The New Herrington Miners' Banner Partnership has spent the past six years assembling an incredible archive of photographs, press cuttings and memorabilia.
Now, with help from Northumbria University, it unveiled its collection with a special showing at St Aidan's Church Hall on Friday.
It now intends to take the show around schools, churches and village halls in an attempt to keep alive the memory of an industry that built the area.
Bob Melvin and Norman Rain, both ex-pitmen, have been behind the assembling of the collection.
Mr Melvin, 60, of Travers Street, New Herrington, worked at Herrington Colliery – the first to close after the strike of 1984/85 – for 27 years while Mr Rain, 71, of Lambourne Close, Burnmoor, worked at Silksworth and Easington.
Mr Melvin said: "This exhibition is all about keeping our heritage alive. There are children growing up in former mining villages who don't even know what a piece of coal looks like.
"Given that their forefathers would have worked down the pit we think they should know more about the history of their communities."
The university has funded the photographic exhibition with £3,000.
Dave Wray, director of Northumbria's Work and Employment Research Centre and the leader of a research project on mining communities, said: "New Herrington was the first pit to be closed after the end of the miners' strike but local people felt they didn't want their community and history to die with the pit."
The banner that the group had restored forms the centrepiece of the exhibition, which homes in on the strike as its major photographic theme.
There are many pictures from the various picket lines, showing quite graphic battles between the police and striking miners.
"It was never put on television just what the miners went through," Mr Melvin said. "We want the public to know what happened."
One fascinating photo shows Sunderland councillors Bob and Juliana Heron, a former Mayor, back in 1984 with their young family outside their Hetton home in the days when Mr Heron was a striking miner.
There is also a letter sent out by former Coal Board chief Ian McGregor in 1984, imploring the miners to go back to work and claiming they had been "misled" by National Union of Mineworkers.
Mr Melvin makes no attempt to hide his bitterness at this letter: "As far as I'm concerned he was brought in to butcher the industry and close our mines," he said.
And as a symbol of just how much the mining industry has been decimated, there is a framed print showing, in the order of closure, the badges of all the mines nationally as they were shut.
"It's just a shame it can't include Ellington," Mr Melvin adds, referring to the Northumberland pit that has recently shut, finally bringing the curtain down on the deep mining industry of the North East.
So how much is the collection worth? Mr Rain is emphatic: "You can't put a price on it, because much of the collection is irreplaceable."