The company that helped create the American Industrial Revolution is back
“The No. 8 Colliery had a million dollar breaker… an anthracite region skyscraper, as its centerpiece, and was the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company’s showplace when the storied Panther Valley coal industry was booming.” - mining historian Jack Yalch.
The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company is back. Contrary to the rumors of its demise forty years ago in the book, The Death of a Great Company, LC&N is alive and well and living in Coaldale.
Part 1 – A New LC&N
“We like Coaldale,” said Sarah Curran Smith - Director of Communications & Special Projects at the resurrected LC&N. “And I think Coaldale likes us.”
The company, founded in 1989 by James J. Curran Jr. and partners, had run into hard times in recent years due to high production costs and low market prices in their anthracite coal operations. In order to generate cash flow during this downturn, they tried accepting certain waste materials as fill for their Springdale quarry near Tamaqua. Public outcry, adding to the existing economic problems, resulted in LC&N abandoning the idea and led to a reorganization of the company.
James J. Curran Jr. has turned over operations of the company to his four children, but will remain as Chairman of the Board. The new management of LC&N is composed of: Sean D. Curran – President & CEO, James J. Curran III – Vice President Operations, is president and CEO, Caitlin Curran Hatch, General Counsel, and Sarah Curran Smith - Director of Communications & Special Projects.
In Sept. 2006, the company moved the main offices from Tamaqua to a double-wide trailer at the former site of LC&N’s No. 8 colliery in Coaldale. The Coaldale site is near the center of the vast coal reserves of over 8,000 acres that are contiguous from Tamaqua to just outside the borough of Jim Thorpe.
Along Rt. 209, just outside the entrance to the LC&N property, is a small park with a Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor wayside sign. The sign commemorates the former colliery with a quote from mining historian Jack Yalch, “The No. 8 Colliery had a million dollar breaker… an anthracite region skyscraper, as its centerpiece, and was the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company’s showplace when the storied Panther Valley coal industry was booming.”
The Coaldale site, developed around the No. 8 Mine, which opened in 1845, supported a colliery workforce that at its peak employed 2,000 men. The mine had eight levels, with the deepest descending 1,200 feet. It had 1,425 mine cars and 24-miles of track and haulage tunnels.
In 1922, an earlier wooden breaker, destroyed by fire, was replaced with a modern design of steel and concrete capable of daily processing 7,800 tons of raw materials and filling 90 rail cars with anthracite coal.
The colliery had a Visitors Center that attracted visitors, government officials, and celebrities for tours of the mine and colliery. One of the points of interest was a large petrified tree, hundreds of millions of years old, located 850-feet below ground.
The No. 8 breaker was closed in 1954. The mine entrance was sealed and the breaker was raised. All that remains of the colliery are brick wash shanty buildings and a dynamite bunker. LC&N plans to rehab the structures into office space. There are also mounds of coal waste called “culm” or “silt,” and nearby is the #99 open pit mine—a construction that appears so vast that you can imagine the Empire State Building had been buried there on its side and removed.
By 1962, with is original markets of coal mining and coal transportation no longer profitable, the original LC&N reorganized into two companies: LC&N and LCN Corporation. LC&N’s major asset was the Lehigh & Susquehanna Railroad, and the wholly-owned subsidiary, LCN Corporation, controlled everything else.
LC&N made deals with the Reading, Jersey Central, and Lehigh Valley Railroad to rent or sell the Lehigh & Susquehanna Railroad, but the railroads ran into financial difficulties. In 1969, LC&N opted to get out of a century and a half of operations in the coal and transportation business and entered the candy business by creating a subsidiary, the Candy Corporation of America.
The company acquired Cella’s Confection, Inc., a company that specialized in chocolate-covered cherries. In 1985, Cella’s was dissolved and its assets were sold to the Tootsie Rolls Company. The chocolate-covered cherries are still being produced and are available at local quick marts.
Continued in Part 2 – From Old Company to New Company
