Plymouth, Pennsylvania sits on the west side of Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley, wedged between the Susquehanna River and the Shawnee Mountain range. Just below the mountain are hills that surround the town and form a natural amphitheater that separates the town from the rest of the valley. Below the hills, the flat lands are formed in the shape of a frying pan, the pan being the Shawnee flats, once the center of the town's agricultural activities, and the handle being a spit of narrow land extending east from the flats, where the center of town is located. At the beginning of the 19th century, Plymouth's primary industry was agriculture. However, vast anthracite coal beds lay below the surface at various depths, and by the 1850s, coal mining had become the town's primary occupation.
Coal mining in Plymouth, Pennsylvania
The Smith Coal Mines
About 1806, Abijah Smith came to Plymouth from Derby, Connecticut, intending to mine, ship, and sell coal. Smith and Lewis Hepburn, his business partner, bought a 75-acre plot (Lots 45 and 46 on the Plymouth Township Warranty Map) on the east side of Coal Creek, and in the fall of 1807, Smith floated an ark down the Susquehanna River loaded with about fifty tons of anthracite coal, shipping it to Columbia in Lancaster County. The significance of Smith's shipment went unnoticed until 1873, when Hendrick B. Wright wrote in his Historical Sketches of Plymouth:
"Anthracite coal had been used before 1807, in this valley and elsewhere, in small quantities in furnaces, with an air blast; but the traffic in coal as an article of general use, was commenced by Abijah Smith, of Plymouth."
Beginning with the fifty tons of coal shipped by Abijah Smith in 1807, Plymouth's and the Wyoming Valley's coal industry grew steadily. In 1830, the Baltimore Patriot reported that "... a greater quantity of Anthracite Coal has been sent down the Susquehanna this Spring than in any former season. The Baltimore Company have sent three thousand tons, and from other mines about seven thousand tons were dispatched, making an aggregate of ten thousand tons."
The North Branch Canal
As late as the 1840s, whenever high water allowed, coal from Wyoming Valley's coal mines was shipped down the Susquehanna River on wooden arks. But by the end of 1830, canal boats began to replace arks as the preferred method of transporting coal and other goods to market. In 1826, the Pennsylvania Board of Canal Commissioners engaged John Bennett to survey the route of a new canal, to be called the North Branch Canal, to run alongside the north branch (the main branch) of the Susquehanna River from Northumberland to the New York border. In early 1827, Bennet reported that the canal was feasible, and in 1828, the state legislature authorized funds for construction. Charles T. Whippo—who had worked on the construction of the Erie Canal—was engaged to survey the route and supervise construction. The southern portion of the canal, as built, ran for along the west side of the river, from Northumberland to West Nanticoke, where a dam was built to divert water from the river into the canal. The work was generally complete by the fall of 1830. The first load of coal shipped on the canal from Wyoming Valley reached Berwick in October.
The canal was a boon to Plymouth's coal operators—who in 1830 included John Smith, Freeman Thomas, Henderson Gaylord, and Thomas Borbidge—and it encouraged others—such as Jameson Harvey and Jacob Gould—to open mines. Smith's teamsters led teams of horses deep into his mine, turned the team, loaded the wagon and then drove the team to the river bank to load the coal into canal boats. Gaylord—whose mine at the time was a tunnel at the base of Welsh Hill—improved on this method and built a gravity railroad that ran along what is now Walnut Street, down what is now Gaylord Avenue, to his wharf on the river. A similar road, called the Swetland Railroad, ran from mine tunnel in Poke Hollow adjacent to Gaylord's, down a route which later became Washington Avenue, across Bull Run to another wharf on the river. Freeman Thomas built a railroad from his Grand Tunnel mine to a chutehouse along the river near the entrance to the canal.
The early coal mines in Plymouth supported an ancillary industry: boat building. The arks used to transport goods on the river were built in a basin where Wadham's Creek entered the river. After the canal was built, the arks began to be replaced by flat-bottomed canal boats, built in the same basin with a distinctive design known as "Shawnee boats." Many of the town's young men became boatmen and were well known along the length of the canal for their distinctive call, "Shawnee against the World."