While exploring rural Pennsylvania, I stumbled on clues to the coal mining ghost town of Clover Run and find myself a fine surprise!
The Area
State Game Lands 174 is almost 4000 acres of wilderness on the border of Indiana and Jefferson counties. Attractive as a place for horseback riding, much of it was once coal mines and it includes Ghost Towns of Sidney and Keal Run.
While looking at maps of the area I noticed “Power House Road” to the north of PA 36. Names like that are irresistable to me, so I pulled up a historic mine map from PASDA which showed Clover Run mine…
Cross-fading between the mine map and an aerial view of the site I made an interesting observation. Where the Power House was shown on the map, there seemed to be a corresponding structure on Power House road! That got marked on my well-worn Gazetteer.
It took a little while for me to get back out there, but one Sunday in April I drove to Power House road and discovered just what I had hoped for… a well preserved power house from a coal mine well over a century old.
Now used as a hunting camp, the building is in surprisingly good shape. It shows the remains of a decorative round window, and it looks like there may be a stone with the construction date at the peak of the roof. The mine is listed in the 1915 State Report with operator Madeira-Hill Coal Mining Company who also mined at Madeira and Spangler, but it’s not in the 1907 report; I think the stone says 1909.
Nearby are stone walls which appear they were at #1 Drift. I suspect these supported a trestle which brought elevated tracks out of the mine, as the hillside sticks up to the right of them.
Since the camp and surrounding area are private property I did not explore further. If I get by there again I hope to maybe find someone at the camp and get a look around, including a look inside the Power House!
The mine map shows the nearby village to contain a rooming house and a theater; there are probably other places one could explore.
It’s fairly rare to encounter well-preserved buildings from this era of mining in Pennsylvania, especially since so many areas were later strip mined. I chalked this up as a rewarding day of exploring… assisted by some mapping technology.