How One Family Built and Destroyed an Entire American City: Scranton, Pennsylvania

Scranton, Pennsylvania: The City That Made the Rails A documentary about the industrial rise and long decline of Scranton, Pennsylvania — told through the iron furnaces, coal mines, railroads, and grand buildings that made it one of the richest cities of its size in the world. The story begins in 1845 with a single letter from George Scranton to his brother, pivoting a failing nail operation toward the T-rail contract that would build a city from nothing. It follows the Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company from its first blast to its departure for Buffalo in 1902, the anthracite coal industry that employed tens of thousands of immigrants, the 1877 general strike that put a labor organizer in the mayor's office, the first electric streetcar system in America, the rise of the International Correspondence Schools, the Tiffany-ceilinged DL&W railroad station, and the Knox Mine disaster of 1959 that drowned the mines and ended an era. The script traces Scranton's population from a few hundred in 1840 to 143,000 in 1930 and back down to 76,000 today — through the Scranton Plan, thirty years of state financial distress, a downtown mall built on demolished historic buildings, and a lace factory reborn as apartments. It ends where it began: at the four stone blast furnaces on Cedar Avenue, standing open to the sky, older now as ruins than they ever were as working iron. Sources "Lackawanna Iron and Coal Company" — ExplorePAHistory.com, Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission "Scranton General Strike" — Wikipedia, with references to Pinkerton Agency reports held at Penn State University Libraries "Knox Mine Disaster" — Robert P. Wolensky, Kenneth M. Wolensky, and Nicole H. Wolensky, The Knox Mine Disaster (Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission) "First Electric Cars" — ExplorePAHistory.com historical marker essay on the Scranton Suburban Electric Railway "Education for Success: The International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, Pennsylvania" — James D. Watkinson, The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. CXX, No. 4 (1996) "Scranton" — George E. Thomas, SAH Archipedia (Society of Architectural Historians), University of Virginia Press, 2012