Editing Greensboro, Pennsylvania (section)

===The industrial era and today===

Around the start of the 20th century came industrialization, and [[Western Pennsylvania]]'s role was vital in the transformation of the national economy. A part of the Klondike coal seam,<ref>{{Cite web| url=http://patheoldminer.rootsweb.ancestry.com/indexk.html| last1=Washlaski| first1=Raymond A.| title=Westmoreland County Pennsylvania Coal Mine Index K| publisher=Virtual Museum of Coal Mining in Western Pennsylvania| date=August 3, 2010| access-date=January 27, 2017}}</ref> which extends through most of eastern Greene County and western Fayette County, the Greensboro area was rich in the mineral that made the region famous around the world. Greensboro, being a community already established with the conveniences, commerce and trade, suddenly found itself as a growing cultural and economic hub for many growing "coal patch towns"<ref>{{Cite web| url=http://kycoal.homestead.com/CoalPatchTowns.html| title=Coal Patch Towns| publisher=Kentucky Coal Mining History| access-date=January 27, 2017}}</ref> sprouting up in the area during the area Coal Rush.

Coal became King, and with Western Pennsylvania as his capital, it was only logical that Greensboro became part of this movement. Indeed, the Penn-Pitt neighborhood was originally company housing for miners, as were the nearby Seventh Pool and Poland Mines areas, and countless others, many of which are lost to history today. Thousands of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe flooded into the region and brought with them new customs, traditions, and culture.

Coal also became Ruler. History has shown that any growth industry using thousands of underskilled, undereducated immigrant workers provides fertile ground for the lust of greed and opportunism. Many mines and their owners sought to capitalize on this and found ways to maximize their profits. As such, many workers found themselves "selling their soul to the company store", earning meager pay for a dangerous day's wage, only to be spent on company goods and rent in the patch towns created by these very companies, effectively making these workers willful individuals of "[[wage slavery]]".  During this period the formation of unions such as the [[United Mine Workers|UMWA]] became more prevalent and necessary to represent the workers. Through the growth of the UMWA and events such as the "[[United Mine Workers#Through the early 1900s|Red Neck Revolution of 1921]]" an era of wage slavery began to end.

At one point, the Greensboro area was famous for the Robena mine, known as the largest mine in the world at the peak of its production in 1946. Robena also became famous for a more tragic reason: in December 1962 37 miners died in an explosion at [[December 1962#December 6, 1962 (Thursday)|Robena No. 3]], illustrating how precarious this work truly was.

Coal defined the region and the lives of those who inhabited it, and made not only Greensboro and the Monongahela Valley prosperous, but the nation as well. Yet this period was not to last, and as the coal seams became tapped out and the processes outdated and replaced with modern mechanical technology, communities like Penn-Pitt and Poland Mines began to fade as their reason for existence ceased.

While coal (followed by healthcare) currently remains the backbone for much of the economy of Greene County, Greensboro and other communities have been migrating away from such dependency and see benefits in non-industrial sources of employment in sectors such as [[ecotourism]], [[agritourism]], and [[community-supported agriculture]] (CSAs), as well as fishing, hunting, hiking and boating.