Who was the village of Eckley really named after?
How did Eckley come to be called Eckley? Read on to find the answer.
Prior to the 1850's Eckley was not a mining town,
but a rural, forested village called Shingletown. It was located on land
owned by the Tench Coxe Estate. The inhabitants took advantage of the surrounding
woodlands and made shingles to be sold in White Haven and Hazleton. These
goods were traded for the necessities of life, such as "whiskey, pork and
tobacco".
In 1853, four prospectors came to Shingletown and
found that the land contained several veins of coal. Within the year these
four men, Richard Sharpe, Asa Foster, Francis Weiss and John Leisenring,
formed Sharpe, Leisenring and Company, later known as Sharpe, Weiss and
Company. Judge Charles Coxe of Philadelphia, executor of the Tench Coxe
Estate, granted the company a twenty-year lease for the establishment and
operation of a colliery on these 1500 acres of land. In 1854 the company
began work on this, the Council Ridge Colliery, and soon the landscape
was transformed from pastoral to industrial.
By autumn of 1854 the company had constructed a
saw mill to provide lumber necessary for the colliery buildings, such as
the breaker, stable and store house. They also began building a village
to house the colliery workers. The scattered forest dwellings of the residents
of Shingletown were quickly replaced by two rows of red wooden frame houses
with black trim. These were neatly lined along one main street which ran
from east to west.
This new village was called Fillmore, presumable
in honor of President Millard Fillmore who left office in 1853. Several
years later, the company applied for a post office for their town and learned
that a town in the Centre County had already appropriated the name. As
a result, the town was renamed Eckley in 1857 in honor of Judge Coxe's
third son, Eckley B. Coxe who was then 17 years old.
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