Frackville: Daniel Frack's Mountain City

Daniel Frack, a local landowner, settled this patch of Broad Mountain in eighteen sixty-one and the village that grew up around him took his name. They called it Frack's Ville, later shortened to Frackville. It incorporated in eighteen seventy-six when it merged with the neighboring settlement of Mountain City, a name that survives as a nickname for the borough to this day.

Just north of town the Mahanoy Plane operated from the early eighteen sixties to the early nineteen thirties: a gravity-and-cable incline railway capable of hauling fifty thousand tons of coal a day down the mountain to the valley below. It was one of the great industrial machines of the anthracite era.

Frackville sits on the north slope of Broad Mountain, with views across the entire Mahanoy Basin. What the coal companies built here in three decades, the twentieth century gradually unbuilt just as steadily.