Robertsdale, the company town on Broad Top

Robertsdale sits on the east side of Broad Top Mountain in the southwest corner of Huntingdon County, and the National Register nomination written in 1992 describes a Pennsylvania coal patch town that still looks the part. The Rockhill Iron and Coal Company laid the town out in 1873. The nomination names its founders as Philadelphia businessmen, among them Edward and Algernon Roberts, Richard D. Wood and Ario Pardee, in partnership with Percival Dewees, who owned an iron furnace at Rockhill, and says the town took its name from two of them. Before the company arrived, a settler from Maryland named William Houck had a coal mine on the site, which the nomination says became the company's first.

Between 1873 and 1875 the company put up houses for 100 miners and their families, along with a store, stable, blacksmith's shop and engine shop. By 1876 it ran three mines at Robertsdale and the village had 479 people. J. Simpson Africa's county history of 1883 counted 250 hands in the mines, twelve thousand tons of coal a month, and seventy company houses holding a population of seven hundred, a majority of the miners Welsh. The nomination calls the company the most productive of all the Broad Top operations between 1873 and the 1920s, and says it eventually worked nine mines around Robertsdale and Woodvale.

The company store, built of buff local stone in 1873 and 1874, stands at the corner of Main Street and the East Broad Top tracks. The nomination says it was the community's sole source of supplies, and that owning all the land let the company keep any other business out of town. Jesse O. McClain managed the store in the early 1900s until a dispute led him to open his own on Lincoln Street. The company fenced it off; McClain sued and won, and the fences came down. In 1925 the company asked him to lease its store again, and the lease stayed in the McClain family until 1958.

Demand for coal fell after World War I, strikes hit in 1922 and 1927, and the company was bankrupt by 1928. New management kept it going until 1956, when the holdings went to the Kovalchick Salvage Company and the mines closed. Of the 113 buildings in the district, 103 contribute to it, and 95 company houses stand. The company began selling those houses to its employees in 1948.

Robertsdale, named after two of the company founders, was typical of most company towns; the company owned most of the land and buildings. The company buildings form the center of town with an office building, depot, post office, and store. The company threw up plank housing cheaply and quickly with few amenities such as indoor plumbing.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Robertsdale Historic District (reference 92000391), section 8 page 3 (PDF page 22) · character 34,891 of the scanned text

Checked 2026-09-05 · National Register of Historic Places nomination, read in full

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