Coal mining village of Carbon, PA. The Carbon mine
was closed by the Keystone Coal and Coke Company after 1917.
Coal mine ruins near Hunker, PA. This was the site of a preparation plant that processed coal brought to it from a mine along Route 31 on an overland conveyor. I have been told that it was called the Pen Mar mine
and also the Reed mine. The operator was the Delmont Fuel Company and, later Eastern Fuel and Gas. An ex-employee of the mine said that it was "low coal," so it wasn't the thick Pittsburgh seam. The mine closed in the 1970s.
Beehive coke ovens at Crabtree are typical of coke oven ruins found throughout Western Pennsylvania.
The Haydenville patch housed the workers
of the Greensburg Coal Company's Greensburg No. 1 mine and Greensburg No. 2 mine. Coal mining lasted into the 1930s, and
today Haydenville is not an isolated coal patch, but a neighborhood of South Greensburg.
Brenizer, PA was a "model" company town. This photo shows some of the styles of homes in Brenizer. The Garnet Coal and Coke Company established the mine and town, but the Westmoreland
Mining Company operated the mine in the latter years, closing it down in the 1950s. There are a few ruins of buildings related to the Brenizer mine across the highway from the patch, and the slate dump is still there, but nothing warranted a photograph.
A typical Westmoreland County patch is Keystone Coal and Coke's Salemville, one of the patch towns in the Westmoreland Coalfield which featured beehive coke production. Sadly, from the vantage point of Route 22, it looks like
the ovens are gone.
A company town known as Hannastown. The mine associated with this particular patch was Jamison No. 2, which closed in 1949.
One of the last coal mining operations in the Westmoreland Coalfield was the Jubilee rail loading facility, operated by Coal Loaders, Inc. in Derry, PA in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They must have used the front end loader at the left of the photo to load the hopper cars with coal from their strip mines around Westmoreland County. The facility is shown here in it's current half-dismantled state. The scalehouse is a wreck, the conveyor is
in pieces, and the stockpile has been seeded with grass. Only Coal Loaders, Inc. knows what the future of the Jubilee loadout is.