St. Clair, Pennsylvania
| St. Clair | |||
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 St. Clair, North 2nd Street |
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| Location in Pennsylvania | |||
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| Basic data | |||
| Foundation : | 1850 | ||
| State : | United States | ||
| State : | Pennsylvania | ||
| County : | Schuylkill County | ||
| Coordinates : | 40 ° 43 ′ N , 76 ° 11 ′ W | ||
| Time zone : | Eastern ( UTC − 5 / −4 ) | ||
| Residents : | 2,854 (as of: 2018) | ||
| Population density : | 894.7 inhabitants per km 2 | ||
| Area : | 3.19 km 2 (approx. 1 mi 2 ) of which 3.19 km 2 (approx. 1 mi 2 ) are land |
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| Height : | 225 m | ||
| Postal code : | 17970 | ||
| Area code : | +1 570 | ||
| FIPS : | 42-67224 | ||
| GNIS ID : | 1185877 | ||
| Website : | www.stclair-gov.org | ||
.jpg) St. Clair from the air |
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St. Clair is a small town ( borough ) in Schuylkill County in the east of the US state Pennsylvania . The place was first settled in 1831 and called St. Clair and incorporated as a self-governing municipality in 1850.
geography
The place is located in a narrow valley in the middle of the anthracite district of eastern Pennsylvania in the Valley and Ridge Zone of the Appalachians , about 3.5 km north of Pottsville , the county seat of Schuylkill County. It is traversed in a north-south direction by Mill Creek, which flows two km further south at Port Carbon into the East Branch of the Schuylkill River .
The Pennsylvania Route 61 runs from Pottsville in the south through St. Clair to the north and has 8 km north of the village connection to Interstate 81 between Harrisburg in the southwest and Wilkes-Barre in the northeast. In an east-west direction, the place is crossed by the Quadrant Route (country road) PA 1006.
The immediate vicinity of St. Clair is characterized by a number of completely or partially charred opencast pits, some of which have also been filled with water.
history
The settlement of St. Clair, named after the first name of the first landowner there, began with the rapidly expanding coal mining that began there in the second quarter of the 19th century , which resulted in a rapid influx of workers and an equally rapid expansion of the mining and transport infrastructure . As early as 1829 an approximately 7 km long horse-drawn railway line, the Mill Creek Mine Railroad, was built from Port Carbon to Mine Hill Gap northwest of St. Clair, on which the coal-laden wagons on wooden rails by horses to the loading docks on the Schuylkill Canal in Port Carbon were pulled. In 1831 the first street of the new town, which at the time had eight houses, was laid out. Road connections to Pottsville and Port Carbon followed a few years later, and in 1844/45 the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad built their iron Mill Creek branch line from Port Carbon to St. Clair and further north to New Castle. As early as April 1850, the Borough St. Clair was spun off from the New Castle township and constituted as an independent municipality. The population had grown from 605 in 1845 to more than 2000 in 1850.
With the increasing demand and the equally growing coal production in the vicinity, the place flourished. The Census of 1860 showed already 4901 inhabitants, an increase of nearly 150% in just ten years, and in 1870 the number had grown to 5726th A railway connection to the north, completed in 1862, enabled coal to be transported from the mines there through St. Clair to the south and east. The almost total dependence on coal also caused a long and severe recession in the 1870s ( Great Depression (1873-1896) ), which was reflected in the sharply shrinking population: in 1880 there were only 4,149, in 1890 only 3,681.
From around 1880 things started to pick up again, which is particularly evident from the considerable expansion of the local railway infrastructure. The Pennsylvania Railroad built a line through the place, put on a train station and offered passenger services. The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad acquired a large area immediately south of the town in 1903 and built what was then the largest loading and marshalling yard in the world between 1909 and 1913 , with 63 tracks of almost 75 km in total and a capacity of 2,861 freight cars . The circular locomotive shed held 52 locomotives . This conveyed by continued growth in coal production boom lasted until the beginning of the Great Depression , and in 1930 the population reached by St. Clair its highest level of the 7296th
After that, both coal production and the number of inhabitants decreased steadily. The Pennsylvania Railroad ended its passenger service to St. Clair in 1940, the Reading Company in 1948. With the increased advent of truck transport in the 1950s, the end of the railway in St. Clair came. The Reading Company gave up its large loading yard in the early 1960s, and the engine shed was shut down in 1964 and demolished in 1972. The area, on which almost all buildings had since been demolished, was sold in 1972 to the Greater Pottsville Industrial Development Corporation, which was planning to relocate industrial companies there. The transition from underground to open pit mining and the associated mechanization also resulted in the loss of hundreds of jobs, and the population of St. Clair decreased to 5159 in 1960 and further to 4037 in 1980.
In 1976 only two large opencast mines were still in operation. Ten years later, the Pine Forest Mine operated by Reading Anthracite was also closed, and since then only the huge mine at Wadesville, just west of St. Clair, in the area of New Castle Township, has been in operation. The number of residents of St. Clair has now dropped to less than 3,000.
Population development
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St. Michael Orthodox Church
Roman Catholic St. Clare of Assisi Church
First Primitive Methodist Church
Bethlehem Baptist Church
Holy Trinity Ukrainian Catholic Church
sons and daughters of the town
- Vincent Carter (1891–1972), American politician, 1929–1935 member of the US House of Representatives
- Michael Dudick (1916–2007), Bishop of the Passaic Eparchy of the Ruthenian Greek Catholic Church in the USA .
- Tim Holden (born 1957), American politician, 1993-2013 member of the US House of Representatives
- Sidney Rigdon (1793–1876), American clergyman and important figure in early Mormonism
Footnotes
- ↑ freepages.rootsweb.com
- ↑ magoo.com
- ↑ freepages.rootsweb.com
- ↑ Aerial view of the train station and engine shed
- ↑ freepages.rootsweb.com
- ↑ freepages.rootsweb.com
- ^ Pennsylvania.hometownlocator.com
literature
- Anthony FC Wallace : St. Clair: A Nineteenth-Century Coal Town's Experience with a Disaster-Prone Industry. Cornell University Press , Ithaca / London 1988, ISBN 0-8014-9900-3 .
- St. Clair Community and Historical Society: Around St. Clair (Images of America). Arcadia Publishing, 2009, ISBN 978-0-7385-6579-8 .
Web links
- Saint Clair Then and Now : Saint Clair Community and Historical Society Web Site
- Geological Society of America, Northeastern Section - 50th Annual Meeting (23-25 March 2015): From deep mines to strippings to Wal-mart: geology and anthracite mining history of the St. Clair area, southern anthracite field, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania - A tribute to Anthony FC Wallace, author of St. Clair (1987)
- 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica : Saint Clair