To mine anthracite, or “hard coal,” on a large scale required extensive access to capital, much of which was drawn from Philadelphia. Before the Civil War, transportation firms led the way. The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, founded in 1822 by Josiah White (1781-1850) and Erskine Hazard (1789-1865), by 1840 had constructed thirty-six miles of canal, joining ten miles of navigable river down the Lehigh River to Philadelphia. In 1825, investors led by Philadelphia bankers and merchants founded the Schuylkill Navigation Company, which by the 1840s boasted a transportation network of 108 miles of canal and passable river, along with 450 tunnels and 120 locks for a capitalization of $2.2 million, all fed by annual coal shipments of 500,000 tons. In 1828 the North Branch Canal opened, reaching all the way to Nanticoke, and in 1831 it was extended to Pittston, connecting Luzerne County to the Philadelphia market. In 1829 the northern field opened to the New York market with the completion of the Delaware & Hudson Canal, which equaled the Erie Canal in capital outlay. This transportation artery included an inclined-plane railroad and a 110-lock canal system linking Honesdale, Pennsylvania, to Rondout, New York, on the Hudson.

The emergence of the railroad system connecting Philadelphia and other eastern cities to the anthracite region soon eclipsed canal building. Frederick List (1789-1846), a leading early-nineteenth-century German economist and political refugee in Philadelphia in the 1820s, purchased a mine in the Little Schuylkill Valley in Tamaqua and recruited one of the nation’s richest men, Stephen Girard (1750-1831) of Philadelphia, as an investor to develop railroad links connecting mines to market. The railroad eventually became the powerful Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, which opened in 1833. Philadelphian Henry Charles Carey (1793-1879), the leading American economist of the nineteenth century and a close adviser to Abraham Lincoln, and like List an advocate of protective tariffs, also held anthracite mining interests. The Lehigh Valley Railroad (LVRR) opened in 1855 connecting Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe) to Easton and then north through the Wyoming Valley into New York state and east into New Jersey and New York City. To the north, George Scranton’s Delaware, Lackawanna, & Western Railroad opened up the Northern Field to New York City and, via the Erie Canal, the Great Lakes. Everywhere railroads used their control of access to the market as leverage to dominate coal production.

Anthracite Boosts Steel Production

Railroads tied together the critical ingredients of the industrial economy of the nineteenth century: coal, iron, and steel. Once accessed, anthracite coal began to play an indispensable role in the industrial revolution. Prior to the use of anthracite in the smelting of iron, American industry lagged far behind its British counterpart, continuing to use charcoal through the 1830s that resulted in an inferior product unsuitable for rail manufacture. The intense heat unleashed in the burning of anthracite closed the gap. By the 1850s anthracite was fueling half of all iron production in the United States, much of it destined for rail building, much of the rest bound for the emerging field of metal machine making, an important industry in Greater Philadelphia. The city’s central entrepôt for the coal was the Reading Railroad’s massive Port Richmond Terminal, a sprawling complex of twenty-one wharfs on the Delaware River capable of loading scores of vessels. From here coal was shipped up and down the East Coast.

Growing demand before, during, and after the Civil War accelerated anthracite production. Regional coal production went from 910,000 tons in 1840 to 3,700,000 tons in 1850, to 9,200,000 tons in 1860, to 11,000,000 in 1865. Over the corresponding period, value of output increased from $1.3 million to $5.5 million in 1850, to $14 million in 1860, to $65 million in 1865, the final statistic suggestive of the enormous inflation and profits gained as a result of the Civil War. The anthracite region’s population—comprising Luzerne, Northumberland, Schuylkill, and what would become Carbon and Lackawanna Counties—grew rapidly, from 46,790 in 1820, to 66,256 in 1830, to 93,086 in 1840, to 155,743 in 1850, and to 248,655 in 1860. As the basis of the regional economy, mine employment went from 3,000 in 1840, to 10,000 in 1850, to 27,000 in 1860, to 39,000 in 1865. From the Civil War until 1900, anthracite production increased fivefold, from 10 million tons to 60 million tons annually. Tens of thousands of immigrants poured into the region, arriving first from Wales, England, and Scotland, then from Ireland, and finally Poland, Italy, Lithuania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Hungary, and many other lands. Workers unionized in bitter struggle against the mine owners in the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) by the first decade of the twentieth century.

In the late nineteenth century coke processed from bituminous coal began to displace anthracite coal for industrial use, especially in steel production. Drawn from the nation’s vast deposits stretching from western Pennsylvania and West Virginia through Illinois, bituminous, or “soft coal,” was considerably cheaper to extract than anthracite coal. The coking industry developed first in western Pennsylvania, and with it the center of the American iron industry shifted from eastern Pennsylvania to the Pittsburgh region, eventually following the development of the iron mining industry in the Lake Superior region to the major cities of the Great Lakes. By 1905, the Pittsburgh area was producing 18 million tons of coke per year. Bituminous production in Pennsylvania alone reached 80 million tons by the turn of the century.

Oil Displaces Anthracite

Another development from western Pennsylvania in the late nineteenth century ultimately contributed to the displacement of anthracite for home heating use, a long decline that accelerated after World War II. This was the discovery of consumer and industrial uses for oil and then natural gas. An industry dominated by John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), oil was first shipped to Philadelphia via the Philadelphia and Erie Railroad, connecting with the Reading in Harrisburg. Beginning in the late nineteenth century oil and natural gas were shipped to refineries via pipelines from northwestern Pennsylvania. With the development of the internal combustion engine in the late nineteenth century, petroleum began to displace both coke and anthracite in industrial production.

The Susquehanna River, whose canals provided the original mode of transportation of anthracite to Philadelphia, contributed to the ultimate decline of the anthracite coal industry. The completion of the Holtwood Dam on the lower Susquehanna in 1910 greatly increased the market for electricity consumption in Philadelphia and Baltimore. The introduction of electricity in industrial production allowed for the rapid development of light industry dependent upon small machines, as well as the development of continuous production methods like the assembly line. By 1930 electricity had become the leading energy source in American industry, and most Philadelphia homes had abandoned carbon-burning appliances. In the years after World War II, the burning of coal as a home heating source declined.

Coal nonetheless continued to play an important role in the production of electricity in the region for many decades. Coal-powered plants generated substantial environmental pollution, and according to 2010 research carried out by the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force investigating the remaining Pennsylvania and New Jersey power plants using coal for generation, fine particle air contamination consisting of soot, heavy metals, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides was associated with dozens of deaths. Most of these plants were slated to close by the end of 2015.

From the beginning, coal contributed to workplace and environmental problems. Tens of thousands of Pennsylvania workers died in the state’s mines, and tens of thousands more suffered and died from coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, or black lung. The rivers and soils near mines and beehive coke ovens were damaged. Air pollution, coal ash deposits, and one ongoing underground coal fire, at Centralia, Pennsylvania, continued to present environmental problems to the state into the twenty-first century. One of the prices of coal, despite its central role in boosting area industry, has been these long-term effects.

Thomas Mackaman is Assistant Professor of History, at King’s College, Wilkes-Barre. He is author of the forthcoming book, New Immigrants and American Industry, 1914-1924. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia’s disposal problem began in 1984 after Gloucester County, New Jersey, blocked outside dumping from its Kinsley Landfill, which had been taking more than forty percent of the city’s trash. Ash from Philadelphia’s two municipal incinerators started piling up after another landfill, near Baltimore, failed to meet Maryland environmental standards and closed.

