With the abundance of coal in Crawford and Cherokee counties coal companies were very attracted to the region and set up coal mining companies in the area. Around this time, in 1887, the Pittsburg Town Company bought land and founded Pittsburg, Kansas. With immigrants coming in to work in the shaft mines Pittsburg started to grow. Shaft mining was the first type of mining that was done in the region and drew in a large migration of people because of its cheap and abundant labor. During this time many of the residents of Pittsburg and surrounding areas had jobs. .
The first shaft mines in the area were established in the mid-1870's and during that time immigrants accounted for around half of the labor force. The Pittsburg area at this time and throughout the early 1900's was a melting pot of ethnicities and culture. When immigrants from all over the world started migrating to southeast Kansas, jobs also opened up in areas of agriculture, commerce, and industry. For a while, there was abundance of work; in the most active years of shaft mining 90 percent of the males who immigrated to Crawford and Cherokee counties found work in the coal mining camps and in the shaft mines. .
Shaft mining was very dangerous and at the turn of the century innovators had discovered a new and improved way to mine coal in the region. This new form of mining was called strip mining. This type of mining required large machines which would remove large amounts of earth and expose the veins of coal. This type of mining required a significantly less number of workers to operate the machines and therefore caused a lot of workers to lose their jobs, and for many families, working at the mines were their only source of income. When these lay-offs start happening is when public welfare organizations start taking rise in the communities, especially in a bigger community like Pittsburg.
One of the first public welfare organizations that started a branch in Pittsburg was the Salvation Army.