This striking 1940s photograph captures the early efforts to remove the infamous “Burning Banks” on Big Lick Mountain, just north of Williamstown, Pennsylvania.

For decades, this massive coal culm pile – a mix of waste rock and fine anthracite – had smoldered and steamed as an underground fire raged within at the site of the former Williamstown Colliery. The thick smoke and sulfur-laced steam hung over Williamstown’s eastern edge, casting a haze over daily life in this once-bustling coal town.

To reclaim what could still be salvaged, a special railroad spur was built to connect the site to the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Lykens Valley line, hauling out usable coal from the burning mound. Efforts to extinguish the blaze and reclaim the land continued for decades after World War II, until the stubborn fire was finally snuffed out in the 1970s during Operation Scarlift.

The end of the Burning Banks marked the close of one of Williamstown’s most enduring and smoky landmarks – a vivid reminder of the environmental scars left behind by the anthracite coal industry in the Coal Region.

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Read more about environmental impacts in the Coal Region

PBS documentary shares the story of the Centralia Mine Fire | 1982

Photograph of experts conferring on reforestation in the Coal Region – 1940

Photograph shows a scarred landscape somewhere in Northeastern Pennsylvania | 1964

“Killed all the fish for miles around” – A lament for Coal Region waterways – 1895

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