The Blue Coal Story

Blue Coal anthracite was Pennsylvania's answer to a national market: Glen Alden Coal Company's branded approach to an industry that had never thought to build one. Walk into any library and ask for coal mining documentaries. You'll get West Virginia. Appalachian bituminous. Labor organizing. Environmental disaster. All of it real, all of it important, and none of it Pennsylvania.

Northeastern Pennsylvania's anthracite region operated on entirely different terms. Harder coal, deeper mines, a different geology, and a different immigrant labor force. And one thing no other coal operation in America ever attempted: a national brand.

Glen Alden and the Blue Coal Brand

Glen Alden Coal Company, based in Scranton, ran one of the larger Wyoming Valley operations through the first half of the twentieth century. At some point in the 1930s, someone there had an idea that sounds, at first, completely absurd: dye the coal blue.

Not the packaging. The coal itself. A harmless blue dye applied at the processing plant before shipping. The result was a product you could identify on sight in a dealer's bin or a basement hopper, visually distinct from every competitor's coal in every market from Brooklyn to Baltimore. Glen Alden called it Blue Coal, and they marketed it hard.

The Shadow and the Coal Company

From 1937 onward, Glen Alden's Blue Coal was the primary sponsor of The Shadow, one of the most popular radio dramas in America. The show aired on the Mutual Broadcasting System, reaching millions of listeners across the Northeast. Every episode opened and closed with Blue Coal endorsements. Lamont Cranston solved crimes. In between, a Scranton coal company sold residential heating to the exact cities making up the show's audience: Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Boston, working-class row houses with coal bins in the basement.

The Shadow was produced by RKO, Radio-Keith-Orpheum, one of Hollywood's major film studios during the Golden Age of American cinema. That a coal company and a film studio found each other through a mystery radio drama was unusual. That it worked was pure geography: the same industrial Northeast that went to RKO pictures also burned anthracite to stay warm.

What nobody anticipated was where the relationship would go. Albert List, a New York industrialist who acquired a controlling interest in RKO from Howard Hughes, later took over Glen Alden as well. In the late 1950s, List moved RKO's accounting department from New York City to the Glen Alden company offices in Ashley, Pennsylvania. For a period, the building on South Main Street that managed one of the largest anthracite coal operations in the country also ran the books for a Hollywood studio.

The Breakers: What the Infrastructure Looked Like

Before coal went to market, it had to be processed. Breakers were built for this: enormous structures at the top of mine slopes where raw coal came up from below. Inside, machinery broke it into marketable sizes. Boys as young as eight sat on boards above the chutes and picked out slate by hand.

The workforce behind those numbers came from the immigrant communities that had been building the Wyoming Valley since the 1880s. The Huber Breaker in Ashley, Luzerne County, went up in 1939 under Hudson Coal Company, one of the last large breakers built in the region.

The Huber ran until the early 1970s. It stood abandoned for decades, a 130-foot landmark above the town of Ashley, before its demolition in August 2014.

The 1950s Collapse

Blue Coal's market was residential coal heating, and after World War II that market was disappearing. New construction moved to oil. Existing homes converted furnace by furnace. The cities that had burned anthracite for generations were switching over, neighborhood by neighborhood.

On January 22, 1959, twelve men died at the River Slope Mine in Port Griffith when workers breached the bed of the Susquehanna River. The Knox Mine Disaster flooded the Wyoming Valley's deep mines and ended large-scale anthracite production in the region. Glen Alden continued through the 1960s, but Blue Coal as a marketed brand was effectively finished. There was no longer enough coal, or enough coal-burning households, to sustain it.

The Ashley Offices Today

The Glen Alden office building at 101 South Main Street in Ashley still stands. In 1994, Congressman Paul Kanjorski secured a $20 million federal grant to acquire Blue Coal's remaining assets, including those offices and nearly 16,500 acres of former mine land across Luzerne County. Earth Conservancy, founded in 1992 to address the environmental aftermath of anthracite mining, now operates from that building. EPCAMR, the Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation, works alongside them on the same land.

The organizations that now occupy those offices are doing the opposite of what Glen Alden did there. The Glen Alden and Blue Coal records, engineering drawings of the breakers, the mine cars, the outbuildings, are being preserved by the Industrial Archives and Library in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

What Beyond the Breaker Documents

Beyond the Breaker is a 26-minute documentary filmed inside the Huber Breaker in Ashley before its demolition in August 2014. It is built entirely from interviews, with former miners, preservationists, architects, historians, and artists, about what the breaker meant and what the Wyoming Valley lost when it came down.

The film does not cover Blue Coal or Glen Alden directly. But the Blue Coal story explains the scale of what the Huber represented: a branded coal product reaching Brooklyn and Philadelphia on national radio, 1,700 workers on a single site, an industry confident enough to build the largest breaker in the world.