Richmondale Colliery

The Richmondale Colliery was located in the town of Richmondale, just outside of Forest City. The Colliery was named after William H. Richmond, a well-established businessman from Scranton, not something unusual in the naming of mining towns.

Since one of his southern mines was named number 3, his mine in this area was dubbed “Richmond No. 4.” He took two steps in conjunction with the digging of the mine: one was to build a very unusual coal breaker; the other was to enter into an operating agreement with the New York, Ontario & Western Railroad.

Richmond put up a 187-foot steel tower right above his shaft No. 4. Coal cars were hoisted directly from the mine interior, well underground, to 187 feet in the air, where they were unloaded into a chute supported by an all-steel truss running downward to the top of the breaker. It is thought that in 1891, Richmond’s breaker was probably the tallest Pennsylvania structure north of Philadelphia.

The O&W was a relatively small railroad which did not own any of its own mines as was the case with many of the other railroads. Richmond would do the mining and O&W would haul the coal to market. To reach the Richmond breaker, the O&W built a standard-gauge rail spur from the Northwest Junction in Simpson, a few miles away, crossing the Lackawanna River in the valley and up the hill to the area now known as Richmondale.

Richmond’s mine and breaker gave rise to the village name Richmondale, and the people began to call the colliery the Richmondale colliery. From its beginning as Richmond No. 4, then Richmondale Colliery, it later was named the following: Elk Hill, Scranton Coal, Elk Brook; then Richmondale again; then Lackawanna Anthracite Mining, Pearl and lastly Rubin-with most name changes coming as the ownership passed from company to company and owner to owner. The original 187-foot tower was razed and replaced before finally being dismantled as coal mining died in this area of the Anthracite region.

During the breaker’s lifetime, 1893 to 1945, a total of 2,384,100 tons of coal was mined by anywhere from a low of 36 workers in its final years to 230 workers during the 1893-99 period.