Pennsylvania

Founder William Penn’s “good and fruitful land” was in ancient times almost blanketed with vast stretches of forests and immense fields of ferns and shrubs. Some 250 million years ago the forests and fields were flooded with sea water. Later, the folding of the Appalachian Mountains compressed the trees and shrubs into coal-hard, smokeless anthracite in the northeastern part of the state, soft bituminous in the west. Pennsylvania’s coal has been mined since the late 18th Century. The state still has almost all of the nation’s anthracite reserves as well as extensive veins of bituminous coal in its rocky hills. Coal is burned to generate electricity that is used to make iron and steel, it helped make Pennsylvania “the steel capital of the world”.

In addition to coal, Pennsylvania once contained great deposits of iron ore, so industrialization came early to the state. Pennsylvania’s ore is low grade (low percentage) and is costly to mine, thus, today ore is brought in from the Great Lakes region and other areas to be processed in the remaining mills located throughout the state. To move raw materials and finished products efficiently in the previous Century, Pennsylvanians had built spectacular highways and an elaborate railroad system. With the near death of the steel industry in America over the past two decades, many major cities in Pennsylvania no longer focus on steel production, instead, they have modernized their cities, and in the process cleaned their air and beautified their landscape.