For nearly a century the coal industry was an important element of Centre County’s economy. Bituminous coal from the Mountaintop and Moshannon Valley areas helped to power the nation’s industrial revolution and later fueled electric generating stations. Coal mining also bequeathed a diverse cultural legacy, as the industry attracted immigrants from many parts of Europe.
Bituminous coal, the end product of decayed plant material, is found in horizontal layers of varying thickness. These layers, or seams, are typically named for the location where they were first discovered as natural outcroppings. Centre County’s most economically valuable seams were, from shallow to deep: Lower Freeport; Upper, Middle, and Lower Kittanning; and Brookville.
Mining on the Mountaintop began in the early 1800s around outcroppings in Snow Shoe Township, supplying coal to local blacksmiths. Extensive mining began after the 1859 opening of the Bellefonte & Snow Shoe Railroad that linked its locations and whose owners held extensive coal lands. The Pennsylvanian Railroad bought the Bellefonte & Snow Shoe Railroad in 1881.
A few years later, the Lehigh Valley Coal Company, the mining arm of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, acquired the coal lands. The railroad served anthracite mines in northeastern Pennsylvania but also had customers that required bituminous coal. In 1891, a typical year, four mines of the Lehigh Valley Coal Company produced 197,000 tons, while four other mines under various owners accounted for 26,000 tons.
Snow Shoe coal came from the Kittanning seams. It was suitable for making coke, used by blast furnaces to reduce iron ore to pig iron, which in turn was used to make steel. Coke ovens at Snow Shoe and nearby Gorton yielded thousands of tons of coke for shipment to blast furnaces throughout Pennsylvania, including Centre County’s own Bellefonte Furnace and Nittany Furnace.
The cyclical nature of the market for coal made it difficult for companies to recruit workers locally, creating opportunities for immigrant labor. During the late 1800s there was steady growth in the Mountaintop area’s population, a substantial portion of which included immigrants from central Europe. Snow Shoe Township had 2,396 residents in 1890, nearly five times the 1860 figure. By contrast, Centre County’s overall population grew by about 60 percent during that period.
The situation was much the same in the Moshannon Valley. Coal mining centered on Rush Township, which shared the Moshannon Creek as a boundary with Clearfield County. Although arks laden with coal had been floated down the creek and onto the West Branch of the Susquehanna River as early as 1820, coal mining as an industry emerged with the coming of the railroad. John Nuttall, who had mined coal in his native England, opened the first mine in 1861 near Sandy Ridge and shipped coal to market over the newly opened Tyrone & Clearfield Railroad, which soon came under ownership of the Pennsylvania Railroad.
The coming of the railroad ignited a mining frenzy. By 1875, twenty-five mines under sixteen different owners were active in a roughly 12-mile corridor on both the Clearfield and Centre County sides of the Moshannon Creek. Production topped one million tons in 1876, with a prevalence of Scotch-Irish and English in the labor force. The Moshannon Valley’s most important coal seam was the Lower Freeport, widely marketed as Moshannon Coal. High in heat value with a long burn time and leaving little ash, it was ideal for use in steam locomotives and steamships.
The dawn of the twentieth century coincided with the depletion of Lower Freeport reserves. By then, both the Pennsylvania and the New York Central railroads—the latter had entered Centre County from the east in the 1880s—served mines that tapped the Kittanning seams. If this coal did not have all the desirable properties of the Lower Freeport, it still found a market not only as a coking coal but as steam coal in a wide variety of industrial applications. The New York Central relied on it as steam locomotive fuel. Kittanning coal was also favored for home and commercial heating.
Two towns owed their creation to the coal industry and the coming of the New York Central. Kato, east of Snow Shoe and adjacent to Beech Creek, clustered around Kato Coal Company’s inclined plane that brought coal down to the railroad from a mine on the hillside above the town. By about 1910, the town consisted of forty-odd houses (most erected by the coal company), a general store, a post office, and a telegraph station run by the railroad. So remote was Kato’s location that the train was virtually the only way in and out. Eventually the coal bed played out, with the mine closing in 1938. The town began to disappear and nature has so reclaimed the area that the town site is no longer recognizable.
West of Snow Shoe, the hundred or so houses of Peale were located on the Clearfield County side of the Moshannon, but the town’s railroad station was on the Centre County side, as was a swath of the 22,000 acres of coal lands owned by the town’s founding enterprise, the Clearfield Bituminous Coal Company. As at Kato, the coal company erected most of the town’s dwellings and support buildings. Newspaper accounts indicate that around 1890 the settlement’s population—including the nearby village of Gorton in Centre County—topped 2,000. However, the Clearfield Bituminous Coal Company gave up on Peale by 1900 in favor of focusing on mining elsewhere. Peale and Gorton soon faded, leaving few tangible remains of their existence.
