The stone company store at Main and Cliff

The Rockhill Iron and Coal Company store stands at the corner of Main and Cliff streets in Robertsdale, opposite the tracks, at the center of the company town the company laid out near its No. 1 mine. The Historic American Buildings Survey report on it, written by project historian Lola Bennett in 1989, dates the store to 1874 and 1875 and calls it one of the first structures put up in Robertsdale and the only one built entirely of stone. The National Register nomination for the Robertsdale Historic District puts the date a year earlier, at 1873 to 1874, and describes the walls as local buff colored stone. It is two stories, gable end to the street, with an office ell on the north side.

The survey says the company never actually ran the store. Citing 1911 Immigration Commission reports, it explains that Pennsylvania law barred coal companies from operating their own stores, so Rockhill leased the building to a merchant who paid it a share of his profits. The arrangement apparently benefited the company, the survey says: the contract made the merchant sell on credit and pay the company whether or not his customers ever paid him.

One of the first merchants was Dr. Lewis Royer, a longtime Broad Top resident who had put the old Rockhill Furnace near Orbisonia back in blast with Percival P. Dewees in 1868. J. Simpson Africa's 1883 county history, in its sketch of Dewees, notes that Dr. Royer then owned the store at the mines. Tax records from the 1880s and 1890s, the survey says, list Royer as a clerk and later as storekeeper, and from 1883 to 1898 he owned a relatively expensive house in town.

The 1991 county inventory of industrial sites records that by 1883 Robertsdale had seventy double houses and a population of 700, with the stone store at the center of town. The district nomination adds that the store supplied dry goods and food to the miners' families, and that by the time the nomination was written the building had stood vacant for years, its roof and windows in poor condition.

Although always known as the "company store," it was never really operated by the Rockhill Iron and Coal Company. According to 1911 Immigration Commission reports, Pennsylvania law prohibited coal companies from operating their own stores. The company would thus lease the store to a merchant who paid the company a percentage of the profits.Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record, Rockhill Iron & Coal Company Store, written data pages, HABS PA-5554 data pages, p. 2 · character 1,278 of the scanned text

Checked 2026-09-05 · Library of Congress survey record, read in full

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