When Philadelphia loaded the ash aboard the Khian Sea, it was to be taken to the Bahamas and used as fill. Before the ship reached its destination, however, concerns raised by environmental groups about the toxicity of the ash scotched the plan. With the ash still aboard, the Khian Sea embarked on a two-year journey across eleven countries and four continents. The ship was turned away at gunpoint at two ports, the crew almost mutinied, and its engineer threatened to scuttle the vessel and was also tossed into jail. Ultimately, the Khian Sea dumped more than 2,000 tons in the remote Haitian port of Gonaives before being ordered out of that country. When the ship, renamed the Felicia in the hope of escaping the Khian Sea’s notoriety, arrived in Singapore in November 1988, its cargo had mysteriously disappeared.

The pariah ship changed its name several more times–to the Pelicano, then the San Antonio–by the time it was detained by federal officials in October 1989. In a 1993 federal court case the ship’s captain, Arturo Fuentes, testified that the crew used a front-end loader to dump the ash from Philadelphia overboard, part of it in the Atlantic Ocean and part in the Indian Ocean. Two Annapolis, Maryland, businessmen, who operated the ship, were convicted of perjury for lying to a grand jury investigating the case and went to jail.

The local firm contracted by Philadelphia to haul the ash, Joseph Paolino & Sons, which had been blocked from disposing of the waste in landfills in West Virginia and South Carolina before turning to the Khian Sea, was eventually acquired by Waste Management Inc. of Houston, Texas. Waste Management repatriated the last remnant of the Khian Sea’s cargo–the ash pile in Gonaives, Haiti. The federal Environmental Protection Agency and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Resources both tested the ash pile and ruled it non-hazardous.

The 2,345 tons of ash were moved to a hopper barge in Stuart, Florida, and sat there for two years. When it appeared that a Waste Management landfill in Louisiana might be the ash’s final resting place, the Louisiana Senate passed a resolution, 25-1, calling for banning the ash from the state.

In the spring of 2002, the ash was shipped by rail to Hagerstown, Maryland, and then trucked to the Mountain View Reclamation landfill in south-central Pennsylvania. “There is no happy ending to the story,” said Lisa Finaldi, national coordinator the toxic campaign of the environmental group Greenpeace. “Hopefully there was a lesson learned from this and we can do better at managing household waste in this country.” Philadelphia taxpayers never had to pay the $630,000 to dispose of the ash because the contract required it to be disposed of legally.

By 1990, Philadelphia had closed its municipal incinerators and instituted a citywide recycling program to cut the volume of landfill waste. In response to the tight market, new landfill capacity opened in Pennsylvania easing the city’s problems. Among big cities Philadelphia’s problem was not unique. After New York City closed its Fresh Kills Landfill in 2001, it had to ship its solid waste to landfills in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, and South Carolina. While Philadelphia did find places to put its trash, the costs of disposal between 2000 and 2014 doubled to $140 per ton and was projected to reach a total of of $367 million a year by 2016.

Mark Jaffe covered the story of the Khian Sea while a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He also covered energy issues for the Denver Post. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Purchasing gasoline was initially a messy and cumbersome process. Consumers bought gasoline by the bucketful from local garages, hardware stores, or groceries and filled their cars by hand with a measuring can. Sylvanus F. Bowser (1854-1938), an Indiana businessman, invented the Self-Measuring Gasoline Storage Pump in 1905. Consumers inserted a hose from Bower’s contraption into their gas tanks and manually pumped gasoline stored in nearby tanks. Nicknamed “filling stations,” gasoline pumps originally lined public streets, but motorists blocked the flow of traffic each time they stopped to refuel.

Off-street service stations with multiple gas pumps allowed petroleum manufacturers to distribute gasoline more safely. Atlantic Refining Company and Gulf Refining Company opened Philadelphia’s earliest gasoline stations during the late 1910s. Atlantic hired Pittsburgh architect Joseph F. Kuntz (1866-1938) to construct functional yet architecturally sophisticated stations. Kuntz modeled one Atlantic station located at Fortieth and Walnut Streets after a Classical Greek temple with columns, white terra cotta tiles, and nighttime lighting.

Easily built and inexpensive prefabricated stations replaced the monumental architecture of the city’s initial gas stations during the 1920s. Gasoline manufacturers erected stations that mirrored the cottages and houses located in residential neighborhoods. For example, Gulf Oil opened a brick, Spanish Revival gas station at Twentieth and Arch Streets in 1930. Gas stations expanded their range of services during the Great Depression by selling tires, batteries, and other automotive products as well as offering repair services to drivers.

Despite the proliferation of gas stations, travel remained a stressful experience for African American motorists, who faced discrimination when they attempted to patronize roadside businesses. This was not the case, however, at gas stations of the Esso brand marketed by Standard Oil of New Jersey (later part of Exxon Corporation) to residents of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and New York during the 1930s. Esso was one of the only gas station chains that openly welcomed African American motorists, who sought out Esso stations for guaranteed service and access to facilities, such as restrooms.

Philadelphia service stations owners struggled to supply gas to their customers during World War II. The federal government initiated a national gasoline rationing program in order to conserve gasoline and rubber in December 1942. Philadelphia residents received gasoline coupons based on their driving needs. Priority users, such as doctors, defense workers, and truck drivers, were allotted supplementary gasoline stipends throughout the war. As American men joined the nation’s military efforts overseas, female Philadelphians took over key roles as garage attendants at the Atlantic Refining Company’s Point Breeze petroleum facility as well as local gas stations.

Following World War II, as Americans purchased automobiles in unprecedented numbers and moved into single-family suburban homes, new service stations provided commuters with convenient places to refuel on the Schuylkill Expressway, at the Pennsylvania Turnpike interchange at King of Prussia (Valley Forge), in the Main Line suburbs, and in downtown Philadelphia. With the expansion of suburban shopping centers, such as Cherry Hill Mall in New Jersey, gas stations proliferated along access roads and highways during the 1960s.

In order to save consumers money, most states moved towards self-service pumps by the 1960s, but not New Jersey, which adhered to its Retail Gasoline Dispensing Safety Act, enacted in 1949. Garden State residents remained opposed to self-service pumps and celebrated full service gasoline stations as an unusual aspect of New Jersey’s automobile culture. In 2016, New Jersey remained one of only two states (the other being Oregon) that continued to prohibit self-service pumps.

During persistent gasoline shortages in the 1970s, gas stations became the scene of long lines of motorists waiting to purchase gasoline. After the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an oil embargo on the United States in 1973 in retaliation for the U.S. decision to aid Israel in the Yom Kippur War, the price of oil per barrel within the United States quadrupled. Left with insufficient supplies of gasoline to meet motorists’ needs, stations posted signs to inform customers they were out of fuel.

By the late 1970s, independent and budget-friendly gas stations challenged brand-name gasoline chains throughout the Greater Philadelphia region. Price-conscious motorists increasingly patronized independents, such as Bi-Lo and Skat, because of their lower-priced fuel. Gas stations including the Kocolene brand kept prices low by cutting out repair services.

The growing popularity of off-brand and self-service gas station again altered station design. Gas stations adopted large canopies over their gas pumps to provide customers with quick service and protect them from the weather. Gas stations also constructed rectangular buildings offering grab-and-go food and beverages. Small convenience stores, like Sunoco’s Aplus chain, became popular gas station staples by the 1980s and 1990s. Along expressways and highways, full-service travel plazas proliferated, offering motorists brand-named gasoline as well as refreshments from chain eateries, such as Dunkin’ Donuts, Burger King, and Dairy Queen. Into the twenty-first century, gas station design and services continued to evolve to meet motorists’ changing tastes and needs.

