This photograph by Isaac Kunkel shows a train loaded with anthracite coal on the tracks of the Summit Branch Railroad (formerly the Lykens Valley Railroad) during the years after the Civil War.

This image is taken approximately where the Wiconisco Fire Company and the town’s baseball field are now located. Cool detail: at left of image you can see steam rising from the engines at the Lykens Valley Coal Company’s operations on the eastern side of Bear Gap.

This train would be bound for Millersburg, Pennsylvania, about 16 miles west of Wiconisco where the coal cars would be taken onto the main line of the Northern Central Railroad or loaded onto barges of the Wiconisco Canal along the Susquehanna River.

Coal from Wiconisco and Williamstown was primarily sent to Harrisburg, Washington, DC, Baltimore, and communities along the Chesapeake Bay and Eastern Seaboard.

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Read more about Wiconisco Township in this era

“This community sustains a great loss” – A fatal mine disaster in Wiconisco Township during the Civil War

The “Wiconisco Plane” on the Lykens Valley Railroad | 1860s

Henry Keiser’s ‘reminisicences’ of Lykens and Wiconisco before the Civil War

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