In 1976, the nation celebrated its 200th anniversary in style.
In the northern Dauphin County mining community of Williamstown, residents planned another celebration for their own anniversary. In the summer of 1976, Williamstown prepared to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the town’s founding with parades, commemorative events, and more.
In the lead-up to the main events in August 1976, a reporter for the Harrisburg Patriot-News interviewed old-time residents about their experiences in town and the current state of Williamstown in the decades after the Williamstown Colliery closed.
A note – there are a few factual inaccuracies in this article – going to put editorial notes in these places.
Williamstown Residents Recall When Coal Was King
“Doomsday” Prophecy Never Came True After Mines Closed
WILLIAMSTOWN — A feeling of helplessness prevailed in this community in the late 1930s when the cry “the colliery’s closing” spread across the town.
The closing wasn’t unexpected. The coal industry had been declining since the early 1930s. Still, it was a shock to the miners who felt sure that the closing spelled doomsday for the community.
However, today, more than 40 years later, as Williamstown prepares to mark its 150th birthday with a weeklong Sesquicentennial Celebration beginning Aug. 23, many residents agree the closing of the mines was the best thing that ever happened here.
When the coal industry fell on hard times, many coal towns deteriorated and became ghost towns. But Williamstown succeeded in transforming itself from a drab coal-mining town of homes continually blackened by clouds of coal dust drifting down from the colliery, into a modern rural community whose residents are proud to call home.
Situated in the center of the Lykens-Williams Valley coal basin, the town originally was called Buellertown, founded by Daniel Williams in 1826. [Despite claiming that the town was founded in 1826 – the town wasn’t laid out until the 1860s – a town wasn’t even imagined until the 1850s].
It wasn’t until 1869, after the town was laid out as it exists today, that it was named Williamstown. [Another inaccuracy – the growing coal town was called Williamstown as early as 1864]
A tunnel to what just before the turn of the century would become the most famous and largest coal mine or colliery in the country was started in 1856. At this time there were just three homes in the town.
The first coal was mined in 1866. By the early 1900s the colliery employed more than 1,400 miners. In a three-shift around-the-clock operation, 1,700 tons of coal were mined each day.
Most of today’s residents don’t remember Williamstown in its heyday as a coal-company town. For them, the history of the town is being told through the pages of a history book published by the Sesquicentennial committee, and from hundreds of pictures that have been resurrected from the attics and closets of older residents and displayed in establishments about town.
But there are some who still remember the days when coal was king here, and when “I owe my soul to the company store” weren’t just the words of a song, but a way of life.
Mrs. Bertha Umholtz, 90, who moved here from Adams County as a young bride shortly after the turn of the century, is one who remembers. “We didn’t have all the conveniences that are available today,” said Mrs. Umholtz, “but to me it has always been a pleasant place to live. Even when contending with the dirt and grime that were part of being a coal miner’s wife.”
From 1900 into the mid-1930s Williamstown was a shopper’s paradise. According to records, there were more than 30 business establishments in the main two-block business district from West Street east to Tunnel.
The memory of Williamstown as a coal company town and of working in the mines also is still vividly clear for 78-year-old Russel Shomper of Vine Street.
Shomper went to work in the Spring of 1911 at the Unrival Hosiery Mill, the only alternative to working in the mines at that time. “The pay was five cents an hour,” said Shomper, “and I remember my first pay check was $3.20. I gave the pay at home,” added Shomper. “I was given the change for spending, all 20 cents of it.”
The age for working in the mines was 14. On turning 14 in September of 1911 Shomper found employment at the mines. He said the pay scale was $9.87 for a six-day work week or a 48-hour shift. “Mule drivers,” he said, “got $10.20.”
With the closing of the mines Shomper became an independent miner and is still active today. “Working the mines was hard, dirty and hazardous,” he said. “But I believe I’d choose mining as a means of making a living if I had to do it over again.”
Sesquicentennial Week will be one of remembering for the 2,000 residents of this community. It will start with a Firemen’s Day event on Aug. 21 and conclude with a parade, which Committee Chairman Joseph Welsh says will be the biggest ever held here, on Aug. 28.
A 72-acre scar of burnt-orange rock spread across the mountain north of town, the remains of a three million cubic yard refuse bank that burned for 40 years, belching smoke and ash across the town, a few neatly remodeled houses clinging to the mountainside where once more than 100 unpainted company homes were quickly built to house the miners, and a tunnel opening to what was the finest anthracite mine in the country, are the last traces linking this community to its past as a coal-mining town.
The coal-mining days were colorful and perhaps important in the development of the town. But so far as many of today’s residents are concerned, young and old alike, the closing of the mine turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
As we near 50 years of this article being written, some of the characterizations of my hometown feel like a remnant of a lost era when the fate of the town still had yet to be decided.
Read more about Williamstown, Pennsylvania
Aerial image shows Williamstown Colliery before its closure | 1938
“Abandoned as Unprofitable” – Williamstown Colliery Closes Forever
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