Burd Patterson
Pottsville, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Anthracite pioneer. He developed slope method for mining below water table, 1835. His Pottsville Furnace was the first successful smelter of anthracite iron, 1839-40. His home, built 1830-35, was first of the mansions to line Mahantongo St.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In the anthracite country around Pottsville, Burd Patterson helped unlock the hard coal that would fuel American industry, devising in 1835 a slope method for mining below the water table where earlier operators had been stopped cold. A few years later his Pottsville Furnace became the first to successfully smelt iron using anthracite, proving that Pennsylvania's stubborn hard coal could power a modern iron industry. His mansion, begun around 1830, led the procession of grand homes that came to line Mahantongo Street.
Why it matters
Patterson's breakthroughs in deep mining and anthracite iron smelting helped launch the industrial economy that made eastern Pennsylvania a powerhouse of nineteenth-century America.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the young American republic was hungry for fuel, and the hills around Pottsville sat atop one of the richest treasures on the continent: anthracite, the hard, glassy coal that burns hotter and cleaner than the softer bituminous kind. Schuylkill County became the heart of Pennsylvania's "anthracite region," a landscape of steep valleys where the black seams tilted down into the earth and, frustratingly, below the water table.
This was the Early Republic, a time when the country was still figuring out how to industrialize. Iron was made the old way, with charcoal from ever-shrinking forests. Everyone could see that the nation's future ran on coal and iron, but hard coal had a stubborn reputation. It was difficult to ignite and difficult to mine, and many practical men doubted it could ever feed a furnace or turn a real profit.
Into that uncertainty stepped a generation of anthracite pioneers around Pottsville, men who treated the mountain as a problem to be solved. The town they built was rough and booming, an industrial frontier where fortunes and reputations were made on whether you could get the coal out of the ground and put it to work.
People & events
Burd Patterson was one of those problem-solvers. Earlier operators had dug down until they hit water and then stopped, defeated by the flooded workings. In 1835, Patterson helped change that with a slope method of mining that let crews follow the coal seams downward past the water table instead of surrendering to it. It was the kind of quiet, practical breakthrough that doesn't make headlines but reshapes an entire industry.
He did not stop at mining the coal; he set out to prove what it could do. At his Pottsville Furnace, in 1839 and 1840, he achieved the first successful smelting of iron using anthracite. That success answered the doubters directly: hard coal, long dismissed as too difficult, could indeed make iron, and make it on a scale that mattered.
Patterson's confidence showed in how he lived, too. The home he raised in the early 1830s was the first of the grand houses that would come to line Mahantongo Street, the address where Pottsville's coal-and-iron money settled. In a town built on soot and sweat, that street became a statement that this hard-won industry had arrived.
Its place in the American story
The story told on this marker is really the story of how America learned to burn hard coal, and that lesson changed the country. Anthracite would heat the cities of the Eastern Seaboard, power its factories, and drive the locomotives that stitched the nation together. Every one of those uses depended on the early proof that the coal could be mined profitably and made to do industrial work.
Patterson's anthracite-iron success sits at a hinge point in that transformation. Iron made with mineral coal instead of charcoal meant iron made in quantity, and quantity was exactly what a growing nation demanded for its rails, bridges, machines, and tools. Eastern Pennsylvania's rise as one of the great engines of nineteenth-century American industry began with breakthroughs like these.
It is worth remembering that a discovery here in a Schuylkill County valley rippled outward for a century. The furnaces and mines that followed drew waves of workers from across Europe, built cities, and helped make the United States an industrial power. It started with the stubborn conviction that the hard coal underfoot was worth the trouble.
If you visit
Come to Pottsville expecting a place that wears its industrial past openly. The town is folded into steep hills, and the geography itself tells you why coal mattered here: the land rises and falls around you, and it is easy to imagine the seams running down beneath your feet, once flooded and impassable until someone found a way through.
Linger on Mahantongo Street, where the marker's story takes physical form. This is the row of stately nineteenth-century homes that coal and iron money built, and reading their façades is a way of reading the fortunes made in the valleys nearby. Patterson's house led that procession; the street is the closest thing to a monument the era left behind.
Give yourself time to take in the surrounding anthracite country as part of the trip. This corner of Pennsylvania is dense with the traces of the hard-coal economy, and a stop in Pottsville pairs naturally with a slow drive through the region's coal towns. You are standing where a nation learned to fuel itself, and the landscape still remembers it.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Burd Patterson
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
John O'Hara
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Carved from Northampton and Berks counties in 1811 and named for the river that drains it, Schuylkill County sits atop the southern anthracite field. Pottsville, its seat, grew from a frontier borough in 1828 into a coal-boom city by 1911. Through the 19th century, hard coal mined here was hauled by canal and rail to fuel the furnaces and homes of the industrializing East.
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