Coaldale, Pa.—Two Different Towns, Two Issuing Banks

Co-author Adam Stroup has identified another instance in Pennsylvania where two towns of the same name had issuing banks. This time, it is Coaldale.

We now know of four such cases in the country, all in Pennsylvania.

There were two Coaldales with issuing banks. Both towns were officially established as boroughs under Pennsylvania law, one in Schuylkill County centered in the eastern third of the state west of Allentown and the other 160 miles to the west in Bedford County, which is hard against the Maryland border.

The Schuylkill Coaldale was settled in 1827 and incorporated in 1906. The 2020 population was 2,426, and the land area was 2.2 square miles. It hosted The First National Bank of Coaldale, charter 9739, organized on Jan.12, 1910, and chartered on April 26, 1910.

The Schuylkill Coaldale was one of the principal early coal mining centers in Pennsylvania. It is situated in the southern anthracite coal district in the Panther Creek Valley. Anthracite is hard coal that burns hot. The dominant producer there was the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company. LC&N built the western terminus of the nation’s second gravity railroad, the Summit Hill and Mauch Chunk Gravity Railway used to ship coal 9 miles down to the Lehigh canal. The company operated multiple mines throughout Coaldale and the rest of the Panther Creek Valley at the time when railroads were coming into their own. The mines, the railroads that LC&N built, and a small shirt factory were the main historic industries in Coaldale. Coaldale lies above one of the richest coal seams in the district, which is still being mined.

A measure of the importance of the Schuylkill Coaldale is the fact that it was targeted by reform crusader Mother Mary Jones, who organized numerous strikes and protests on behalf of coal miners around the country for improved pay, safer working conditions, and child labor laws. She descended on Coaldale to launch a march for child workers that started in Coaldale and proceeded to McAdoo.

The Bedford Coaldale is little more than a wide spot in the road at 0.03 square miles with a 2020 census of 128. It was incorporated in 1865. The bank there was named The Broad Top National Bank of Coaldale, charter 11188, organized May 17, 1918, and chartered June 7, 1918. There is no longer a hint of an old bank building there in Google Street View unless the bank occupied one of the old clapboard buildings that line Main Street.

For our purposes, the most interesting of these two banks is The Broad Top National. The post office that served the bank and the town was called Six Mile Run, after the scenic river that flows southwestward through town. The Six Mile Run post office was established in 1851, long before the Schuylkill Coaldale post office in 1871.

The town for The Broad Top National Bank is listed as Six Mile Run in the 1920 through 1925 annual reports of the Comptroller of the Currency. However, that post office name doesn’t appear on the Series of 1902 notes being issued then. Technically, Six Mile Run should have appeared in the postal location written in script on the left side of the title blocks on the notes. Clearly, the clerks in the Comptroller’s office knew to ship notes for the bank to Six Mile Run. In contrast, if a note holder wanted to redeem his note for legal tender currency, he just may have shown up in the wrong Coaldale 160 miles to the east.

Adding significantly to the history of The Broad Top National Bank was that P.N. Risser, an entrepreneur and organizer of the Bedford County Trust Co., bought into the Broad Top bank, becoming its president in 1925. The business of the bank was then moved 26 miles down the road to Bedford and renamed Farmers National Bank of Bedford, a move and title that was approved on Oct. 21, 1925, by the Comptroller of the Currency. Within two years, they added trust powers, resulting in yet a second title change to Farmers National Bank and Trust Company of Bedford, approved on July 25, 1927.

The Schuylkill Coaldale bank survived the entire note-issuing era with a circulation of $45,000 in 1934. The Bedford Coaldale bank ran into trouble during the Great Depression, so it was placed in a conservatorship on March 28, 1933, following FDR’s bank holiday, and then a receivership on Oct. 27, 1934. It had a closing circulation of $150,000.

Broad Top in the bank title clamors for an explanation. It refers to a geologic feature, specifically, an anomalous elongated northeast-southwest trending plateau comprised of almost flat-lying old sedimentary rocks sandwiched between steeply folded ridges of even older rocks in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Ridge and Valley Province. The rocks directly under Coaldale are largely of Pennsylvanian and Mississippian age. Pennsylvanian time was a magical era when huge, widespread, and thick coal deposits accumulated. Much of the coal in the Bedford-Coaldale area is of bituminous grade, that is, soft coal. The coalfield is known as the Broad Top Field.

The Broad Top is geographically classified as a plateau because it is comprised of flat-lying sedimentary rocks. Don’t confuse this designation with the image of a tabletop plateau that you would find in the Southwest. The Broad Top area has been deeply eroded so that when you visit the area, you find yourself in scenic, very hilly terrain. If you bother to look at the rocks in road cuts, you may discern that they are flat-lying, which caught the attention of geologists and coal miners.

The thing that thrilled us was the discovery of yet another pair of towns with the same name in the same state that hosted banks that issued notes. This obviously can sow confusion for national bank note location collectors.

Table 1 lists the known towns with duplicated town names in the same state that had note-issuing national banks. Gerald Dzara and Bob Liddell contributed entries to this list.

Forming a collection of notes from these banks would be a fantastic pursuit but a tough challenge!