The Scranton Family and the Birth of an Industrial City
Near Scranton, Pennsylvania
You are standing at the heart of one of America's great industrial origin stories. What is now Scranton, Pennsylvania was barely a clearing in the woods when two brothers from New Jersey arrived in the eighteen thirties and changed everything.
George Whitfield Scranton and his brother Selden came to the Lackawanna Valley with one ambition: to make iron. They had the coal, buried in seams beneath the valley floor, and they had a dream. In eighteen forty they established what would become the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company, and they faced an immediate and crushing problem. Railroads were exploding across the northeastern United States, and the rail companies desperately needed iron rails. But those rails were being imported from Britain at great expense.
The Scranton brothers devised something remarkable: they worked out a method to manufacture iron T-rails domestically using local anthracite coal as fuel. It was not easy. Their first furnace attempts failed repeatedly. But they persisted, and by eighteen forty-eight they were producing rails that would help lay the tracks of the Erie Railroad. Their success made them famous and made this valley rich.
By eighteen fifty the growing settlement was formally renamed Scranton in their honor. By the time the Civil War began in eighteen sixty-one, George Scranton's furnaces were producing iron for the Union war effort day and night, their fires visible for miles. The Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company became the largest iron producer in the United States.
The city that grew from this single gamble became one of the most productive industrial centers in the country, home to more than one hundred forty thousand people at its peak. The Scranton family quite literally put this place on the map. Lackawanna County itself was not officially formed until August thirteenth, eighteen seventy-eight, making it the youngest of Pennsylvania's sixty-seven counties, but from the moment the furnaces lit, there was never any question what the county's heart would be called.
