Nobody wants to think about work on Labor Day weekend. It’s the last big summer weekend. Isn’t the whole idea of the holiday to forget about the job for a long weekend?

Call me a killjoy if you will, but my contention is just the opposite: On Labor Day weekend we should be thinking about work – or at least workers. For there is no other holiday that captures who we are more appropriately.

This holiday was founded and promoted by organized labor – unions – back around 1890 for the specific purpose of recognizing the contributions of the American worker. As trade unions grew and spread their influence across the country, so spread the popularity of Labor Day and its attendant commemorative activities.

Here within the Alleghenies, there’s plenty of evidence that our early-20th-century communities celebrated Labor Day with big parades, speeches and festivities. But the Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Coal Culture Timeline dramatically documents that life was no picnic for laborers here.

In 1919, for example, Labor Day commemorations were banned in many communities here because of the “Red Scare”; Fanny Sellins, an organizer for the United Mine Workers, was beaten to death by sheriff’s deputies near New Kensington; 45,000 miners here joined a nationwide strike; efforts to organize steelworkers in Johnstown failed and the organizer was run out of town by the Coal and Iron Police.

While trades, such as carpenters and printers, unionized much earlier, most steelworkers and miners within our region didn’t organize successfully until the New Deal era in the late 1930s. Safer working conditions for laborers and steadily improving standards of living for their families were the result.

As grim as life could be for laborers, though, there was a color and richness to their ways of life that forms another part of our heritage. Whether they were miners, millworkers or loggers; electrical workers, pipefitters or carpenters; masons or farmers, each group developed and took pride in its own culture.

Our labor heritage is worth thinking about and celebrating – and what better time to do that than over Labor Day weekend? While the traditional ways of commemorating the day with parades and speeches have given way to barbecues and festivals, there are places to go that weekend to learn more about our labor heritage.

A delightful day trip north – just east of the Allegheny National Forest – will take you to the Pennsylvania Lumber Museum along U.S. Route 6 between Coudersport and Galeton in Potter County. LumberMuseum.org. Or head west to Carrie Furnaces in Rankin, along the Monongahela River just southeast of Pittsburgh, for the Festival of Combustion on September 3 – a festival featuring a variety of hot art-making, from molten metal to glass and ceramics. RiversOfSteel.com.

Johnstown’s Heritage Discovery Center has exhibits for both adults and children that explore steel-making, coal-mining and the immigrants’ experience around the turn-of-the-20th-century. Jaha.org.

Or if you enjoy live music and storytelling, at 1:00 p.m. on September 3, join Van Wagner at the historic Eliza Furnace in Vintondale, off PA 422 on the boundary between Indiana and Cambria Counties. A teacher and musician with hands-on experience as a coal miner and logger, Van presents the stories of our region’s labor heritage in an entertaining way.

Sponsored by Indiana County Parks and Recreation, Van will be telling stories of colliers, who produced the charcoal that provided the fuel for iron furnaces like Eliza. For more information, visit IndianaCountyParks.org.

Consider taking some time this Labor Day weekend to commemorate the labor that made this region – and the nation – what it is today.

This is more than a story of unionization, although unions certainly play an important part. This is a story that weaves strength, sacrifice, danger, endurance, ingenuity and success together into a heritage left to us by our own ancestors.

Celebrate that – rather than the last big summer weekend.