The introduction of imported strikebreakers and manufacturers finding substitutes for the area's special block-coal, forced the organized miners back to work at prevailing wages.

Mine owners employed the practice of importing replacement workers (strikebreakers) from far afield, from the Port of New York and other Eastern seaports, and from Virginia.

The fledging government’s policies of raising taxes and converting communal and church lands into real estate hit the peasant population particularly hard.

The penniless immigrants ended up at government expense in a large shelter on Ward’s Island, on the grounds of an insane asylum.

When the coal operators from the Mahoning Valley sent recruiters to tap this idle labor force, 200 Italians responded to their call between March and May 1873.

Local papers recorded arson and one strike-related homicide, that of Giovanni Chiesa, aka John Church, both in Churchill.

[16][17] Although the miners' strike began nine months before the Panic of 1873, railroad construction had begun falling the year before as a result of Civil War over expansion.

[19] Young attorney William McKinley represented the unpopular miners without a fee, by highlighting the dangers of the industry – 250 fatalities in the state every year, and another 700 injuries – and the practices of local mine owners.