Calumet: A Patch Town Henry Frick Built and Then Closed

Calumet was not really founded so much as constructed. In eighteen eighty-eight the Calumet Coke Company built it from scratch as a housing site for its miners and coke-oven workers. It was what southwestern Pennsylvania called a patch town, a company settlement thrown up as cheaply as possible to keep the labor force close to the mine.

H. C. Frick Coke Company, the dominant force in this coalfield, soon absorbed the operation. During the Bituminous Coal Miners' Strike of eighteen ninety-four, Calumet was a flashpoint in the bitter confrontation between strikers and Frick's management. The coke works shut down in the nineteen twenties, and the mine followed in the early nineteen thirties, just as the Depression hit. Workers were left with nothing, at a time before unemployment insurance or public welfare existed.

The houses stayed. People stayed. Today Calumet is a census-designated place of about eleven hundred residents, the physical footprint of the company town surviving long after the company itself disappeared.