COLLIER, PA
Collier is a patch built in 1907 by the H.C. Frick Coke Company. The company-built housing there is typical of that found throughout Western Pennsylvania.
The houses on this street in Collier are a little different than those in the photo above. They may have been built at a different time. Coal and coke companies would
build additional homes during boom years to house the expanding work force.
This building, which was one the repair shop, is all that's left of the Collier coal mine, which closed after the 1950s.
A eroding refuse pile from years of coal mining and coke manufacture at Collier has yet to be reclaimed.
This photograph was identified as the Collier mine site shortly before it closed.
Collier, along with Phillips, was the last coke yard/coal mine combo built by Frick Coke in the Connellsville Field. As such it represents the end of the
first chapter of the famed coking coal field. Collier played out as the next chapter was written: transporting the coal to far off by-product ovens. While I was taking this photograph, I could hear the machinery of the nearby
Burd surface mine extracting one of the remaining blocks of Redstone seam coal, thus writing the final chapter in coal mining in the Connellsville Field.
Nov. 2003 image by author
Nov. 2003 image by author
Nov. 2003 image by author
Nov. 2003 image by author
Image courtesy Coal and Coke Heritage Center, Penn State Fayette
Nov. 2003 image by author