Gilberton: Coal Town Built on Lease and Luck

Gilberton took its name from John Gilbert, a coal mine owner who opened colliery operations here in Schuylkill County in the early eighteen sixties. Growth was slow until eighteen sixty-five, when three large collieries came on line at once and the transfer of coal up to the Broad Mountain toward Frackville became the central industry of the valley.

By eighteen eighty the borough had grown into a prosperous village of about three thousand people with stores, hotels, and churches. By nineteen ten the population had climbed to five thousand four hundred, a steep climb in a single generation, built entirely on anthracite coal.

Gilberton was chartered as a borough in eighteen seventy-three. Like most of its neighbors in the Mahanoy Basin, it boomed hard, then contracted just as hard when the coal economy collapsed in the mid-twentieth century.