Alaska, Northumberland County, Pennsylvania

Anthracite mining was introduced to the Mount Carmel area in the 1830s, but the Alaska site remained undeveloped until the 1870s. In 1874, the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company (P.&R. Coal & Iron) built a deep mine shaft and breaker at the site. Early in construction, the engine, boiler, and shaft houses of the Alaska shaft were destroyed by a fire on March 15, 1874.^[2] A new breaker was subsequently completed in 1875. On June 5, 1886, a second breaker fire destroyed the replacement structure, as recorded in the annual report of the Pennsylvania Inspector of Coal Mines for that year.^[3] The mine employed a large workforce: by 1920, Alaska Colliery had 777 miners and produced approximately 300,000 tons of coal that year.^[4]

By 1880, the population of the surrounding Mount Carmel Township had grown to over 7,000 residents. The community's demographics shifted during this period, with an initial population of German, Irish, and Welsh immigrants followed by an increasing influx of Eastern Europeans, including Poles, Lithuanians, and Slavs, toward the end of the 19th century. This diversity resulted in the establishment of various ethnic parishes and fraternal organizations within the township.^[5]

Like many small anthracite coal patch towns in the Middle Coal Field of Pennsylvania, Alaska declined as the regional coal industry contracted in the early-to-mid twentieth century. Pennsylvania Department of Mines annual reports from the late 1800s through the early 1900s document active production at Alaska Colliery under the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, but production decreased as deep mining became less profitable.^[6]

By the 1950s, the deep-shaft mines of the P&R C&I (which became Reading Anthracite in 1954) were increasingly expensive to operate due to high labor costs and the need to continuously pump water from underground workings. When the company began to favor surface strip mining, existing patch towns became an impediment, as strip mining requires the complete removal of surface structures to access shallow coal seams.^[7] The razing of Alaska was carried out by the Reading Anthracite Company to facilitate these surface operations; company housing was demolished because the structures sat directly atop coal deposits accessible through stripping pits.^[8] Similar fates befell nearby communities, including Logan and portions of the broader Mount Carmel Township area that lay in the path of expanding strip mines.^[7] By the early 21st century, the Alaska patch had been entirely replaced by a landscape of stony debris and active or abandoned strip pits.^[8]