Eckley Historic District

Eckley is a former anthracite coal company town in southern Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, laid out on a gridiron plan of blocks along Main Street. The village was developed by Sharpe, Weiss and Company after mining began there in 1854, with the first shipment of coal leaving by rail in 1855 via a branch of the Lehigh Valley Railroad. At its height in the 1870s and 1880s it held more than one hundred fifty dwellings, two breakers, a sawmill, three churches, a store, a hotel and a doctor's office, and the houses were painted red. Its dwellings fall into five types, from superintendents' Gothic Victorian homes to one and a half story salt box houses. It is significant as a surviving example of a hard coal company town that was not altered to meet later urban growth, and it is valued for showing how miners and their families lived in the late nineteenth century.