Alaska, Northumberland County, Pennsylvania

Alaska was a coal town in Mount Carmel Township, Pennsylvania, United States. Centered on the Alaska Colliery. In maps and local usage, it was also called “Mt. Carmel Junction,” since the Reading Railroad’s Mt. Carmel Branch connected to the main Williamsport (Shamokin, Pennsylvania) Division at Alaska.^[1]

Anthracite mining was introduced to the Mount Carmel area in the 1830s, but the Alaska site was undeveloped until the 1870s. In 1874, the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company (P.&R. Coal & Iron) built a deep mine shaft and breaker at the site. Early in construction, the engine, boiler, and shaft houses of the Alaska shaft were destroyed by a March 15, 1874 fire. A breaker and support buildings were subsequently erected (historical accounts note a new breaker was completed in 1875 after a prior fire^[2], and another was destroyed by fire on June 5, 1886). The mine employed a large workforce: by 1920, Alaska Colliery had 777 miners and produced about 300,000 tons of coal that year^[3]

By 1880, the population of the surrounding area had grown to over 7,000 residents. The community's demographics shifted during this period, with an initial population of German, Irish, and Welsh immigrants followed by an increasing influx of Eastern Europeans, including Poles, Lithuanians, and Slavs, toward the end of the 19th century. This diversity resulted in the establishment of various ethnic parishes and fraternal organizations within the township.^[4]

Like many small anthracite coal patches in the Middle Coal Field of Pennsylvania, Alaska declined as the regional coal industry contracted in the early to mid-twentieth century. Pennsylvania Department of Mines annual reports from the late 1800s through the early 1900s document active production at Alaska Colliery under the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, but production decreased as deep mining became less profitable.^[5]

By the 1950s, the deep-shaft mines of the P&R C&I (which became Reading Anthracite in 1954) were increasingly expensive to operate due to high labor costs and the constant need to pump water from deep underground. When the company began to favor surface strip mining, the existing patch towns became an impediment. Strip mining involves removing the entire upper layer of soil and rock to access coal seams closer to the surface, a process that necessitates the complete razing of any structures on the land.^[6]The specific razing of Alaska was carried out by the Reading Anthracite Company to facilitate these surface operations. In many cases, the company housing was demolished because the structures sat directly on top of coal deposits that could be reached more efficiently through stripping pits.^[7]Similar fates fell upon nearby communities like Logan and parts of Centralia, Pennsylvania that were not impacted by the fire but were simply in the path of expanding strip mines.^[6] By the early 21st century, the Alaska patch had "gradually disintegrated into nothing," replaced by a landscape of stony debris and active or abandoned strip pits.^[7]

• Kulpmont, Pennsylvania
• Locust Gap, Pennsylvania
• Merrian, Pennsylvania
• Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania

40°47′01″N 076°26′15″W / 40.78361°N 76.43750°W / 40.78361; -76.43750