Alison Kreitzer is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of American Civilization at the University of Delaware. She is writing a dissertation about dirt track automobile racing in the mid-Atlantic region. (Author information current at time of publication.)

English colonists to the Delaware Valley brought with them a preference for large, open fireplaces, which meant that as settlement expanded, so did the demand for firewood. Although some German colonists preferred burning wood in closed stoves, this had little impact on the region’s home heating markets. As a result, the fires burning in most colonial hearths were incredibly inefficient, as most heat disappeared up the chimney with smoke and soot.

After more than a half century of depleting local firewood stocks, home heating fuel became a scarce commodity. In 1744, Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) published a pamphlet advertising his “Pennsylvanian Fireplace,” which claimed to burn firewood more economically, produce more even heat, and reduce smokiness. Eventually known as the “Franklin Stove,” this cast-iron inset for existing fireplaces achieved few of Franklin’s goals. Improvements by David Rittenhouse (1732–96) in 1784 helped reflect heat into interior rooms, yet the Rittenhouse Stove was expensive and difficult to install. In 1796 the American Philosophical Society sponsored a contest, complete with a sixty-dollar prize, for the best stove design to “benefit the poorer class of people.” Although intended for less-affluent consumers, the contest winners planned to charge ten dollars—a sum far beyond the budgets of poor Philadelphians—for their stove. As fuel scarcities became more acute, the ability to stay warm in Philadelphia’s frosty winters increasingly depended on a household’s income.

The British blockade during the War of 1812 exacerbated firewood shortages. Jacob Cist (1782–1825) of Wilkes-Barre saw an opportunity and shipped samples of anthracite coal to Philadelphia, along with literature touting its many advantages as a home heating fuel. Although initially Philadelphians struggled to light this “stone coal,” anthracite eventually heated the homes of those willing and able to install a fireplace grate or stove designed for the new fuel. In the 1820s, two new canals, built by the Schuylkill Navigation Company and the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, connected Philadelphia to the anthracite region and dramatically increased the city’s supply of coal. As late as 1830, though, firewood still accounted for about two-thirds of the home heating market. A concerted effort by the city’s stove manufacturers to provide affordable coal stoves and philanthropic and promotional campaigns that touted anthracite as the “workingman’s fuel” combined to make “stone coal” the preferred home heating fuel by the advent of the Civil War. In fact, by 1860 anthracite met 90 percent of Philadelphia’s home heating demand.

In the post–Civil War decades, a sophisticated network of fuel distribution developed in the region. Most coal arrived via water at the Schuylkill coal wharfs or via railroad at the Reading Railroad’s Port Richmond facility and then was carried by coal dealers to their small yards throughout the city. Dealers competed fiercely for customers, who often complained that they were swindled by unscrupulous dealers. Although retailers offered scales for weighing coal, many consumers doubted their accuracy. Despite calls for inspection and regulation, Philadelphia never provided much oversight of the coal trade, relying upon the market to drive out the worst coal dealers. As the trade had a low barrier to entry—a small coal yard and a delivery wagon—hundreds of coal dealers worked across Philadelphia by 1900. With razor-thin profit margins, the incentive for dealers to cheat customers was significant.

Although coal reigned supreme well into the 1940s, manufactured and natural gas, along with heating oil, eventually replaced mineral fuel in the region’s home heating markets. This meant that area residents were much more likely to manage home heating through a utility company than purchase, manage, and operate their own heating apparatus. In 1924, for example, the Philadelphia Electric Company introduced electrically driven oil furnaces on the market. By 1927 there were over twelve thousand of these furnaces at work in the city. Philadelphia Electric also sold gas furnaces to residential customers. Using heating oil became more cost effective for consumers after the completion of major pipelines, called Big Inch and Little Big Inch, linking petroleum fields in the Southwest with the East Coast during World War II. The expansion of the market for gas—mostly natural gas piped from the Southwest—occurred quite dramatically during the 1940s and 1950s, and by 1955 the utility was adding over ten thousand customers per year. Some local gasworks continued to make “manufactured gas” from anthracite coal, but national trends in energy markets  undermined this source of heating fuel. The adaptation of Big Inch and Little Big Inch to transport natural gas to Philadelphia area in the postwar decades, in addition to the construction of new gas pipelines in the 1950s, linked the Delaware Valley’s refineries to national energy flows, as petroleum products from Texas and Oklahoma became cost-effective substitutes for Pennsylvania oil and coal. The rise in oil prices during the 1970s made oil furnaces less attractive, and by the beginning of the twentieth-first century, new methods of drilling for gas, such as hydraulic fracking, increased gas supplies. Still, oil furnaces persisted into the twenty-first century.

No matter what method people in the Philadelphia region used to warm their homes, they found themselves less and less involved in the day-to-day decisions of which fuel to use, how much to purchase, or how to manage their apparatus. Heat became available at the turn of a dial and the original source of that energy was often thousands of miles away. Without the hassle of haggling with dealers, arranging for delivery and storage, and then managing their own furnace, the substitution of gas, oil, and electricity for wood and coal made sense for most households. In the post–World War II decades, for example, Philadelphia Electric alone served one hundred thousand residential natural gas customers, and home heating accounted for two-thirds of the company’s gas revenues. In the end, the convenience of getting heat on demand without worrying about coal prices, shady dealers, or how to operate their furnace outweighed any concerns local consumers might have about the origins of the energy they used to stay warm.

Sean Patrick Adams is Professor of History and Chair at the University of Florida. He is the author or editor of several books, including Home Fires: How Americans Kept Warm in the Nineteenth Century (2014). (Author information current at time of publication.)

Following World War II, the federal government developed civilian nuclear power technologies as an extension of wartime nuclear weapons research. Nuclear power reactors, which used the same physical reaction as in a fission-powered nuclear bomb, were promising commercial investments: although nuclear power required high start-up construction costs, it had low long-term operational costs. In 1956, federal regulators made nuclear power technologies available to public and private utility corporations.

In 1967, after nearly a decade of planning, building, and certifications, PECO opened the first of three planned reactors at the Peach Bottom Nuclear Generating Station on the Susquehanna River in York County. At that time, construction was planned for several additional reactors in the region. PECO selected Limerick, Pennsylvania, about thirty miles northeast of Philadelphia, as a site for two additional reactors. Metropolitan Edison began work on two reactors on Three Mile Island, on the Susquehanna River south of Harrisburg. And Jersey Central Power and Light made plans to build a reactor at Oyster Creek, in Ocean County, New Jersey. In the next several years, it was predicted, these seven reactors—three at Peach Bottom, two at Limerick, two at Three Mile Island, and one at Oyster Creek—would generate enough electricity to power Philadelphia and the surrounding counties several times over.

Anti-Nuclear Activism

Plans to expand Greater Philadelphia’s nuclear power capacity, however, were slowed by anti-nuclear power activism in the late 1960s and 1970s. Across the nation, protests erupted in response to proposed plants. Activists cited the environmental impact of nuclear power plants, which, like many other thermal power plants, required the use of local bodies of water to regulate the plants’ temperature. Opponents of the expansion at Peach Bottom and construction of the Limerick, Three Mile Island, and Oyster Creek plants were concerned about the potential ecological consequences of local temperature increases in the Susquehanna and Schuylkill Rivers and along the New Jersey shoreline. Protesters were also deeply troubled by the possibility of radioactive contaminants escaping into the surrounding habitat. Their protests thus reflected the broader concerns of the global environmental movement.

