The massive Williamstown mining complex in northern Dauphin County, Pennsylvania operated from 1866 to 1942.

Located on the border of Dauphin and Schuylkill counties about 20 miles east of the Susquehanna River, the community of Williamstown was built on the success of the town’s anthracite coal mine.

First efforts to tunnel through Big Lick Mountain at Williamstown began in 1856-57 and expanded during the Civil War under the Summit Branch Railroad Company. A town was laid out, named Williamstown after a Revolutionary War-era traveler who passed through the region and operated a sawmill nearby, and the transportation of anthracite from the mine complex began in 1866.

The mine became a subsidiary of the powerful Pennsylvania Railroad in the 1870s and operated as such until the early 20th century. The colliery grew to the terrain below Big Lick Mountain and neighboring Bear Valley, extending as deep as 1,600 feet below the surface by the 1920s. In its earliest years, 1866 to 1870, the Williamstown Colliery ranked as one of the largest producers of anthracite coal in the world.

However, by the late 1920s, the expense of mining coal at such great depths and the changing of the American economy from steam to oil power saw the price of anthracite begin to drop. By the 1930s, with the Great Depression in full swing, the anthracite industry in Williams Valley, including at Williamstown, collapsed.

The Williamstown Colliery was officially shuttered on January 30, 1942. Over the subsequent years, the colliery was dismantled and sold for scrap. Today, only crumbling ruins remain of a mining operation that helped fuel the Industrial Revolution and served as the lifeblood for the community at the base of Big Lick Mountain below the Williamstown Tunnel.

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