Our History

Greater Hazleton’s history dates back to the late 1700’s

Since the early 1800s, Greater Hazleton has been a region defined by business leaders who brought an innovative approach and their own unique perspectives to the work they did.

Whether it was anthracite coal pioneers like Ario Pardee and Eckley Coxe, who were fueled by the many ways coal mining could transform the region, or well-known business figures like Dr. Edgar L. Dessen, who knew the growth of business and industry could counteract the demise of the coal industry, Greater Hazleton developed under the guiding hand of innovative leaders who saw great potential for this area.

But to get a complete picture of Greater Hazleton’s history, we need to go back to the beginning, before there even was a Hazleton.

The Native Americans were the first to cross through the area. The first white settlers arrived during the Revolutionary War to bury members of a militia regiment slain by Natives and Tories during the Sugarloaf Massacre on September 11, 1780. Some of the soldiers then settled in St. Johns; others built homes along a “warrior’s path” that roughly followed the present-day Broad Street in downtown Hazleton.

In 1804, the first major road connecting the region to larger population centers was established, primarily for the logging industry. The Berwick Turnpike, today’s Route 93, was cut along an old trail that wound through the heart of our area. At that time, most of what is now designated as Hazleton remained a dense pine forest with thickets of hazel. The settlement was little more than a tollgate along the turnpike.

Legend has it that in 1826, John Charles, a hunter and War of 1812 veteran, first discovered coal in an area that would become Hazleton while digging for a groundhog.

He encountered the little black rock that would put Hazleton on the map in some woods near a dirt road running from present-day Jim Thorpe to Berwick. That wooded area is now the site of the Hazleton Shopping Center – on Broad Street.

By 1833, when blacksmiths and others had recognized the value of anthracite as a fuel, a young New Yorker named Arivistius “Ario” Pardee was hired to survey the area and to report the practicality of extending a railroad from Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe) to Beaver Meadows. The forward-thinking Pardee bought land in present-day Hazleton and is known as the founding father of Hazleton

He completed the railroad in three years and incorporated the Hazleton Coal Company in 1836. Pardee then built the first school on Church Street (where Hazleton City Hall now sits) in 1837 and a year later, the city’s first church, First Presbyterian, located at Broad and Church streets. He built his Pardee Mansion on the north side of Broad Street, between Church and Laurel streets.

Pardee’s company, the largest shipper of anthracite in Pennsylvania, operated mines in Cranberry, Crystal Ridge, Jeddo, Highland, Lattimer, Hollywood, Mount Pleasant and Hazleton. Hazleton outgrew the other patch towns to become the commercial center of the region.

Pardee also played a role in turning George B. Markle into one of Hazleton’s iconic citizens. Markle moved to the city when he was 22 and served as superintendent and bookkeeper of the Pardee family’s company store. He learned the coal mining industry through the Pardees and went on to start his own company, G.B. Markle & Co., along with a colliery in Jeddo that served as a major supplier of anthracite coal during the Civil War. Markle’s business acumen continued to grow. In 1867, he opened the Pardee, Markle & Grier banking house along with partners Pardee and W.A.M. Grier. Before he died in 1888, George Markle would assume ownership of the Hazleton Sentinel newspaper, which was founded in 1866 and has undergone several mergers to become today’s Standard-Speaker, the daily newspaper serving Greater Hazleton.

Another name synonymous with the area’s coal industry history is Eckley Coxe. Eckley, the grandson of Tench Coxe and his brothers inherited more than 80,000 acres of land that would prove to contain one of the most profitable coal veins in the area. Eckley, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in chemistry and physics and studied mining and mechanics in France, became president of Coxe Brothers and Company in 1865. He and his wife, Sophia, dedicated their lives to improving the education and safety of local miners. In addition to opening a hospital in Drifton to treat injured miners, the couple founded the Industrial School for Miners and Mechanics in 1879 to give miners an opportunity to learn science, math and English. After fire destroyed the school in 1888, Coxe rebuilt it as Mining and Mechanical Institute, which is now the co-ed independent MMI Preparatory School in Freeland. This education allowed a miner to grow to become a certified miner, foreman or superintendent. Coxe earned more than 100 patents for his inventions, including his traveling-grate furnace that captured tiny pieces of coal to burn as fuel. The furnace helped the coal ignite and burn without fracturing and eliminated the need to manually stoke the fire.

The town of Eckley was named after Coxe and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania named Eckley Miners’ Village as a museum in 1975, introducing visitors to the lifestyle of coal miners in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Before the 1850s, the area was a fo rested community in which inhabitants used the woodlands to create shingles and sell them in neighboring towns. Once coal was discovered, the area quickly became home to immigrant miners from around the world with houses ranging from single-family dwellings to two-and-a-half-story double houses. The village of Eckley also featured two churches, a six-room schoolhouse, a hotel, a company store and a doctor’s office.

Hazleton was officially incorporated as a borough on April 22, 1856 and was chartered as a city in 1891. From its inception in 1892, the Chamber played a key role in developing downtown Hazleton as the city’s commerce epicenter. In those early clays, the city was home to businesses that produced everything from stoves to caskets, stores that sold a variety of general merchandise and service providers like dentists and insurance agents. Hazleton always aimed to provide something for everyone in its business endeavors. This brings us back to George Markle and his family, another family name deeply rooted in Hazleton’s history. Alvan Markle took over the banking business from his father and changed the name to the Markle Banking & Trust Co. In 1910, he had the company’s office building on the corner of Broad and Wyoming streets demolished and began construction on the Markle Building. The 11-story structure was the first high-rise office building in the city and received a six-story addition in 1923. It featured many professional offices along with a bank and restaurant. Today, it remains one of the defining locations for business in downtown Hazleton.

