gases or cave-ins. Our guide told us that if a miner was hurt, he was loaded on the back of a mule, which carted him home, dropped him off — and that was that. No such thing as company-provided health care in those days. Then the company recruiter would go down to the pub, announce there was work to be had — and there were always plenty of takers.

Small wonder that coal towns were hotbeds of unionism — and attempts to crush those unions.

There was violence in this area. It was the stomping grounds for the famous Molly Maguires, the Irish-American secret society that allegedly terrorized mine bosses — though some historians say the Mollies may have existed only in the imagination of those bosses who used them as a scapegoat to put a boot to labor's throat.

I wonder how much of this stuff is taught in Pennsylvania schools today. I wonder how much your average Pennsylvania resident knows of, say, the great coal strike of 1902, centered in these coal fields, which involved tens of thousands of miners. It prompted the intervention of President Teddy Roosevelt to ensure that the great Northern cities had their winter fuel supply.

I briefly wondered how the likes of Fox News would have covered the Molly Maguires or the coal strike. But that question pretty much answers itself.

Union sentiment was extraordinarily high in this part of Pennsylvania. Unions helped make miserable work conditions a little less miserable; unions improved the lot of the worker, his family and his entire community.

But I wonder if these small towns are still as pro-union as they were — or if, even in a place like coal country, the sentiment has turned against unions.

Our national view on unions seems to be that they once played a necessary role but have now outlived their usefulness. Indeed, in the popular, right-leaning narrative, unions are a scourge, driving up costs, impeding efficiency, protecting slackers. Public-sector unions are regarded as enriching themselves at the expense of taxpayers. If you listen to the anti-union narrative, you get the idea that schools are filled with instructors who couldn't spell "cat" if you spotted them the "c" and the "a." My oldest has been in school for nearly six years and I've seen no evidence of this. But maybe I just don't watch Fox News often enough.

Times have obviously changed, and I'm sensitive to the argument that unions may not be as necessary now as they were then. Thing is, back when coal was king, plenty of people — most of them with a stake in the matter — argued that unions were unnecessary.

Indeed, you could take the rhetoric of 1902 and set it down in 2011 and note little disparity in the message — though you might notice a difference in who was making the argument.

Gil Smart is associate editor of the Sunday News. Email him at gsmart@lnpnews.com, or phone 291-8817.