Yep, I hear you -- it seems to fly in the face of the economics of it, right?

But they coal interests did indeed do all sorts of work to make coal more affordable for working-class folks in those early years. They created coal trusts that would buy large amounts of coal in bulk during the summer -- when the price was cheap -- and warehouse it until the winter, when they'd sell it as the cheaper summer rates. They also ran programs to make it cheaper to buy the stoves, which cost a bit up front. Governments did their part too: They did big surveys of the locations of coal fields and released the info freely into the public domain, so that coal-mining firms could have a much greater chance of success when they dug.

The coal interests (and state and local governments) understood that the price and affordability problem was an infant-industry one -- i.e. that if they could just help people out for the first decade or so, coal would take off the point where the market for the fuel would be more self-sustaining. Intelligent capitalism!

If you want to read more about, the historian Sean Adams' book "Home Fires" talks about this whole transition ...