A Legacy of Coal

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Excerpt from A Legacy of Coal: The Coal Company Towns of Southwestern PennsylvaniaRecognizing that a true portrait of these communities would best be revealed by example, detailed monographs on three individual coal towns were also incorporated into this volume. The three towns-star Junction, Windber and Colver-were chosen to represent the South western Pennsylvania coal company town because each possessed the five major traits (see figure 1 However, each town also had certain unique features of its own. For this reason, they should be seen as representatives of a broad trend, and not as the best or most exemplary of the region's coal towns.The primary goal of this project was to formally establish these characteristics through a literature search, interviews with local residents and wind shield surveys of actual towns. While some of these characteristics may be found in other forms of settlement, the occurrence of all five together is typical of Southwestern Pennsylvania coal company towns.Through the course of this investigation several other physical traits were recognized. These include: a grid or linear plan, a company store, open sewer systems, narrow, deep housing lots, individual gardens, unpaved streets, and electric light. In addition to these striking physical similarities, this study found that these towns have strong social, political, economic, ethnic and cultural parallels, suggesting that company towns have a uniformity that transcends mere planning and architecture.Star Junction is the oldest of the three towns. Located in Fayette County, Star Junction's economic livelihood depended upon the produc tion of coke, a metallurgical fuel derived from raw coal. The town and its coke works were built in 1893 by the Washington Coal and Coke Company and re¿ected housing problems that were peculiar to the coke industry. Windber was founded in 1897 by the berwind-white Coal Mining Company along the northern border of Somerset County. Intended to serve as a regional head-quarters for the company's western mining operations, Windber consists of an independent urban center surrounded by eleven dependent mining settlements. As the largest and most complex of the three company towns, Windber reveals the special considerations required by a corporate center. Colver, on the other hand, is a small, self-contained community. Built by the Ebensburg Coal Company in 1911, Colver developed almost two decades after Star Junction and Windber and, therefore, incorpor ates more of the industrial housing reforms promoted during the Progressive Era than its older counterparts.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.