Steamtown and the Anthracite Corridor: What Coal Country Became
Near Scranton, Pennsylvania
At its peak in the eighteen eighties, Scranton was one of the most important industrial cities in the United States. The anthracite coal beneath the Wyoming Valley was the only naturally occurring hard coal in North America, and it burned hotter and cleaner than bituminous coal, making it the preferred fuel for heating the homes and offices of the eastern seaboard. Scranton and Wilkes-Barre sat at the center of the field. The railroads that carried coal out, the Delaware and Hudson, the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western, the Lehigh Valley, ran through the city like an industrial circulatory system.
By nineteen hundred, Scranton's population had reached over one hundred thousand people. By nineteen twenty, it was about one hundred thirty-eight thousand, drawn by mining jobs, steel fabrication, silk mills, and the railroad yards that serviced the coal corridor.
The industry left in layers. The silk mills went first, in the nineteen thirties, when manufacturers moved south for lower wages. The railroad yards shrank through the forties and fifties as trucking displaced rail freight. The mines closed through the sixties, partly because oil and natural gas had replaced coal for home heating, partly because the seams that were economically mineable had been largely exhausted, and partly because underground mining had never stopped killing people and the labor cost of safety compliance had become prohibitive.
By nineteen eighty, Scranton's population had fallen below ninety thousand. The economy that had drawn immigrants from Poland, Lithuania, Ireland, Italy, and Wales over four decades had collapsed in four decades more.
Steamtown National Historic Site was created by Congress in nineteen eighty-six, preserving the former Delaware, Lackawanna and Western rail yard in downtown Scranton. The roundhouse, the repair shops, and a collection of steam locomotives that no longer run on the main lines are maintained there as a record of what powered the American industrial age. The city the railroads built is still here. The industry that paid for it is not.
