Shenandoah, Pennsylvania: Coal, Rails, and the World That Arrived

A farmer named Peter Kehley cleared this Schuylkill County hollow in eighteen thirty-five and lived here in near-total isolation for two decades. Then the Civil War changed everything. The sudden demand for anthracite coal sent the Philadelphia Land Company into this valley in eighteen sixty-two to lay out a town grid and open the Shenandoah City Colliery. Coal was moving by rail within two years.

The population that followed was extraordinary. Welsh miners, Irish laborers, Poles, Lithuanians, Slovaks, and Ukrainians poured in, making Shenandoah one of the most polyglot places in Pennsylvania. By nineteen hundred the borough held more than twenty thousand residents and three competing railroad depots: Pennsylvania, Lehigh Valley, and Reading. For a generation it was a place where you could hear six languages on one block. The coal seams thinned, the population peaked, and Shenandoah shrank. Today it holds about five thousand people, but the tight row houses and the ornate churches built by immigrant congregations still line its hillside streets.