The southwestern PA region has a long history of mining & manufacturing activity. Some of this activity ‘died’ a long time ago & evidence of it may be obscured, forgotten, or unknown. I had a discovery experience just like that recently.

In the Fall of 2018 we’d moved to a neighborhood in Peters Twp. that was near a section of the Montour Trail that I’d never been on before. So, Frodo, our Standard Poodle, & I have since been exploring that trail. We start out at Mile Marker 30.4 next to the Peters Twp. Sanitary Authority plant on Brush Run Creek. Last week we’d walked only a short way from the parking lot & decided to take an old road/trail that left the Montour Trail & cut sharply up the hillside that lined the trail. It was steep enough & long enough to get the heart started. And it was deserted enough to let Frodo off-leash so that he could run around, explore, & do doggy stuff. A win-win for both of us. When I got tired of climbing, we took a trail across the face of the hillside on to a path & series of cutbacks down. Coming around the last cutback into a clearing saw this locked metal door on the face of the hillside.

Moving in closer realized that it was the actual portal into the Montour 4 mine.

This portal was opened in 1953 and allowed a conveyer belt to bring coal from the mine into a collector which loaded the coal into rail cars parked directly below at the Montour Trail level. Unfortunately, this portal did not have a particularly long use life.

Fortunately, some folks had the vision to see this as the starting place to develop a real regional asset which now connects all the way to Washington D.C.