Whitsett Historic District

Whitsett is a company-built bituminous coal mining community on the Youghiogheny River in northern Perry Township, Fayette County, about a mile north of Perryopolis. Most of its houses were built between 1891 and 1917 by the Pittsburgh Coal Company and its predecessors, and the district includes managers' and workers' duplexes laid out in uniform rows, mine entrance remains, a tipple foundation, a slate dump, and beehive coke ovens. The town was planned on an orthogonal grid, and its surviving plan and house stock are regarded as a typical example of a mining community of the period. Its residents included Eastern European immigrants, many recruited by company agents, and African American miners who came from the south. In 1925 the company adopted an open shop policy that gave African American miners access to skilled mine jobs for the first time. Banning No. 2 mine closed in 1944, and the community is now primarily residential.