While nuclear power protests delayed construction at some sites, during the 1970s several new reactors went online. During 1973-74, PECO replaced Peach Bottom’s original small reactor with two new reactors. In 1974, Metropolitan Edison began commercial production at Three Mile Island’s first reactor. Two years later, Public Service Electric and Gas opened the Salem Nuclear Power Plant on the Delaware Bay in Salem County, New Jersey. In 1978, Three Mile Island added a second reactor.

In response to what they believed to be shortsighted, runaway production, anti-nuclear power activists renewed their pressure on PECO and other local energy companies. In 1977, the Philadelphia-based pacifist organization Movement for a New Society formed the Keystone Alliance, a diverse group of antinuclear activists who coalesced around the construction of the Limerick nuclear reactors. Throughout the late 1970s, the Keystone Alliance held rallies and protests outside Philadelphia’s PECO offices and organized teach-ins, letter-writing campaigns, and marches across the region.

The movement against nuclear power gained national attention on March 28, 1979, when an operational problem at Three Mile Island initiated a partial meltdown of its second reactor. The meltdown itself was contained by the end of the day. However, the accident caused significant damage to the reactor, and it was unclear to the public for several days whether associated dangers, such as explosions and fire, had passed. As technicians worked to eliminate the dangers, officials issued voluntary evacuation recommendations to protect local residents, and the nation watched to see if the accident would escalate into a more severe emergency. By April 1, experts issued an all-clear.

Although a catastrophe at Three Mile Island was averted—later studies concluded that the radiation received by local residents was less than that of one medical X-ray—the accident added significant momentum to anti-nuclear power campaigns. As hundreds of thousands of protesters marched in cities across the country, the Keystone Alliance redoubled its efforts in Philadelphia. In 1981, the Alliance, backed by a broad coalition of residents, environmental groups, professional organizations, and politicians petitioned the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to abandon the construction of the partially-completed Limerick complex. The Keystone Alliance also later filed suit against PECO alleging misappropriation of funds for a pro-nuclear public relations campaign.

Chernobyl Affects the Debate

The Keystone Alliance delayed, but failed to halt, the construction of additional nuclear production sites in the Philadelphia region: by 1990, both Limerick reactors, two additional reactors at the Salem County complex, and two reactors in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, had gone online. However, the controversies that predated and followed the accident at Three Mile Island significantly increased public criticism of nuclear power. In the 1980s, the New Jersey-based Sea Alliance joined the ranks of the region’s anti-nuclear power groups, specifically targeting the facilities in Salem County, one of the largest nuclear power sites in the nation. Such protest organizations gained further traction as Cold War hostilities increased in the 1980s and contributed to a broad antinuclear movement that called for abolishing nuclear weapons as well as nuclear power. The April 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station in Ukraine, the most severe nuclear accident in history, cemented public fears about nuclear power around the globe.

In the United States, the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents contributed to increased regulatory scrutiny of nuclear power production. In 1987, the Philadelphia area’s nuclear power sites once again gained critical national attention when the NRC ordered the shutdown of the Peach Bottom power complex, citing employee misconduct, operational problems, and corporate negligence. As the national media reported, the official reprimand revealed that operators had been found asleep while on duty, among many other problems. Likewise, in the 1990s, both Salem County reactors were shut down for two years for emergency maintenance on malfunctioning systems.

After early 1990, when the second Limerick reactor began commercial production, no new reactors were added to the Philadelphia area’s electrical grid. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and local agencies continued to oversee the scheduled maintenance, repairs, and minor accidents of the region’s aging nuclear power infrastructure. Although the region’s nuclear power plants regularly appeared in the news for such reason, after the 1980s, protest largely abated.

As the region’s environmental advocates began to demand low- and no-emissions electricity in the 1980s and 1990s, some activists began to accept nuclear power as a clean energy alternative. Although nuclear power is not strictly renewable, because it consumes fuel in the form of fissile materials, it does not release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Thus the green energy movement created some new opportunities for the nuclear power industry. However, especially in Pennsylvania, traditional segments of the energy sector, including the natural gas and coal industries, remained fierce competitors and voiced critical opposition to the growth of nuclear energy.

In the 2000s, new concerns dominated public discussions about nuclear power. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, for example, raised critical questions about the resilience and safety of nuclear power plants in the event of sabotage or attack. More importantly, the catastrophic meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in eastern Japan in March 2011 once again brought nuclear power under severe public criticism in the United States. The Fukushima accident was caused by a tsunami that followed a massive earthquake, which rendered the plant’s cooling system inoperable. The meltdowns, considered the second-worst nuclear accident in history, released a great deal of radiation into the environment and required the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of residents. For Americans, Fukushima served as a stark reminder that nuclear power production could be vulnerable to natural disasters as well as human and technological error. Fortunately, during 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, the reactor at Oyster Creek in Ocean County, New Jersey, was unharmed and continued to function normally, despite severe coastal flooding.

From the time plans began in the late 1950s, nuclear power production in Greater Philadelphia was controversial. For decades, residents, politicians, and businesses struggled to balance economic motivations and energy demands with concerns about public safety and environmental risk. In 2017, nuclear production facilities generated over one-third of the electricity for both Pennsylvania and New Jersey, with nearly all of the plants located within one hundred miles of Philadelphia and in close proximity to millions of residents. The extreme tension between public safety and public benefits came to define the nuclear power industry in the region.

Sarah Robey completed her Ph.D. in history at Temple University and is an Assistant Professor of the History of Energy at Idaho State University. Her research explores American nuclear history through the lens of activism, public knowledge, and civic engagement. She has held fellowships at the Philadelphia History Museum, the National Museum of American History, and the National Air and Space Museum. (Author information current at time of publication.)

PGW originated in the 1830s from Philadelphia’s desire to catch up with other cities in providing gas lighting for streets, businesses, and homes. Although Philadelphia was the fourth-largest city in the country in 1837, it lacked a municipal gas works. In 1835, voters elected Samuel Vaughan Merrick (1801-70), an engineer and entrepreneur, to the Common Council to push Philadelphia towards building a gas works. Deeply involved in the city’s development, Merrick was one of the founders of the Franklin Institute and the first president of the Pennsylvania Railroad. After traveling to Europe to investigate municipal gas works, Merrick persuaded Council to charter a private company to build the works, but the Council retained the right to acquire it. Thus the experiment was to be started with private funds, but if it worked out, the municipal government could claim the gas works.

Merrick designed the plant himself for a location on the Schuylkill River near Market Street. Opened on February 8, 1836, the facility used Pennsylvania coal to produce gas. PGW delivered this gas within Philadelphia’s original boundaries, the area between Vine Street and South Street and between the two rivers. In the first few years of operation, PGW installed cast iron pipes about two feet below the city’s surface to bring gas to many of the outdoor lamps lining Philadelphia streets, giving a distinct look that came to define nineteenth-century cities. Hotels, stores, and other public places also quickly installed gas, which rapidly replaced oil for illumination. Private use of gas lighting grew more slowly because the cost of lighting homes was beyond the reach of the city’s working class.

City Assumes Ownership

Convinced of the gas works’ growing profitability, in March 1841 the Philadelphia government took over ownership of PGW. After Philadelphia’s consolidation with the county in 1854, PGW acquired the local companies in the annexed territory, extending its reach fully into the 129.7 square miles that made up the new city. By 1890, 1,500 public lights lit Philadelphia’s streets and two million lights lit private homes.

