Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series.

Girardville, a tiny, past-its-prime coal borough hidden in the Schuylkill County mountains, could be worth more dead than alive.

Locals say a thick stretch of the Mammoth coal vein that minted the town’s anthracite heyday runs right under Main Street. To get to it and strip mine the tons of shiny, hard coal buried there, the town would have to be razed.

Some speculate that if the money’s ever right, this is how Girardville will meet its end.

“There’s coal right under the town. Someday you’ll see steam shovels coming down Main Street,” predicted Joseph Wayne, owner and operator of the town’s legendary Hibernian House Tavern. This jewel of Girardville serves up Guinness, Irish heritage and labor union pride in equal measure.

“Coal, coal, coal — that’s why this town is here,” said Rob Krick, president of the Girardville Historical Society. He spoke at his Main Street office stuffed with artifacts documenting the town’s mining heyday. But Krick made clear those days are long over. The town’s days could be numbered.

“It’s probably why it’s going to disappear,” he said.

Truth be told, there’s not much left.

Row homes, once tended with pride, have been left to decay. Occupied structures share walls with collapsing and condemned properties.

Pride that once beamed from this square-mile, self-sufficient town that had everything is down to a flicker. Businesses, once plentiful, have dwindled to a handful. Population has plunged by 75%. The town’s last church closed after Christmas. There are no police or ambulance services.

The borough’s 1,500 real estate parcels generate a paltry $416,000 in local taxes. It makes for a shoestring budget dwarfed by infrastructure needs, officials said.

About 25% of the town’s buildings are condemned — or should be — according to former Mayor Michael Zangari, who finished his term in December. There were no candidates on the ballot. Instead, a write-in winner was recently sworn in. About 650 structures remain occupied, based on utility service records.

There’s no plan, nor resources, to build for the future. A large swath of Girardville is swallowed up by a floodplain. This makes redevelopment hugely expensive and all but impossible.

This no-win conundrum has town officials bewildered over where to begin.

“You tear it down, it looks better, but what are you going to get on a lot worth $1,000? Fifty bucks a year in taxes? That’s hard to work with,” an exasperated Zangari said.

To say the odds are stacked against Girardville’s survival is an understatement.

Still, a collection of new leaders warns against counting Girardville out. The town’s always been an underdog, they say. And that’s exactly how they like it.

“Never write off Girardville,” recently seated Borough Council member David Willis said.

Gold of coal

The odds were stacked from the very beginning. Girardville wasn’t founded, per say.

It was sold, bought and wholly owned.

Holding title was Philadelphia philanthropist and Girard College namesake Stephen Girard. He purchased large tracts of coal-laden land here in 1830.

The community that followed was on his estate.

Girard died in 1831 before visiting the burgeoning town he owned. The mansion he was building for himself stands crumbling on a hill to this day.

The region’s thick coal veins were mapped by 1852. But it took the railroad coming through in the years following the Civil War for the anthracite region to really catch fire. It’s known as the “gold” of coal. But the bounty was all one-sided.

Companies boomed from the hard, hot-burning fuel. They held all the cards. Girardville became the quintessential company town.

Virtually all the money miners made from their dangerous toils deep underground was paid right back to the company store. The setup would make money launderers blush. But people here proved to be as hard-headed as the coal they mined.

Seeds of the national unionized labor movement sprouted from these Mahanoy Valley mines. A mysterious group of Irish miners began fighting for workers’ rights. They became known as the Molly Maguires.

To the coal companies, they were wanted criminals. Punishment was the hangman’s noose.

“Black Jack” John J. Kehoe, a Girardville constable and union advocate, was among those executed.

He was convicted of killing a mine boss and hanged in 1878. All told, 20 miners across the anthracite region were executed. Historians have labeled the evidence brought against them as “flimsy.” Instead, ethnic prejudice and antilabor sentiments fueled guilty verdicts.

Kehoe’s great grandson, the Hibernian House’s Joseph Wayne, described Schuylkill County’s justice system back then as a “railroad to the gallows.”

Wayne, 84, who still tends the family business that dates to 1873, helped secure Kehoe’s posthumous pardon in 1979. The original pardon documents, along with the shackles that chained his great-grandfather at the county jail, are on proud display at the Hibernian House.

What in Kehoe’s day was a family store became a bar and boarding house for miners. The heavy iron door of Black Jack’s prison cell now guards a phone booth to the right of the bar. Wayne lovingly maintains the tavern as a monument to the Irish immigrants who mined the coal, shaped the town and fought to unionize. In many cases, they gave their lives doing so.

Wayne’s stated mission: “Leave a legacy behind for labor, honor miners’ sacrifices and teach future generations about the fight for workers’ rights.”

Just don’t call the early labor union activists, such as his great-grandfather, Molly Maguires. This was a pejorative term applied by the coal companies and their paid henchmen, the Pinkertons.

They were Hibernians, Wayne corrects.

Their ancient order still holds regular meetings at the tavern.

“The labor movement was built here,” Wayne declares with unmistakable pride. “I want people to know the hazardous jobs they had and how the mine owners weren’t concerned about their health or welfare. A lot of those accidents never should have happened.”

In short, hard coal made for hard people.

That’s the lineage that makes Girardville so hard to kill.

The curse of coal

There are so many reasons to give up.

Collapse has become the common theme here. The town’s buildings, its economy, even its pride are all crumbling. It all began as “King Coal” was toppled from its throne.

