then they found out he had squatter's rights.

It was (and probably still is in the dirt-poor parts of the world) common to glean traffic lanes for "roadkill", so to say. The even harder version is people going though mine tailings for tidbits of coal, ore, or whatever may be useful.

My dad recalls gleaning fields for wheat, rye, whatever ears the farmers' workers had lost or missed during harvest.

[edit: not my best day, spelling wise ;-)]

Marion Post Wolcott never seems to disappoint. She really had a great eye and fabulous technique.

Springfield, Missouri has a coal fired plant and it is illegal to pick up coal along the tracks. Seems they had a problem with people getting too close to the trains.

My father got thrown in jail for picking coal off the tracks, Easter Sunday 1928. He was 15 - Delano, Pennsylvania.

Both of my parents grew up poor in western PA "coal patch" towns.

Every time I hear the song "The L&N don't stop here any more" I think of the wonderful stories of the hard luck years they endured. How I would give anything to be standing along the "sulfur crick" with rusty old Pennsy H21 and GLa hopper cars of coal (like those in the W Va picture) rumbling by.

"I was born and raised in the mouth of the hazard holler...
Coal cars rumblin past my door..
Now they're standin in an empty row all rusty
And the L&N dont stop here anymore"

I had an outfit like that as a child. Get up, get in and that's it!

The early years.

We grew up hearing the family was so poor that Grandfather would pick up coal off of the train tracks. Fast-forward 85 years, through the wonders of newspaper archives digitization: a 15-year-old Grandfather is arrested for picking up coal in the rail yard after he pushed it off of a rail car. The following month, Grandfather's name appears on a U.S.Marine Corps muster sheet at Marine Barracks Port Royal, South Carolina (now Parris Island). The beginning of the Sergeant Major's 40-year adventure.

This was apparently very common in coal country in the early 20th century and before. My mom was a coal miner's daughter born in 1910 in Bradenville, Pa. where her father worked the mines and she and her three brothers were often told to take burlap bags to the railroad tracks and pick up as much coal as possible that had fallen off the train cars as they rattled along. They used it to heat their homes in the frigid Pa. winters and her mom would cook with it. When I was very young and went there to my grandma's funeral, I well remember the miles and miles of the most train tracks I've ever seen and coal scattered everywhere. We who are living today have no real idea of how very hard life was in earlier times.