After 1860 PGW’s problems came not from the need to add customers, but from political changes in Philadelphia. Between 1860 and 1951, Republican political bosses controlled city government and used PGW’s board of trustees as a source of patronage. James McManes (1822-99), as head of the city’s gas commission, took kickbacks from contractors and employed a large number of the gas works’ 1,000 employees as election workers, allowing him to gain control over the Republican Party. Under his rule, PGW operated inefficiently, fell into debt, and as a consequence charged higher prices for gas to private customers than any other city.

By the late 1880s PGW’s operations had almost completely broken down. The Gas Commission was an independent agency, but its members, who were appointed by Council, were either Republican ward leaders or subservient to ward leaders. The commission refused to adopt numerous technical improvements in the production and distribution of gas. Costs to consumers were high for what proved to be an inferior product. Safety was not a priority, and accidents frequently happened. The status of the works became a national disgrace as journalists wrote about the “gas house gang” and the greedy politicians who ran the city through their control of PGW. The situation was not entirely unique to Philadelphia, as other cities such as St. Louis had political bosses who ran local public utilities for personal gain. However, when the journalist Lincoln Steffens wrote about bad government in American cities, he found Philadelphia among the most corrupt. During the Progressive Era, reformers in a number of cities removed ward leaders from control over public utilities.

Ownership Compromise

Trying to remedy the situation, in 1897 a broad movement among consumers and good-government groups in Philadelphia proposed selling the gas works to a private company. But political opposition to a sale resulted in a compromise. Philadelphia leased the system to the United Gas Improvement Company (UGI) for 30 years, renewing it every ten years thereafter until 1972. Under the arrangement, UGI sold the gas, maintained the production plants, and paid the city an annual rental fee, which averaged about $1.5 million through the first quarter of the twentieth century, rising thereafter with each new contract. UGI remained a Philadelphia corporation, whose leaders included a number of businessmen also involved in building the city’s transportation system. The company owned a number of local gas companies along the East Coast and during the 1920s was one of the largest utility holding companies in the United States.

Although Republican bosses who controlled Philadelphia politics during the early twentieth century made several attempts to gain control over the gas works, PGW remained largely immune to corruption during its 70 years of operation by UGI. Gas usage expanded greatly. Even as more homes converted to electricity for lighting, they adopted gas for cooking, refrigeration, and heating water. Nevertheless, controversy periodically erupted over whether the city should take back control of this vital asset. The leaders of the Republican machine such as Boies Penrose (1860-1921) and William Vare (1867-1934) wanted more access to the gas works patronage and its valuable construction contracts. The most politically charged attempt to take over the gas works occurred in 1938 when Mayor S. Davis Wilson (1881-1939) tried to seize the company’s facilities despite a vote by the Council granting UGI a new lease. Before the dispute ended with an injunction from the state Supreme Court, Wilson sent the police to take over the gas works buildings. Hundreds of people, including PGW employees who were defending the plants against the police, were involved in the near-riot. After the court’s decision, UGI’s contract remained in place. Ironically, with the city unable to pay its operating expenses in 1938 because of the Depression, the Council used the gas works as collateral to borrow $40 million from a federal agency.

After World War II, PGW grew rapidly, with revenue of over $100 million by 1970. Change occurred as most residents and businesses adopted gas heating to comply with new pollution regulations, which largely eliminated coal for winter heating. To meet demand, PGW expanded its services by maintaining retail stores, operating a fleet of repair trucks, automating its billing system, and switching production in its own plants from coal to natural gas. Financially, PGW’s relationship with the city was complicated by Philadelphia’s dire budget needs. In 1965 the Council again used the gas works as collateral for a loan, and a few years later it secured an advance on payments from UGI.

Political Pressure to End Lease

Whenever the contract between the city and UGI came up for renewal, politicians used the occasion to urge the end of the lease. After 1951, the pressure came from Democrats, the new majority party in the city. In the 1960s, Controller Alexander Hemphill (1922-86), with considerable support within Council and among leading Democrats, led the opposition to granting a new contract.

In 1972, Mayor Frank Rizzo (1920-91) decided to end the contract with UGI and replace it by creating the Philadelphia Facilities Management Corporation to run PGW. The new municipally-run company served 556,000 customers and delivered the gas through 2,932 miles of gas mains. In its first days, the new company’s top managers were people who had worked for UGI before the lease expired, and the board included a number of distinguished Philadelphians.

From the start of PGW’s new status, it faced serious problems because of inflation, rising natural gas prices, and high interest rates on bonds for capital construction. Philadelphia also had serious fiscal difficulties and relied on the $15 million fee paid by PGW to meet its obligations. On several occasions, some of Philadelphia’s leaders suggested selling the facility. One major point of contention was gas rates, which many consumer groups believed were too high. Costs for the average homeowner rose from about $180 a year to $894 during the first 20 years of city control. Part of the rise in rates occurred because of inflation during the 1970s and part because of the disruption of energy supplies during the same period. But these national causes did not help ensure a smooth transition for the gas works to public operation.

After 1972, controversies over PGW became a regular part of Philadelphia’s political landscape. An additional concern about rates was the inability of persons living near the poverty level to secure heat during the winter. When City Council prohibited the termination of gas for such individuals, the loss of income was great enough to push the gas works close to bankruptcy and prevented its annual payment to the city. On several occasions, the city had to bail out PGW to help it pay its bonded indebtedness. Even when the $15 million annual fee materialized for the city’s benefit, PGW remained a source of controversy, such as the board’s decision to build a gas generating plant in the 1970s and 1980s that never was used.

The end of the UGI contract in 1972 further politicized PGW’s operations. One of Rizzo’s initial actions was to shift the law firm representing the gas works to a political ally. Additionally, the Gas Commission, composed of the controller, representatives of the mayor, and the Council, assumed control over PGW. Patronage began to play a part in the makeup of the workforce once again, and allies of mayors gained the business of sales of bonds and the contracts for legal work. In 1986 this mixing of politics with gas led the two most important officials from PGW to resign in a dispute with Mayor Wilson Goode (b. 1938). About the same time, PGW hired ex-mayor Frank Rizzo as its security director when he was attempting to regain his old office, a situation that prompted considerable controversy.

Over the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, further political problems surfaced. Several major scandals led to the resignation of top leaders, and the question once again emerged: Could the city effectively run a public utility, or should it be sold to a private corporation? Mayor Edward Rendell (b. 1944) explored the issue in the 1990s, and Mayor Michael Nutter (b. 1957) in 2014 opened bidding to secure a sale. UIL Holding Company of Connecticut won the rights to buy PGW for $1.86 billion. Mayor Nutter proposed that the money be used to fill a very large hole in the city pension fund. But the Council rejected the offer as members expressed fears about the loss of control over what had been a source of patronage and funds for the city. Workers at PGW feared what a change in ownership would mean for their jobs. More generously, some expressed concern that poor city residents would lose their protection from having their gas turned off because of nonpayment of bills during the winter.

For almost two centuries, PGW remained a major institution in Philadelphia. But political disputes throughout its history often overshadowed PGW’s usefulness as a city-owned municipal facility. During the same period, cities such as New York and St. Louis sold off their gas works, which often were combined with electric companies as a means of providing easy billing for customers and clear regulatory control over rates. Philadelphia during this era faced a constant conundrum: Would its residents be better served by a gas works run by a city run utility or by a private company?

