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A coal town, also known as a coal camp or patch, is a type of company town or mining community established by the employer, a mining company, which imports workers to the site to work the mineral find.
A coal patch (called "coal camp" outside of Pennsylvania) is a town where everything was built and owned by a coal company, including schools, churches, stores, theatres, and residential structures. Coal patches in Western Pennsylvania generally date from the 1870s through the 1920s.
The patches consisted of from a few dozen to a hundred frame houses, with a company store and perhaps a chapel. When they arrived in the patch, residents typically had few or no possessions, whether coming from another area of the coal region or after disembarking from an immigrant ship.
The hundreds of coal mines opened in the region at the turn of the 20th century created a corresponding number of new company towns known as patches. In Fayette County alone, more than 140...
Mar 28, 2007 · The Brewer Co. produces both coal tar sealer and asphalt-based sealer, but sells the asphalt-based sealer to retailers in 5 gallon pails and coal tar emulsion to contractors in bulk. The Brewer...
- Allan Heydorn
“The houses are made much as a bag is made, to hold in rather than to look pretty. They are square, bare, cheerless looking frame structures for the most part, hideously painted and guiltless of ornamentation.
In the early 1900s Pennsylvania had more company towns, which were known as " coal patches ," than any other state in the nation. A 1922 survey estimated that a little less than half of the state's estimated 180,000 bituminous coal workers lived in "independent communities."
