INDIANA--It took Denise Dusza Weber a decade's worth of research, more than 100 first-person interviews and two sabbaticals from her previous job as a high school history teacher, to complete a massive 446-page chronicle of her childhood home, Vintondale.
And that only covers the years up to 1930 in the often "wild and wooly" past of the former coal mining town near the border of Cambria and Indiana counties.
Weber will share some of those tales today at 7 p.m. during a presentation titled "Delano's Doman: History of a Coal Town." Her presentation will take place at the Blue Spruce Park Lodge near Ernest.
Warren Delano was among the leading investors in Vintondale, when it and its coal mines were established in 1894.
Although he was the maternal uncle of a future Democratic president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Warren Delano "was a staunch Republican and a strict company man," Weber noted.
Like FDR, Warren Delano, was a product of New York's affluent Hudson River Valley. According to Weber's research, which included a visit to archives at FDR's Hyde Park Homestead, the Delano family had made one fortune in railroads and coal before losing it in a worldwide financial panic in the 1840s.
"They went to China, got into the opium business and recouped their money," Weber said. When they returned to the states, the Delanos reinvested in the domestic trades they knew best--including coal mining in Indiana and Cambria counties.
In addition to Vintondale, which lies just across the border in Cambria County, Delano developed the smaller coal mining towns of Wehrum and Claghorn, in nearby southeastern Indiana County.
According to Weber, Vintondale is the one of the three communities that survived because the mining company sold many of the lots to private owners. In Wehrum, "The company owned all the lots," and the town promptly faded after the mine was shuttered.