Herbert B. Ershkowitz is Professor Emeritus at Temple University and the author of three books and numerous articles on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history. He wrote a 150-year history of PGW that is available in the PGW archives.

Reaching hundreds of miles to the Philadelphia area from western Pennsylvania, pipelines carrying oil and gas were critical to Philadelphia’s emergence as an industrial power and linked the fates of suppliers and consumers for more than 160 years. The development of the pipelines, marked by both challenge and innovation, supplied energy for residential and business consumption as well as commercial export. By the twenty-first century, distribution and transmission lines held the potential to boost the region’s role as an emerging energy hub.

Before long-distance pipelines, beginning in 1836, the first energy pipelines in Philadelphia carried manufactured gas within the city for lighting. The Philadelphia Gas Works, the first municipally-owned distribution company, illuminated Second Street with forty-six manufactured gas lights.

The discovery of an oil spring in Titusville, Pennsylvania, followed by the drilling of the first successful well in 1859, touched off an oil rush by speculators and presented urban dwellers with other energy options, especially for lighting. However, moving crude oil long distances was both expensive and dangerous. Teamsters transported crude oil in forty-two-gallon barrels by horse-drawn wagons, either to barges floating down the Allegheny River bound for Pittsburgh or onto the Philadelphia and Erie Railroad, bound for Philadelphia and New York. The movement of the barrels, together with evaporation, sloshed and spilled oil into the rivers and along the railways cutting deeply into profits. As little as 15 to 20 percent of the oil produced reached consumers.

Transporting oil even short distances was cost prohibitive as teamsters gouged drillers at $4 per barrel for transport, a cost more expensive than moving the entire rail freight to New York City. Consisting of as much as 6,000 wagons daily, the heavy hauls destroyed existing roads and made conditions especially dangerous by spilling slick oil on muddy roads and endangering both teamsters and the animals that bore the burden of the haul.

Demand for Kerosene Increases

As long as oil remained difficult to transport at acceptable cost, Philadelphia continued to rely on manufactured gas to supply homes and businesses, but crude oil byproducts like gasoline, Naptha, paraffin, and tar came to be used in factories to spur Philadelphia’s industrial development. Demand for kerosene increased in homes as well because it provided a bright, steady light that increased hours of productivity. Known for its safety, it replaced costly whale oil and foul-smelling and dangerously explosive camphene, a derivative of turpentine. One gallon of kerosene could produce 140 hours of safe, odorless illumination.

It was amid the Oil Rush that the first transmission pipelines were built by individual drillers as an experiment intended to move oil short distances, transporting it directly from the well to refineries up to a mile away. Rudimentary at best, these systems consisted of two boards nailed together in a “V” shape and covered with a third, allowing gravity to initiate the flow. These wooden distribution, or gathering lines proved to be fragile and brittle, and thus they were soon replaced with small-diameter cast-iron pipes. Threatened by the interference of the encroaching “experiments” with their control over hauling oil, teamsters responded quickly by tearing up the pipelines.

In 1865, Samuel Van Syckel (1813-94) pioneered the first successful long-distance transmission lines near Titusville, managing to overcome the teamster’s sabotage by posting guards along the five-mile route.  Delivering approximately 2,000 barrels daily through a two-inch diameter wrought-iron pipe with the help of three pumps, the Van Syckel pipeline inspired a flurry of additional pipeline projects, resulting in construction of an expanding wrought-iron infrastructure from the oil fields to railroad terminals and canal entries.

By the 1870s pipeline technology improved with the introduction of subsurface cast-iron pipes. Such large-scale pipelines required purchasing land rights from landowners along the pipeline route and, in many cases, required court orders to secure eminent domain or condemnation of properties along the route. The land needed to be cleared of trees and stumps, trenched and then, once the pipe was installed, filled-in again.

Pipelines Prone to Leaks

Once set, pipelines were prone to slow and steady leaks as well as explosion, which polluted water and destroyed land. The lines often cut through watersheds, streams, and wetlands, removing large swaths of trees to clear a path for construction.

Showing little regard for the environmental or human impact, speculators eagerly invested in infrastructure projects that promised cheap, abundant, and reliable sources of light and industrial fuel to supply the increasing demand of the Greater Philadelphia region and the European markets it served through export from its ports.

Byron D. Benson (1832-88) and several other producers organized the Tidewater Pipeline Company, Limited, in 1879, seeking to bypass the monopoly John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937) had secured over area rail transport. Tidewater constructed a 109-mile, six-inch-diameter wrought-iron pipeline from Bradford to Williamsport capable of transporting 250 barrels per hour to ready tank cars on the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad bound for Philadelphia and New York.

The Tidewater Pipeline revolutionized oil transmission and distribution by allowing producers to stabilize cost fluctuations in transportation and to undermine Standard Oil’s monopoly of the railways. To strengthen Tidewater’s hold, Benson arranged to transport the daily flow of 6,000 barrels of crude via the Central Railroad to the Lombard & Ayers works in Bayonne, New Jersey, and the Logan & Farnsworth refinery in Philadelphia. The line was further extended to Tamanend, Pennsylvania, and, then, just short of the seaboard in Bayonne, New Jersey.

Standard Oil Builds Its Own Pipelines

Not deterred by the competition, Standard Oil responded by building its own pipelines towards its refineries in Ohio and along the Atlantic Coast, including port refineries in Philadelphia. The Cleveland line was completed in 1880, reducing shipping costs by more than half. The following year, Standard Oil built a four-inch line from Bradford to Buffalo, parallel to a competing six-inch line built by the Buffalo & Rock City Company. Rockefeller cut off Buffalo & Rock City’s supply chain by purchasing New York refineries and, without any buyers, Buffalo & Rock City was forced to sell out to Standard Oil.

Using right of ways purchased from the Erie Railroad, Standard Oil subsequently built a series of trunk pipelines to refineries toward the Atlantic Coast, starting with a six-inch pipe from Olean, New York, to Saddle River, New Jersey, in 1881 and co-locating another six-inch line that was extended to Bayonne.. The following year, the company built a 260-mile pipeline from Colegrove, Pennsylvania, to supply refineries at Gibson’s Point owned by Philadelphia’s Atlantic Refining Company. In 1883, the line was expanded by seventy miles to Baltimore refineries.

By 1882, Rockefeller controlled 3,000 miles of pipelines. He accelerated construction by introducing steam-powered machinery to trench, lay, and thread pipes, saving manual labor for cutting, stumping, and removing trees or boulders.

After negotiations failed to prevent Standard Oil from acquiring Tidewater Pipeline, the Pennsylvania legislature prohibited the merger in 1883. Notwithstanding the prohibition, the two companies entered a pooling agreement, allowing Standard Oil to gain control of Tidewater and maintain a dominant share of transmission facilities.

Oil Lines as Public Utilities

Following damaging revelations of Rockefeller’s monopoly by pioneer muckracking journalist, Ida Tarbell (1857–1944) in 1902, Congress and the courts dealt Standard a number of blows. In 1906, the Hepburn Act made oil transmission lines public utilities by requiring interstate pipelines to offer services at equal costs to all shippers and designating these transmission lines as common carriers subject to the regulation of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC).

In 1911, the Supreme Court ruled that Rockefeller’s tactics violated the Sherman Antitrust Act and broke the Standard Oil Trust into 34 separate companies. The following year the court drew on the Sherman Antitrust Act again to order Standard Oil of New Jersey to dissolve into seven regional oil companies. Finally, in 1913, Congress made the first attempt at federal involvement in U.S. pipeline ratemaking by granting the ICC authority over valuation of common carrier lines.

