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Directions to Driving Tour Stop #5

Return south to the intersection with PA Route 601 and bear left onto Bedford Street, which turns into Graham Avenue. Proceed one mile into downtown Windber.

Latitude: 40.2542
Longitude: -78.8461



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Driving Tour Stop #4

The rich Eureka coal field in The Stonycreek Corridor helped to make the Berwind-White Coal Company one of the nation's leading coal producers with customers that included the New York City subway system and transoceanic steamship lines. In the 1890s and early 1900s, Berwind developed 13 Eureka mines and established a regional headquarters in Windber. Eureka Mine 40 was one of Berwind's largest and best-equipped Eureka mines, producing 22 million tons of coal between 1905 and 1955.

The Mine 40 complex, including mining facilities and the coal-patch community, was developed between 1902 and 1905 on farmland adjacent to the community of Scalp Level. Ironically, Scalp Level and the Paint Creek valley below it had been a favored destination of Pittsburgh-based landscape painters for decades. Works produced by the Scalp Level School of artists still are collected today. Lumbering and mining activity badly degraded the once-pristine valley and brought artists' plein-air painting here to an end.

From the Overlook you can see more than 100 structures that contribute to the Berwind-White Mine 40 Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, including mining-support buildings dating to the first half of the 20th century, worker housing, and the remnants of a boney (coal refuse) pile that now has been largely reclaimed through cogeneration activity.


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