Pine Grove: Anthracite's Canal Crossroads

Pine Grove sits at the northern tip of a feeder canal that once carried anthracite coal out of Schuylkill County's Southern Field, a major anthracite district in Pennsylvania during the eighteen thirties and forties. German Palatine settlers had already been farming this hollow for decades when the borough was incorporated in eighteen thirty-two. Before the canal, Pine Grove was a modest crossroads village with an iron forge, a grist mill, a tannery, a sawmill, and a distillery.

The Union Canal changed everything. For roughly thirty years, wagons loaded with coal rolled down from the collieries and transferred onto canal boats here, making Pine Grove a key link in Pennsylvania's first transportation network. When a June eighteen sixty-two flood destroyed the canal, the coal traffic moved on, and Pine Grove settled into the quieter pace of a Schuylkill County market town that still carries its anthracite-era bones.