Establishing transmission lines as common carriers and breaking up Standard’s monopoly opened the oil market, and the flow of crude oil from producing regions to the Greater Philadelphia area increased, making petroleum a viable option for lighting, heating and fuel.  The introduction of Edison’s electric lightbulb and mass production of automobiles hastened the shift from kerosene lamp oil to gasoline by reducing the domestic kerosene market. In 1911, U.S. output of gasoline overtook kerosene. In response to these innovations, crude oil pipelines carried oil from prolific fields in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas to the refineries on the East Coast, creating the beginning of what would be a national network of transmission and gathering lines.

Demand for petroleum products in the Philadelphia area increased in the two world wars in the first part of the twentieth century. During World War II, German submarines threatened American tankers delivering and exporting petroleum products from the East Coast, sinking forty-six oil tankers. In response, the U.S. government contracted with the Delaware-based War Emergency Pipelines Corporation (WEP), a conglomeration of eleven private oil companies to initiate construction on the Big Inch and Little Big Inch pipelines (1942-43) from the Gulf Coast to refineries and distribution centers in New York and Philadelphia. They transported approximately 350 million barrels of crude oil by the end of the war.

Postwar Pipeline Conversions

Following the war, Texas Eastern Transmission Corporation (TETCO) converted pipelines to transport natural gas as part of a deal with WEP. In 1957, the Little Big Inch converted to a common carrier of petroleum products, supplying Philadelphia refineries and encouraging local markets to convert from manufactured to natural gas. Additional natural gas transmission pipelines serving the Greater Philadelphia region included the Williams Transcontinental Gas Pipeline, commissioned in 1950, extending 10,500 miles from Texas through Pennsylvania to markets in Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, D.C. The Columbia Gas Transmission Line provided service from the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Coast, connecting to the Millennium Pipeline near Port Jervis, New York, and then to Downingtown, Pennsylvania, extending eastward under the Delaware River into New Jersey.

The discovery in 2008 of up to 500 trillion cubic tons of recoverable natural gas in the Marcellus Shale Formation, stretching through north, central, and western Pennsylvania, opened a new era by stimulating a flurry of natural gas pipeline projects terminating in Philadelphia. Analysts estimated that as many as 4,600 miles of new interstate transmission lines would be added to the region by 2018.

Such activity spurred opposition from environmental groups, who disputed the safety of large- volume distribution through densely populated residential areas, watersheds, and fragile ecosystems. Because of the high risk of explosion, these groups called for more stringent regulation on pipeline construction. Fearing cumulative impacts, including the potential for water pollution, fragmentation of forests, and destruction of ecosystems extending from natural gas extraction, environmentalists called for moratoriums and even a state-wide ban in Pennsylvania.

The Marcellus Revolution

Touted as the Marcellus Revolution, the flow of abundant and low-cost natural gas prompted a dramatic increase in the number of gas-fired generation facilities, shifting the source of energy generated by the power grid from coal and nuclear fusion to natural gas. While demand for oil and gas remained high through the winter heating, gas-fired energy powering air conditioners and cooling systems increased consumption of natural gas through the summer months.

The shift toward natural gas was exemplified by Philadelphia Gas Works’ announcement in June 2014 that it would add twenty-four natural gas vehicles to its service fleet. The first public natural gas filling station opened off of U.S. Route 1 in Philadelphia’s East Falls neighborhood in September 2014.

Philadelphia’s proximity to the Marcellus Shale made the city a potentially ideal energy hub for shipping, trading and refining natural gas. To realize those possibilities, investors sought to take advantage of the existing infrastructure—pipelines, refineries, storage facilities, and ports, while expanding gas-fired power plants and overhauling  antiquated distribution lines, thus hastening the transition from coal and oil to natural gas.

Other pipeline expansion projects sought approval by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Spectra Energy’s proposed Greater Philadelphia Expansion Project and the proposed Mariner East 2 expansion project were projected for completion by 2016. PennEast Pipeline had respective target dates of 2018 and 2017, pending final FERC approval. Sunoco Logistics planned to revitalize the Marcus Hook Refinery with the approved Mariner East 2 expansion project. Together, these lines would serve consumers in the Greater Philadelphia region and beyond.

From the first oil well drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania, to the massive pipeline expansion anticipating Philadelphia’s emergence as an energy hub, the Greater Philadelphia region has benefited from pipelines transmitting petroleum products from the Pennyslvania hinterlands to light and heat homes, power industry and manufacturing, and boost local economy.

Tara M. Zrinski teaches Philosophy at Northampton Community College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She has been one of four eco-feminist bloggers writing for From the Ground Up, a blog on Shalereporter.com. Her work has focused on documenting the impacts of Marcellus Shale development on the environment and human health as well as the environmentalist response to natural gas extraction, pipeline construction, and energy transition in Pennsylvania.

Although Native Americans farmed, hunted, and erected structures in the Delaware Valley prior to European colonization, their methods generated little pollution in the modern sense. With the establishment of Philadelphia in 1682, founder William Penn (1644-1718) hoped to avoid the filthy conditions of European cities by arranging the street plan as a spacious, orderly grid. Despite his intentions, in the early 1700s fetid alleyways developed between major streets. Residents threw garbage directly outdoors, a practice that attracted feral pigs, wild dogs, and vermin. Without paved roads, foot and carriage traffic soiled the air with dust, or, depending on the weather, mud made travel impossible. Such conditions prompted Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) to call for trash collection and street paving. Performed by servants and slaves, garbage collection began in 1757, with trash hauled downstream and dumped directly into the Delaware River. Street paving commenced in 1762. Initially using brick, it largely depended upon property owners, who after contributing funds, were reimbursed by the colonial assembly.

Early industry and commerce posed threats to the environment across the region. In Wilmington, Delaware, waste from textile shops, papermakers, and flour mills polluted stretches of the Brandywine River. Philadelphia’s butchers, slaughterhouses, and breweries discharged carcasses and runoff into Dock Creek, a tributary of the Delaware River that became the city’s de facto trash dump. Petitions argued for moving tanneries, which lined the creek, to the hinterlands. Backyard privies held human waste as well as household debris. Working after dark, collectors transferred the “night soil” to holding pits outside of town for use in fertilizer. But in heavy rains, privies flooded into gutters, eventually reaching Dock Creek. In 1763, the tainted creek sparked Philadelphia’s first environmental laws, imposing fines for illegal dumping and inadequate storage of refuse. Regulations also targeted unburied animal remains, littering in public spaces and squares, and obstructive signage. Hoping to minimize noise and uncleanliness, some residents in 1773 opposed extending High Street’s crowded market stalls westward. When their lawsuit failed to materialize, they vandalized a nearby lime house in protest. New Jersey banned the burning of oyster shells to create “quicklime,” a material used in mortar. Burning shells generated a thick, acrid smoke and the law, passed in 1775, was one of the region’s first air pollution measures. During the American Revolution, fines for violating Philadelphia’s pollution laws increased eightfold due to wartime inflation.

