Wilkes-Barre, The Diamond City

The city of Wilkes-Barre sits in the Wyoming Valley, a long narrow trough carved by the Susquehanna River through the Appalachian ridges of northeastern Pennsylvania. Its name honors two unlikely heroes: John Wilkes, a radical British Member of Parliament who championed American colonial rights, and Colonel Isaac Barre, a veteran of the French and Indian War who defended the colonists in parliamentary debate. The town was founded in seventeen sixty-nine by Connecticut settlers who believed, based on their colony's sea-to-sea charter, that they had a legal right to settle here in competition with Pennsylvania's own land claims. That dispute triggered a small, mostly forgotten civil conflict called the Pennamite-Yankee Wars.

Then, in seventeen seventy-eight, came disaster. During the Revolutionary War, Tory rangers and Iroquois warriors allied with the British attacked the Wyoming Valley settlements. The Wyoming Massacre, on July third of that year, killed hundreds of settlers and sent most of the survivors fleeing from the valley. General Washington sent John Sullivan north the following year to destroy the Iroquois villages that had supported the raid, a brutal campaign that still shapes how the history of this valley is remembered.

Wilkes-Barre rebuilt and then, in the nineteenth century, struck something even more valuable than farmland. Anthracite coal. A local judge named Jesse Fell demonstrated in eighteen oh eight that this dense, hard stone coal could burn on an open grate as a home fuel, unlocking a market that transformed the region. By the late eighteen hundreds, Wilkes-Barre called itself the Diamond City, a reference to the black diamonds pulled from the earth beneath the surrounding hills. The Wyoming Valley held one of the richest anthracite coalfields in the United States.

The Knox Mine Disaster in nineteen fifty-nine, when miners broke through the riverbed of the Susquehanna and flooded the mines, effectively ended large-scale anthracite extraction. A city that had built itself on coal spent the second half of the twentieth century figuring out what came next.