Blossburg: Coal Before the Railroads Came

The coal seam running beneath Blossburg was discovered in seventeen ninety-two, when a road-building crew hacking the Williamson Road through Tioga County broke into an outcrop of bituminous coal along what would become the town limits. The discovery lay dormant for years. Then in eighteen oh two, Aaron Bloss moved to this hollow and began seriously mining the high-quality vein that would later bear his name, the Bloss seam.

He is counted as Blossburg's first true settler. The real commercial coal trade started slowly, building through the eighteen teens, hampered by the near-impossibility of getting coal to market without a waterway. Canal schemes were proposed to solve that problem, and coal eventually moved out by water and rail to distant markets.

The railroad arrived later and transformed the scale of the operation entirely, turning a hardscrabble coal camp into a functioning industrial town. Blossburg sits in Tioga County.