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Samuel Harries Daddow (1827–1875)

The St. Clair mining engineer behind a landmark anthracite treatise — and a case study in the skilled, technical British element of the coalfield. Markers: ★ verified · ✔ confirmed · ✎ corrects a common error · ⚑ open/caution.

Samuel Harries Daddow, a mining engineer of St. Clair, compiled with the Pottsville editor Benjamin Bannan the treatise Coal, Iron, and Oil; or, the Practical American Miner (Pottsville, 1866) — a landmark of anthracite mining engineering, and the kind of skilled-technical contribution that defined the British element of the coal region. ★ He also compiled detailed coal-field and geological maps of northeastern Pennsylvania. ★

In St. Clair he ran a “Miner’s Safety Squibs” fuse firm — Daddow & Beadles — and a cap factory, the family business behind it tied to his 1856 marriage to Esther Anne Beadle. ✔ ✎ (The firm is his; the invention of the safety squib itself is not cleanly attributable to him and is not claimed here.)

He was born in 1827 and died in 1875, dates carried by his Wikidata record and an English Wikisource author page that lists his posthumous 1879 article “Anthracite” in The American Cyclopædia. ✔ ✎ His birthplace is commonly given as Cornwall, England, but that claim is undocumented — repeated without citation in the secondary sources, and absent from his Wikidata record — so this page reports rather than asserts it. ⚑ (A separate, later Samuel Harries Daddow, 1882–1964, is a different man; do not conflate them.)

His role in the county’s skilled-British mining stratum is set out in the English of Schuylkill County profile.

Sources

Frequently asked

What was Samuel Harries Daddow known for?
He was a mining engineer of St. Clair who, with the Pottsville editor Benjamin Bannan, produced 'Coal, Iron, and Oil; or, the Practical American Miner' (Pottsville, 1866) — a major treatise of anthracite mining engineering — and compiled detailed coal-field maps. He also ran a 'Miner's Safety Squibs' fuse firm and a cap factory in St. Clair.
Was Samuel Harries Daddow born in Cornwall?
He is reported to have been born in Cornwall, England, in 1827, which would place him in the Cornish engineering and authorial element of the county's British miners. That birthplace is widely repeated but is not documented in a primary source — Wikidata records no place of birth — so this page treats it as reported rather than confirmed.