Huber Coal Breaker
Ashley, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Erected by the Glen Alden Coal Co. in 1939, the breaker could process 7,000 tons of anthracite daily. It was among the first in the industry to utilize Menzies cones to separate coal from rock. An innovative aerial tramway disposed of waste by-products. Anthracite was sprayed with an iridescent chemical, to create Glen Alden's distinctive "Blue Coal." Operations ceased in 1976, following the decline of anthracite mining. It was demolished in 2014.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Rising over the anthracite fields of Luzerne County, the Huber Coal Breaker was built by the Glen Alden Coal Company in 1939 to crush, sort, and clean up to 7,000 tons of hard coal a day. It was among the first to use Menzies cones to separate coal from rock and an aerial tramway to haul off waste, and its product was famously dyed to market Glen Alden's trademarked "Blue Coal." When anthracite demand faded, the breaker shut down in 1976 and was demolished in 2014, closing a chapter in the region that once heated much of the nation.
Why it matters
The breaker embodies the anthracite era that powered American homes and industry and built the hard-coal communities of northeastern Pennsylvania.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Northeastern Pennsylvania sits atop one of the world's great deposits of anthracite — a hard, clean-burning coal that became the fuel of choice for heating American homes and firing the boilers of a growing nation. By the time this breaker rose over the fields of Luzerne County, the region around Wilkes-Barre and the Wyoming Valley had spent generations turning that black rock into the engine of a local economy, and into the daily grind of tens of thousands of miners.
The breaker was built in 1939, on the far edge of the anthracite boom rather than at its dawn. The Great Depression still gripped the country, yet demand for hard coal to warm the nation's houses remained steady enough to justify a massive, modern plant. Structures like this were the beating industrial heart of their towns — the place where raw coal from underground was crushed, sized, and cleaned before it could be sold.
A breaker was where the mine met the market. Its towering silhouette dominated the skyline of a coal town the way a cathedral dominated a medieval one, and the rhythm of its machinery set the rhythm of the community's working life.
People & events
This breaker was the work of the Glen Alden Coal Company, one of the giants of the anthracite industry, and it was engineered to move coal at an industrial scale — capable of processing thousands of tons of hard coal in a single day. That kind of capacity meant a constant flow of rail cars, waste, and workers.
What set the plant apart was its embrace of new methods. It was among the first in its industry to adopt a system of cones for separating valuable coal from worthless rock, and it used an aerial tramway — buckets carried overhead on cables — to haul away the waste that every cleaning operation produces in mountains. In an industry often bound to old ways, this was a plant built to look forward.
Glen Alden also understood marketing. The company treated its cleaned anthracite with a distinctive tint, turning out a product it sold under a trademarked name that customers could recognize on sight. It was a clever bit of branding wrapped around an ordinary lump of fuel — proof that even a coal company thought about how its product looked to the family shoveling it into a furnace.
Its place in the American story
For roughly a century, anthracite from this corner of Pennsylvania heated a huge share of American homes and helped power the country's factories, railroads, and cities. When you picture the coal that warmed a Northeastern winter parlor before the age of oil and gas, you are picturing hard coal like the kind processed here.
This site also tells the harder second half of that story: decline. As oil, natural gas, and electricity took over the work that anthracite once did, demand collapsed, and the great breakers that had defined the region fell silent one by one. The plant here shut down in the 1970s and stood empty for decades before it was finally demolished.
That arc — boom, dominance, and fade — is the story of countless American industrial regions. The rise and fall of anthracite shaped the culture, the labor movement, and the very landscape of northeastern Pennsylvania, and it is why the memory of a place like this is worth marking at all.
If you visit
You will not find the great structure itself anymore — it came down years ago — so come expecting to read a landscape rather than tour a building. Stand where the marker sits and picture something enormous once looming over you, alive with noise, dust, and the endless motion of coal on the move.
Let your eye follow the terrain. The flatness of certain ground, the odd hills that don't look quite natural, the routes of old rail lines — these are the fingerprints of a vanished industry, and once you know to look for them, a quiet field starts to tell a loud story.
This stop rewards travelers curious about America's industrial past. Pair it with the broader anthracite heritage of the Wyoming Valley — the museums, mine tours, and coal towns nearby — and you begin to feel the scale of the world that once revolved around the hard black rock beneath your feet.
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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