Another large building in Hazleton, the Duplan, was the world’s largest silk mill. It opened in 1898, operated by a French firm, the Duplan Silk Company. The factory covered 600,000 square feet along Diamond Avenue following two expansions and had 1,675 looms and 144,000 spindles. Duplan’s founder, Jean Duplan, was an innovator and moved the company from individually dyeing yarn to piece-dyeing a completed woven cloth in order to consistently capitalize on the most current style demands. Duplan, which began manufacturing artificial silk (known as rayon) in 1911 and later produced nylon, operated other local plants in Kingston, Wilkes-Barre, Nanticoke and Dorranceton (a town that later merged with Kingston).

Despite these early efforts to diversify Hazleton’s business sector, the region still felt a heavy threat from the demise of the anthracite coal industry, which began after World War I. In 1917, the record year for anthracite, more than 100 million tons were dug and more than 180,000 men worked in the mines in the region. From the end of World War I to the end of the century, however, the amount of anthracite mined and the men employed in mining declined, as oil competed with coal for the heating market. World War II triggered a brief rebound for anthracite producers. When a strike was called in the middle of the war President Franklin D. Roosevelt nationalized the mines in 1943 so coal remained available. Following the war, Americans preferred to run their furnaces on oil, a cleaner type of heat. Companies were removing less coal from the earth but paying more to pump water out of the mines. Floods overwhelmed the pumps after Hurricanes Hazel in 1954 and Diane in 1955.

The mines closed, costing Hazleton its major industry just after its second-largest employer, the Duplan silk mill, closed in 1953.
The decline of the local coal industry was most evident in the numbers. Facing unemployment that neared 23 percent in the city, the Hazleton area was at one of its lowest points. More than 13,500 men were employed in the mines in the late 1920s, but that number plummeted to just 6,000 by 1950. One man who would not let Hazleton disappear along with the coal mines was Dr. Edgar L. Dessen, a prominent local radiologist.

He spearheaded the organization of a group of local civic and business leaders to help Greater Hazleton’s economy further move in a manufacturing direction.
The group worked with the Greater Hazleton Chamber of Commerce and formed the Community Area New Development Organization, or CAN DO, to match Dessen’s philosophy that a “can do” attitude could save the great city. The organization created three fund raisers in an effort to build its economic development initiatve and attract companies to the area. The “Dime-A-Week” campaign asked workers to contribute $5.20 a year, while the Mile of Dimes campaign saw supporters tape dimes along Broad Street. The third campaign included_red lunch pails used as piggy banks in which area residents could deposit their loose change. When the drives ended, CAN DO had raised $14,000, which it used to buy 500 acres of land that is now the site of Valmont Industrial Park. A second initiative hoping to raise $500,000 to construct shell buildings resulted in a windfall of $760,000 toward the efforts.

After CAN DO laid the foundation of its first industrial park with years of hard work, General Foam Corporation became the first company to open in Valmont Industrial Park and brought 100 new jobs to the area. Other companies soon followed and Hazleton was alive again with thousands of jobs generating millions of dollars in payroll. Economic development improved the quality of life in the area and resulted in more industries looking to locate in Greater Hazleton.
A crucial component of attracting these national and international companies to the area was having major transportation routes in place here. When the success of the coal industry began to dwindle in the 1950s, area business executives knew they would have to act fast to establish adequate transportation routes in the region that could attract the businesses and industries they hoped would become the future of Greater Hazleton’s economic development. However, original plans called for Interstates 80 and 81 to be positioned at least 40 miles away from the area. A group of executives, including representatives from the Chamber of Commerce and CAN DO, traveled consistently to interstate road hearings and lobbied federal and state officials to consider moving the two routes closer to Hazleton.

Greater Hazleton became known as the “Crossroads of the East” in 1966 when the local portions of interstates 80 and 81 were dedicated. Several interchanges opened around the junction over the next 35 years, including the dedication in 1999 of the Route 424 exit on 1-81 that is known as the Greater Hazleton Chamber of Commerce Beltway.

Within three years after the local portions of the interstates were dedicated, CAN DO began plans for Humboldt Industrial Park, which opened in 1972. The Park was designed to provide many of the crucial amenities that industrial corporations look for in a prime location.

CAN DO further expanded its imprint on Greater Hazleton when it opened McAdoo Industrial Park in 1989 and the CAN DO Corporate Center in 1995. The McAdoo Park offered acres of industrial space for companies that didn’t need a high-profile location next to an interstate highway. The corporate center in Drums, adjacent to Interstate 80, was designed to house white collar businesses and light assembly operations.

In the early 1990s, Hazleton focused its revitalization efforts around not only on what it could do in the present but what its plans envisioned for the future. The city developed the Comprehensive Plan that detailed its revitalization plans for the next 10 years. This included the creation of a downtown Hazleton business district designed to have amenities that appealed to both business people and shoppers. Today, downtown Hazleton is the epicenter of business and entrepreneurship for a region that is well-known on a regional, state, national and international level.