In 1911, growth of the mines required still more workers, and the firm of Kline and Potts added thirty additional homes to the town. Single houses measured twenty-four feet by twenty-six feet and contained seven rooms. Double, or two-family houses, according to Hyde-Murphy's plans, had dimensions of twenty-eight feet by thirty feet and had five rooms on each side. In the late fall of 1905 the railroad was completed to Sagamore, enabling the Hyde-Murphy firm to ship in materials for the construction of the first ninety houses. At the hotel, on the site of the future town, the company doctor, officials and construction foremen lived in comfort while supervising the development of the new operation. In August 1905 the Indiana Times reported that the B&S had awarded a contract to the Hyde-Murphy Company of Ridgeway, Pennsylvania, "to erect houses for the coal mines near Wallopsburg." Before construction began on the houses, however, William Hayes, aided financially by the B&S, built a sixty-room hotel, known as Hotel #19. Some early residents claim the community was named in honor of a New York state Indian chief, while others believe, since the town was founded during the administration of Theodore Roosevelt, that it was named after the President's home, "Sagamore Hill." One month later, a corps of engineers, with transits and maps in hand, could be seen in Armstrong County near Wallopsburg (now Beyer) busily laying out streets and alleys for a new mining town. These "shanties" housed the nearly seven hundred laborers who arrived within the next few weeks as work on the railroad lines commenced with vigor. In the next several months, a "shanty town" of hastily built cabins grew up on the Brown farm near Marchand. The B&S awarded a contract to a Potter County Firm, Greco and Company, which immediately formulated strategy for the construction of a seventeen-mile line between Juneau and Plumville. By March of the same year, construction on the B&S extension was underway. In July, the same paper announced that the B&S had secured trackage rights over the BR&P from DuBois to Juneau and planned to build their own line form Juneau to Plumville. It is the intention (of the railroad company) to market the output of the Goodyears' coal field near Plumville." The road, as presently located, runs almost parallel with the BR&P between Sykesville and Cloe. The Punxsutawney Spirit said in the Januarticle, "is authority for the statement that it is the intention of the Buffalo and Susquehanna Railway to extend its road south. The new town was quickly populated, and Indiana County residents journeyed out on foot and in buggies to stare in amazement at the houses, tipple and partially constructed coke ovens standing on the formerly peaceful site of the old McKees' Mills.Įxcitement over the founding of Ernest had barely died down, however, when the Indiana Democrat breathlessly announced the possibility of another new coal town in the vicinity of Indiana County. Beginning in 1903, the Rochester and Pittsburgh Coal and Iron Company build the town of Ernest along the extended line of the railroad. The extension of the BR&P from Jefferson County in 1902 opened up the rich, largely untapped coalfields of Indiana County. The lifeline of the early coal towns was the gleaming track of a coal-carrying railroad, the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh Railway, which transported coal as far as the Great Lakes region. Some of these new communities bore the names of prosperous New York businessmen or their wives: Walston, Adrian, Eleanora and Yatesboro. On huge tracts of land once occupied by fields of growing grain or herds of grazing cattle, rows of identical houses now stood. Many such communities grew up, seemingly overnight, in Jefferson, Clearfield, Cambria, and Armstrong counties. By the turn of the century, the company-owned mining town was firmly established as a way of life for thousands of western Pennsylvania coal miners.
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