The coal seams around Lithgow became important once the Great Western railway was extended to Mount Victoria around 1850. About the same time, Andrew Brown had a flour mill and water power was used by him to drive the mill. Later he changed to a steam engine and became the first to use coal in the Lithgow area.

Trading of coal began in 1868. Thomas Brown started the Eskbank Mine which is just behind the Union theatre. By 1873, The Hermitage and the Eskbank Mines were the only two which were mining and selling coal. The Hermitage Colliery, situated about a mile from the centre of the city, was the oldest coal mine in the Lithgow Valley. At the Hermitage Colliery there were 120 men. This mine closed in 1960. The Eskbank mine closed in 1903. Many other sites were being prepared of which Lithgow Valley Colliery, near the park, was one of them.

After securing a Government contract for Railway coal, the Lithgow Valley Colliery was up and running. In 1876, the daily output was one hundred tons and the number of men working was twenty. Two horses were used for wheeling.The miners had picks, shovels and forks.The company also established an Brick and earthenware Pipe works that later became a Pottery, today named, Lithgow Pottery. In 1886, there was an explosion in which seven men including the manager, lost their lives.

In 1873/1874, the ZigZag Colliery was officially opened and closed down in 1932. In 1883, Irondale Colliery, four miles from Wallerawang, opened up although it was found to have inferior coal causing it's shutdown soon after. In 1882, the Katoomba mine was prospected and opened for commercial production. It closed in 1946 and is now a tourist site called the Scenic Railway. In 1884, there was the Calos Gap Mine and it closed in 1903 having only produced 2,000 tons. Cullen Bullen Colliery was opened in 1885 and closed in 1900 having produced 203,000 tons. The Oakey Park Colliery produced good quality coal and was opened in 1886. The mine close after a strike broke out regarding the selling price of coal. After several attempts, the last one under police guard, to use free labour sent up from Sydney, the mine eventually closed in 1941, only to be flooded out in 1964.

Around 1920, the State Coal Mine linked two shafts with a total number of employees being 800. The output at this time was roughly 550,000 tons. In 1947, the State Mine was the largest coal mine in the Western district, producing 2,000 thousand tons per day for use by the Railway and the Power House. In 1947, there also existed an open-cut coal mine called the Commonwealth Open-Cut Coal Mine, situated about 12 miles from Lithgow. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, this mine helped to resolve the tremendous coal shortage in Australia. The first coal washing plant was erected on this site and although the mine has closed, there is still many thousands of tons of inferior coal lying under the grass.

There were other mines opened up in the area such as New Vale, Ivanhoe, Great Cobar, Torbane, Methven, Hassans Walls, Invincible, Black Diamond, Wallace's Colliery, Brown's Mine, Steelworks, Blue Mountains, Springvale, Grose Valley and Newcom.