Koppel: The German Company Town

The borough of Koppel, Pennsylvania was essentially built from scratch by a German manufacturing firm. In nineteen oh five, Arthur Koppel and his partner Harry Ellis scouted the Beaver River valley for a plant site. The company, Orenstein and Koppel of Berlin, bought five hundred fifty-eight acres above the river in nineteen oh six, built rows of worker housing, and opened the factory in nineteen oh seven, making specialized small rail cars used in sugar cane fields and rock quarries around the world.

When the United States entered the First World War in nineteen seventeen, the federal government seized the plant and all company-owned buildings, arrested the principal officers as enemy aliens, and ran the operation until the armistice. The government then sold it for one point three million dollars. New ownership eventually became the Pressed Steel Car Company, but the Depression killed that too, and the plant closed in nineteen thirty-seven. Koppel spent two decades as a depressed mill town before Babcock and Wilcox arrived in the late nineteen fifties. The borough still bears the name of the German industrialist who built it.