Coal patch towns

Seek : the capital of Coaldale. Known as "Gary Town" in the 's. Seltzer City : between Pottsville and Minersville. Recently renamed by the state to "Seltzer". Shanty Upper and Lower : victims of the Centralia minefire. Collectively known as "the Shanties", and also known as Byrnesville. A lone garage and a grotto of the Virgin Mary are all that remain.

To the left of Arnot's Addition. Sheatown : a little area west of the center of Nanticoke Shenandoah Junction : somewhere in or around Shenandoah.

Anyone know where this patch is or was? Sheppton : just south of Hazleton; for some reason, people from Hazleton refer to Sheppton as "Sheppton by Oneida ". See also Sheppton Mine Cave-In. Sheridan : west of Tower City on Rte Continue out Water St. This town no longer exists. Only one house left in Sin City. This patch got its name from the coverings that were used as windows in the shacks.

The coverings were made of goat skin and gave off a terrible smell, especially during the summer months. Skipper's Island : not really a patch, but an area in the extreme eastern part of McAdoo. Roughly from Lincoln Street down to the side street between Blaine and Grant, all the way over to where Schuylkill meets Carbon County. So named because during heavy rains or when the snow melts, parts of Blaine, Lincoln, and Grant streets get flooded and become impassable. Skunktown : the former name for Carey's Patch.

Dates to the 's, at least. Smoketown : 1 across the tracks from Edgewood, on the back road to Adamsdale. Site of the casket company. Also home to the dirt-floored Smoketown Playground.

Going down Rte 93 about a quarter of a mile up from Conyngham Builders, it was to the west of the highway. Glen Alden abandoned the complex, in place, because sticks of dynamite had little impact on one of the buildings.

Since then, the "city" has been used by the military, police, and fire departments for training. You can see large calibre hits on some of the walls. It was declared a historical site in Concrete City school, located close to Concrete City, was a two story red brick building built in and was also known as the Betsy Ross School and as the Lower Askam School.

It housed students. It was razed about Connor's Row : next to Courtney's Row, south across the crick from Heckscherville; a fire destroyed all five double-block houses in the early 70's. Connersville : west of Mt. Carmel Connerton : between Girardville and Lost Creek. Site of the Hammond Colliery. Flooding started in in lower parts of Connerton, near the crick. Sometime prior to , the pumps in a nearby mine were shut down and the ground water started running out of cellars and down the streets, making the town unfit to live in.

The state came in and bought out the homes, a la Centralia. Cooney Island : a small lake just outside Ashland on the Gordon road; Contained a prodigious stock of large carp that were suckers ha! Also known as Coney Island.

Formerly called "Frenchtown". Beaver Meadows predates Hazleton and many surrounding towns. Established before the Civil War. Starting place for Ario Pardee, Hazleton coal baron. The caboose for trains was invented here, for the safety of the mine workers.

Beaverdale : west of Mt. Also called Big Mine Run Junction? Blackwood : no longer exists; was located a few miles west of Goose Heaven and Silverton, at the base of the Sharp Mountain, on the back road between Silverton and Newtown. Blakely : eight miles northeast of Scranton, population about 2, It is a borough if you include the village of Peckville, which has a population of about 6, Blakely is named after an officer who commanded the Sloop-of-War Wasp during the War of Prior to coal mining era, the name was associated with a huge township from which at least seven boroughs were formed in the mid's.

Not really a patch, just a section of town named for bloody feuds that occurred there during the 30's and 40's. Boiler Row : an alley in Heckscherville.

Bonetown : the Honeypot section of Nanticoke, around Coal Commission study. Historians with the state say towns are found in 30 Pennsylvania counties. He did this by finding old records, using Google Earth and visiting the places himself. And there are hundreds more in Maryland, West Virginia and Ohio. DellaMea said of his map. Obsession over the history of coal is not uncommon in the patches. Korcheck, a lifelong Nemacolin resident and a retired English professor at California University of Pennsylvania, was asked to write the history of Nemacolin by mine officials as their operations were winding down.

Korcheck could not be reached for an interview, though he was profiled by the Post-Gazette in Unlike boom towns in the traditional sense, Mr. The company oversaw the building of an elementary school, a Catholic and Presbyterian church, ballfields and an amusement hall with a bowling alley and seat theater.

The company maintained the structure of the duplexes and regularly painted them while the miners were responsible for lawns and gardens.

Korcheck wrote. To beautify the bare hillsides, he found, the company planted , trees comprising a dozen different species — dense verdant thickets that today isolate the village from surrounding roads. At its peak production in , Buckeye Mine employed nearly 1, workers and dug more than 2 million tons of coal of the ground. O nce the Second World War ended, however, life in Nemacolin began to change.

Progress crept in. A charter was created for a group of citizens, officially the Board of Nemacolin Inc. The township agreed to provide police and road maintenance.

Trumka recently recalled the conversation with a hint of nostalgia. He took increasingly frequent trips back to the village as his parents became older. Each time, he noticed the manicured lawns and up-kept houses showed more signs of wear and neglect.

Longtime residents moved to find work elsewhere, and the duplexes became rental properties. Trumka said. The vibrance of the town starts to fade. His childhood home sits abandoned on Bliss Avenue. T oday, almost none of the or so people living in Nemacolin mines coal for a living. Aside from the post office, there is no business based in the village.

Instead, residents work elsewhere — as a cashier at the Circle K down the road in Carmichaels, or as a medical receptionist an hour away in Connellsville, or a health inspector in Morgantown. Many are retired or close to retiring. About 19 percent are living below the poverty line, according to the U. The duplexes were picked up — several at a time — by landlords in tax sales.

Home prices fell. Tenants from all over flocked to Nemacolin for dirt-cheap rent. In the early s, the school burned down by arsonists who were never caught, forcing students to attend elementary school in Carmichaels.

DeFrank, the coke and coal historian.