Coal and coke built Connellsville. From its earliest settlement, coal played a part. Founder Zachariah Connell executed the town charter on March 21, 1793 and included the following language: "The said Zachariah Connell being desirous of giving all the encouragement and advantages that the nature of the case will admit of, consistent with his own interest and safety, doth hereby grant unto the inhabitants of said Town, their heirs, and assigns for ever, the free and full privilege of digging and removing from said Stone Coal Bank and Stone-Quarry to their habitation or place of abode within said town only any quantity of Coal and Stone necessary for their own particular use." Coal underpinned the region. The Connellsville coal and coke seam, part of the Pittsburgh seam, ran from Latrobe 42 miles to Fairchance. Another seam developed later, called the Klondike, continued into Greene County. The seam was about 3.5 miles wide and produced very pure coal. Connellsville was incorporated as a borough March 1, 1806. By 1833, the first coke was produced in a beehive oven in this region. Coke was used in iron foundries. It replaced charcoal when chestnut trees became scarce. Called "silver cinders" or "the bones of coal," coke was produced by baking coal in beehive-shaped brick ovens for 24 to 72 hours. The high temperatures burned off impurities, leaving almost pure carbon in a hard, porous form. Such fuel is ideal for making steel and withstands transport easier than the soft bituminous coal itself. Evelyn Hovanec, emeritus professor of English at Penn State Fayette, The Eberly Campus, and a founder of the Coal and Coke Center there, said historians have argued whether the first coke oven was built in Dawson or in Connellsville. "They were trying to use coke in iron factories prior to the coal and coke era. It was a very booming business in the early 1800s. The first commercial coke went out of Dawson down the Youghiogheny River," she said. At first, the new fuel was unusual, but in the early years of the Industrial Revolution, coke fueled the northern industrial rise during and after the Civil War. Coke-fired furnaces smelted the rails that enabled westward expansion. Connellsville prospered. "The Industrial Revolution started right here," Hovanec said. "Henry Clay Frick began his big thing with Andrew Carnegie in Pittsburgh, but they couldn't use the Yough to transport the coke, except in the spring. But once the railroads were in, the owners built spurs from mines," She said. Connellsville was the center of development of the Connellsville seam. The coal was taken to the Monongahela River by rail and then floated to Pittsburgh." By 1856, the Pittsburgh and Connellsville Gas-Coal and Company's works opened on land just north of Connellsville owned by Daniel R. Davidson. By 1881, 295 ovens burned the mine's coal into coke. More than 5 million pounds of coke a week was shipped to Connellsville from Davidson during the first six months of 1881. And Davidson was just one coal and coke operation. In 1906, the city's centennial year, Connellsville shipped 12,058,000 tons of coke; the lower part of the seam shipped 5,188,000 tons, according to the Connellsville Weekly Courier. The H.C. Frick Coke Company erected an arch of coke at the intersection of Main Street (now Crawford Avenue) and Pittsburgh Street. the letters HCFCCo were fitted with 1,500 light bulbs, making the arch the first electric sign in Connellsville. As years passed, mining expanded south and west to Fairchance. By 1921, mines had opened in Indiana and Greene counties. Coalbrook operated 76 ovens, Trotter operated 464 and Davidson operated 370 ovens in 1921.The smoke from the ovens darkened Connellsville's skies by day and made them glow at night as coal burned into coke. Connellsville and the entire Connellsville coke region prospered. Enormous fortunes could be made in coal and coke, as well as in auxiliary industries such as railroads, brick works, explosives manufacturing, glass manufacturing, machine shops, engineering and other fields that supported the mines and the coke works. "The coal and coke industries spawned other industries," Hovanec said. Beginning in the 1880s, thousands of immigrants arrived from southern and eastern Europe and African Americans migrated north to work the mines and the coke ovens. Patch towns sprang up outside the larger communities of Connellsville and Uniontown. While the exact origin of the term "patch" is unclear, mine owners were frequently German and the word "pacht" means tenant or tenancy. "Miners and coke workers rented their houses from the coal company," Hovanec said. "The company had to build housing in the proximity of the work regions. People who came worked for lowest wages." In 1860, 39,000 people lived in Fayette County. By1910 the census indicated there were 110,000 residents. Immigration was contentious. "In the patches, the immigrant people went Democrat. They were Catholic or Orthodox. They had Slovak, Polish, Croatian churches. In the towns, the original inhabitants were Protestant, Republican and Northern European," Hovanec said, adding that the differing cultures formed a mosaic. "Today, we don't think anything of it. We put it all together. Southwestern Pennsylvania is unique," she said. "A restaurant will serve lasagna and halupki. Everyone, no matter their heritage, knows what kielbosi is. Big cities may have this, but we are rural. It's unique." Not only the culture, but the industry blossomed until the First World War. Then, the technology changed and by-product coke ovens became more prevalent than beehive ovens. The Semet-Solvay Works in Dunbar closed. then H.C. Frick and U.S. Steel made a corporate decision to build coke ovens near the steel mills. Hovanec added that in the 1920s, an underground conveyor was built in Leisenring to transport coal to the Monongahela River. In the following decade, "coke ovens went down to almost nothing." But the Second World War restored the area, if only for a time. "The Connellsville area became a beehive of activity again. They rebuilt some of the ovens at Shoaf," Hovanec said. The Korean War also brought a need for coking coal in the early and mid-1950s. But the boom had passed. Support industries, such as the West Penn Railway, which ran trolleys from Masontown to Greensburg, stopped running in the 1950s; brick factories and other auxiliary industries closed. In 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency shut down the last of the beehive ovens. The Shoaf works in Fayette County and the Alverton ovens in Westmoreland County were the last to go out. "While the heyday was here," Hovanec said, "Connellsville coke was the standard by which all coke was judged. We couldn't have won two world wars and settled the West without Connellsville coke. We were at the center." Hovanec regrets that more residents don't appreciate the richness of their heritage. "They should be proud, but they are ashamed. The people who worked the mines and coke ovens brought great qualities of honesty, hard work, qualities that should be celebrated," she said. "It's time for the people here to take pride in their heritage, in what their ancestors did for the world."

---

Copyright ©2026— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)

---