Historians like Krick trace the first cracks in the region’s anthracite foundation to aftereffects of World War II. Girardville’s sons returned home from battle. But many didn’t want to go back into the mines.

Perhaps they’d seen too much of the world to crawl back into a dark, dank hole, Krick said.

The generational chains that tied people to Girardville started to strain.

The coal-based economy soon followed. Technology put many deep miners out of work. Finally, the gleam of anthracite’s gold began losing luster in the 1960s and early 1970s, Krick said.

It never returned.

These days, hundreds of coal trucks barrel back and forth along Main Street. They transport loads from elsewhere in Schuylkill County.

But they never stop here.

It’s as if the noisy trucks are mocking the town. Jake brakes thunder, rumbling rowhomes lining the street. Flatulent exhaust pipes billow smoke. Covered coal loads scatter dust.

The result is a layer of black soot, thickened by the decades.

It’s turned nearly everything in town a dull, ugly gray.

The trucks and their unwanted byproducts have become the bane of many residents’ existence.

Quite literally, they’ve been left in the dust.

“You can watch 500 coal trucks go by every day,” Krick said. “It starts at 4:30 in the morning, and it goes to 3 or 4 in the afternoon. It’s constant.”

Other remnants from the bygone coal economy are mountainous piles of discarded rock, shale, slate, clay and low-grade coal. The unsightly, unnatural formations are known as boney piles, culm banks, slag heaps or gob dumps.

They dominate the geography here. A century and a half of mining has made the landscape utterly apocalyptic. The scenery, if you can call it that, evokes an eerie alien world.

Creeks and streams have turned to rust. They run orange with oxidized iron from all the acid drainage still seeping from the mines. The discharge kills everything else.

“The environment, the water quality, the mountains are all torn. It’s not very inviting,” Krick acknowledged. “One of the biggest (acid mine) discharges in northeastern Pennsylvania is right on the east end of Girardville. It turns everything orange.”

There are other unwanted legacies. Four miles west on Big Mile Run Road, pungent sulfur clouds billow from beneath the ground. There, the uncontrolled, ever shifting mine fires of Centralia burn like a devil’s furnace. It’s another way coal has created a ghost town, residents here say.

Should that mine fire ever eat its way across the maze of coal seams to reach the Mammoth vein that runs under Girardville … well, look out, locals warn.

Once the town’s benefactor, coal has become its curse.

The number of jobs left here can be counted on two hands. For work, many commute to warehouses and distribution centers that dot Interstate 81. The likes of Walmart and Amazon — not King Coal — rule the economy now.

None of this is fodder for inviting real estate listings.

Yet, after a long, steady population decline from the 5,000-plus who once thrived here, Girardville has experienced something of an unexpected rebound.

The price of housing is right

Exact numbers are hard to pin down. But town officials agree there’s been a recent influx of up to 400 people, including families with children.

The town may not be all that livable, given the fallout from coal. But in an inflation-riddled world, the price is right.

“You can buy a house relatively cheap. Pre-COVID, rent was dirt cheap,” Zangari said.

These days, rent on a row home runs $700—$1,000, he added. Bargain-basement tax-upset sales fuel real estate speculation by out-of-town landlords, officials say. About 20% of the town’s landlords are “absentee,” Zangari estimated. It’s brought a steady stream of newcomers from bigger, costlier cities and states.

New residents include significant numbers of minorities — Black, Hispanic, even some recent immigrants from other countries, town officials say.

“You could buy a whole block for $90,000,” quipped Kyle Kopko, former director of the Center for Rural Pennsylvania and executive director of the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania. “They have years of housing stock due to years of population decline.”

“A lot of towns that have gone through this post-industrial change are going through demographic changes,” added Jonathan Johnson, director of research for the county commissioners association. “It’s changing the face of the community.”

Surrounding towns, such as Shenandoah and Ashland, have experienced similar trends in even greater numbers, Johnson added, citing socio-economic and demographic data.

Complicating the current population count in Girardville is the issue of multiple families crowding into small row homes, said Zangari, who’s also a longtime volunteer firefighter.

“You’re starting to find where a two-bedroom house no longer is mom, dad and two kids,” the former mayor explained. “You go in and we got bunk beds stacked, and you’ve got as many folks as you can fit. That’s just based off some of the experiences I’ve had as mayor and some I’ve had as a firefighter.”

What hasn’t returned to Girardville is the community pride it once exuded in spades.

Zangari, age 29, is one of two people from his 2014 high school class remaining in town. No one else stayed.

The reason: “Better jobs, better housing, better amenities” elsewhere, he said.

The last generation that remembers Girardville in its prime is in their 70s and 80s. Those who didn’t move to follow their kids to greener pastures are dying off, Zangari added.

Newcomers, drawn by cheap housing and low cost of living, mostly see Girardville as a way station, the ex-mayor added. Some relocated here to be close to loved ones serving time in the plethora of nearby prisons, he said.

“These are folks that are, in my opinion, passing by,” he said. “They’re here for a little while, and they move on to the next municipality. Then you see a next wave come through. We’re a stepping-stone-type deal.”

PennLive collaborated with RealClearPennsylvania in shaping the concept and identifying sources for this project.

Coming tomorrow: Part Two: With Girardville’s ‘King Coal’ glory days long gone, a new set of town leaders embrace minority newcomers. Can the fading town be their “blank slate” for a new beginning?