Mining technology changed in the early 1900s. In the larger of the county’s twenty-eight active mines in 1910, small electric locomotives replaced mules in pulling coal-laden mine cars to the surface. Electric cutting machines replaced picks and shovels. Carbide head lamps replaced candles. Despite mechanization, the work was hard, sometimes brutal, and dangerous. Miners had to be alert for roof falls, gas and coal dust explosions, and other hazards. Risks did not cease after retirement, as the dreaded “black lung” brought on by years of inhaling coal dust devastated the lives of many miners and their families.
Centre County produced 10.2 million tons of coal in the twentieth century’s first decade, up from 5.8 million tons during the 1890s and 3.3 million tons in the 1880s. Meanwhile, the Lehigh Valley Railroad had to divest itself of its coal company subsidiary because of federal legislation that prohibited railroads from hauling freight they manufactured or mined.
The Lehigh Valley Coal Company became an independent entity in 1924 and retained 45,000 acres of coal lands on the Mountaintop. The company remained the county’s largest coal producer, with Lehigh Valley No. 22 yielding a record 358,000 tons in 1926. The leader in Rush Township that year was Penn No. 5 with 101,000 tons.
The last Lehigh Valley mine closed in 1942. The company subsequently sold or leased its lands to local enterprises. Among the largest beneficiaries was Snow Shoe’s R.S. Carlin Inc., which eschewed deep mining in favor of surface or strip mining. Around that time, companies began strip mining in neighboring Burnside Township, whose coal beds had remained mostly undisturbed by deep mining. In the Moshannon Valley, the closing of the Penn No. 5 mine in 1950 signaled the end of significant deep mining on the Centre County side of Moshannon Creek. The valley’s largest strip miner was the Elliot Coal Mining Company, owned and operated by the Lewis Stein family of Philipsburg.
Strip mining was cheaper and less hazardous than tunneling and could exploit seams that were too thin or too near the surface for underground mining. In 1949 Elliot opened a state-of-the-art coal preparation plant in Rush Township. Coal was channeled through the plant to be washed, sized, blended to customer specifications, and then shipped by rail or truck. Elliot estimated that directly and indirectly, the plant created or preserved more than 1,200 jobs.
While many markets for coal shrank after World War II, one market expanded noticeably. In response to a soaring nationwide demand for electricity, utilities built more coal-fired power plants. In 1950 utilities consumed 10 million tons of Pennsylvania bituminous. That figure rose to 43 million tons in 1960 and showed no sign of slackening. This growth spurred Allentown-based Pennsylvania Power and Light to establish three giant coal-fired generating stations and develop three underground mines to guarantee a supply for these stations.
One of the new mines was in Rush Township about midway between Philipsburg and Osceola Mills and christened Rushton. Mining started in the fall of 1965 and the workforce numbered about 250. In some years, output topped 750,000 tons, helping to push Centre County’s output over the million-ton mark in 1969. It remained there for all but one of the next twenty-one years. By the late 1980s, PP&L calculated that mining its own coal had become more expensive than buying it from other producers. Rushton was closed effective June 30, 1991, and the mine permanently sealed.
Millions of tons of coal remained but finding buyers was challenging. Beginning in 1990, electric utilities faced strict federal mandates to protect air and water quality, including a provision to sharply limit sulfur dioxide emissions. Central Pennsylvania coal is typically high in sulfur, forcing utilities to install expensive pollution-control equipment and/or source lower sulfur coal.
The demand for steam coal declined further as coal-fired plants closed or converted to natural gas firing. In 2024, virtually all the coal mined in the county was aimed at the export market. Three strip mines remained active in the county in 2024, employing twenty-five people and shipping 160,598 tons. Although the coal industry is no longer a vital part of Centre County’s economy, its heritage lingers in such areas as the county’s ethnic composition and the built environment of the Moshannon Valley and Mountaintop areas.
Michael Bezilla
Sources:
Bezilla, Michael. Branch Line Empires. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017.
Duke, John. “Coal Mining in Centre County,” Centre County Heritage, October 1972, pp. 155-57.
Linn, John Blair. History of Centre and Clinton Counties, Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1883; reprinted by the Centre County Historical Society, 1975.
Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources and predecessor agencies, annual reports of bituminous coal production, 1875-2024.
First Published: April 7, 2026
Last Modified: April 8, 2026