Woodvale, the coal patch town on three county lines

Woodvale sits on the east side of Broad Top Mountain where Huntingdon, Fulton and Bedford counties meet. A large part of it lies in Wood Township, but the 1992 nomination notes that Fulton Street runs through all three counties. The post office uses the name Wood to avoid confusion with the Woodvale in Cambria County.

The town was built by the Rockhill Iron and Coal Company, formed by Philadelphia businessmen Edward and Algernon Roberts, Richard D. Wood, Ario Pardee and Gillingham Fell in partnership with Percival Dewees, a Rockhill furnace owner, and incorporated in 1872. The company bought control of the East Broad Top Railroad, completed the line from Mount Union to the mountain in 1874, and built Robertsdale at its first mine. By 1890 it had opened Rockhill No. 6, the Woodvale shaft, two miles south of Robertsdale, and that November finished the tracks to the mine. "With the opening of this mine came the necessity of housing more miners, thus the creation of the town of Woodvale, named after the Wood family who occupied several positions at various times with the East Broad Top and Rockhill Iron and Coal" (nomination, p17).

The nomination says the company was the most productive of all the Broad Top operations between 1873 and the 1920s, and Gardner's 1913 state report puts its output at some 1,300 tons a day, the largest in the field. The busiest years were 1915 to 1917, when wartime demand for coal opened mines 7, 8 and 9 near Woodvale. Summer excursion trains brought picnickers from all along the line to the Woodvale picnic grounds; the nomination, citing the Daily News, says the railroad hauled them in cattle cars because it could not buy more passenger cars.

The 1917 company store burned in 1937 and was not rebuilt. Immigrants from the Galician and Carpathian region built St. Michael's Greek Orthodox Church in 1917; in the 1920s the Klan burned crosses near the church.

Mine 6 closed in 1925 and the last mines in 1956. The company began selling houses to employees in 1948. When R. Ann Safley prepared the nomination she counted 79 contributing buildings on 96 acres, among them the 1911 Methodist church, the 1919 post office, a 1930s mule barn, and the 1913 power house, which held a shoe factory in 1958 and since 1978 a furniture factory employing around fifteen people.

With the opening of this mine came the necessity of housing more miners, thus the creation of the town of Woodvale, named after the Wood family who occupied several positions at various times with the East Broad Top and Rockhill Iron and Coal.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Woodvale Historic District (reference 92000942), p17 · character 22,904 of the scanned text

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

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