Pollution received heightened attention after independence. By 1784, Dock Creek had been covered to its mouth at the Delaware River, although underground it continued to serve as the city’s principal storm sewer. A major crisis came with Philadelphia’s 1793 yellow fever epidemic, which killed more than four thousand people. Many theories suggested the disease emanated from contaminated streets, foul privies, or in the judgment of Dr. Benjamin Rush (1746-1813), rotting cargo in the city’s port. In response, Mayor Matthew Clarkson (1733-1800) ordered the cleanup of market stalls and streets. Still others believed dirty water led to the fever’s spread. Prior to his death, Franklin bequeathed to Philadelphia funds for constructing a municipal water system. Designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820), the first waterworks commenced operation in 1801. Using steam technology, the system delivered clean water to homes and businesses, reducing the need for private wells. Despite these innovations, leading intellectuals such as Rush and Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) openly questioned the need for and the health of urban environments. And since colonial times, the region’s affluent classes tended to own country houses, providing respite from increasingly toxic cities and their civic obligations to address such toxicity.

Toll of Expanding Industries

With expanding industries and transportation networks in the 1800s came new forms of pollution. To blunt the effects of water contamination, Philadelphia in the 1820s began acquiring private estates along the Schuylkill River for the establishment of Fairmount Park; in subsequent decades, the park’s boundaries grew to maintain a buffer between the growing industrial city and its wooded hinterlands. Effluent from coal-heaving in Manayunk, gunpowder making in Wilmington, and iron founding in Philadelphia entered creeks and rivers. Ferry passengers and operators routinely threw their waste overboard. Trains, running at street level, contended with pedestrian and equestrian traffic, which led to extreme congestion. Locomotives emitted noxious black smoke and were prone to explosion. In 1838, Philadelphia banned them from all streets, necessitating the construction of train stations beyond city limits. Meanwhile thousands of work horses augmented travel and transport. On average, each animal generated twenty pounds of manure and several gallons of urine per day, and cities found it difficult to secure the resources needed to keep pace with cleanup. Adding to water pollution were the refineries built along the Schuylkill River adjacent to Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park after the discovery of oil in 1859 at Titusville, Pennsylvania. The first, the Belmont Petroleum refinery, opened in 1865 just upriver from the Fairmount Waterworks. The refinery contained underground storage tanks and a waste pipe running directly into the river. In 1870, to curb toxic runoff, the city purchased Belmont’s land, prompting its relocation downriver to Point Breeze; the parcel later was merged into Fairmount Park. In addition, a new law required all refining activities be positioned south of the waterworks to prevent future contamination.

Following the Civil War, with rapid population growth and industrialization, contaminated water ranked among the region’s most serious problems. By 1880, nearly thirty thousand tons of privy waste was collected annually in Philadelphia. Although flush toilets had come into use, early models were connected to privies, which overwhelmed municipal systems. Raw sewage, along with coal ash (from homes and businesses), industrial runoff, and household items was deposited directly into the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers. Wilmington’s Brandywine River, the city’s main water source, also was heavily polluted. Outbreaks of cholera and typhoid fever occurred in the 1880s, prompting the building of reservoirs, a modern sewer system in 1890, and in 1909, Wilmington’s first water purification plant. Philadelphia’s City Council in 1900 approved funding for a municipal filtration system, which nearly eradicated typhoid.

Disease epidemics were especially worrisome in crowded neighborhoods populated by European immigrants and migrating African Americans. Seeking to improve public health and combat poverty, charitable Philadelphians such as Theodore Starr (1841-84), Susan Parrish Wharton (1852-1928), Hannah Fox (1858-1933), and Helen Parrish (1859-1942) helped form the Octavia Hill Association, which, influenced by British settlement programs, spearheaded housing reform in south Philadelphia. Fearing a cholera outbreak in the same vicinity, the city launched an asphalt paving campaign in 1893. With workhorses plying the streets, sanitary officials, concerned with maladies spread by manure dust, lobbied for asphalt citywide; compared with block paving, asphalt cost less and proved easier to clean. Personal hygiene and pollution became intertwined when in 1897, Philadelphia’s Women’s Protective Health Association posted signs throughout the city warning of the dangers of public spitting, which many believed transmitted disease. In 1905, Dr. Lawrence Flick (1856-1938), a Jefferson Medical College graduate who made strides curing tuberculosis, further condemned the practice in On Spitting, a pamphlet he distributed to grocery stores, taverns, and passersby.

Persistent Water Contamination

Despite earlier efforts to combat it, water pollution continued to pose significant problems near the turn of the twentieth century. Philadelphia’s North American in 1899 bemoaned the contamination of Frankford’s Little Tacony Creek and called for its conversion into a sewer line, a process not completed until the 1930s. Although some municipalities had banned releasing sewage into waterways, many continued to do so. Human waste was blamed for typhoid outbreaks in Trenton, New Jersey, and for high mortality rates among the poor, whose dwellings lacked flush toilets or indoor plumbing; in 1913 alone, eighteen hundred Philadelphia children succumbed to gastrointestinal ailments, with many linked to sewage-contaminated water. The following year, fears of bubonic plague launched the Philadelphia’s Bureau of Health “kill the rats” campaign. The city offered advice on trapping and pledged five cents for those captured alive and two cents for those dead. “Rat patrol” agents walked the docks, setting traps and a receiving station, erected on the Race Street Pier, took in more than five thousand  specimens by January 1915. Concerns also mounted over worsening air quality due to coal burning, factory emissions, and the hundreds of trains operating in the region. In 1902, the Philadelphia Inquirer lamented the city’s “intolerable smoke nuisance,” comparing its sooty atmosphere to that of London. Across the river, Camden’s City Council in 1910 heard petitions against the Pennsylvania Railroad, whom citizens accused of “befogging” downtown with locomotive smoke. Automobile emissions in the early twentieth century added to the region’s already bad air, prompting Philadelphia journalist Christopher Morley (1890-1957) to describe in 1919 a “haze that is part atmospheric and part gasoline vapor.”

As the middle of the twentieth century approached, the Delaware River’s sections at Philadelphia were some of the country’s most contaminated. From the city south to Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania, the river effectively was a dead zone. Fish kills were common, and in summer months bacteria caused oxygen levels in the river to plummet. Pilots received warnings about the river’s odors as they flew overhead while some ship captains, due to the smell, refused to dock. Chemical production in Wilmington and Newport, Delaware, led portions of the Brandywine and Christina Rivers to suffer similar fates. Although Philadelphia began upgrading its sewage treatment system in 1947, manufacturing waste continued to flow freely into rivers and creeks. By 1950, Philadelphia contained two-thirds of the region’s industry, the majority in chemicals, metals, paper products, petroleum refining, and plastics. The remaining share was spread among smaller industrial cities along the Delaware River: Wilmington, Delaware; Chester, Pennsylvania; and Camden and Trenton, New Jersey. At the time, no legislation required factories to limit waterborne pollutants and without air monitors in use, atmospheric contamination also faced little scrutiny. During his mayoral tenure, Richardson Dilworth (1898-1974) targeted Philadelphia’s open trash dumps, eventually forcing them to close in 1957. Incinerators then handled solid waste, emitting hazardous fly ash particles. The area’s largest, on the Delaware River at Philadelphia’s Spring Garden Street, by 1960 processed six hundred tons of garbage per day. In 1961, Pennsylvania Governor David L. Lawrence (1889-1966), who as mayor of Pittsburgh had combated his city’s notorious air pollution, convinced President John F. Kennedy (1917-63) to create the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC), the country’s first federal river compact to address pollution. Yet funding and action proved difficult. One million pounds of waste entered the river every day in 1964, with 60 percent coming from sewage treatment plants.

Concerns over pollution reached a national crescendo in the 1970s, as many Americans embraced environmentalism and the federal government enacted laws for resource and wilderness protection. At the local level, the health of the Delaware River and solid waste disposal remained intractable problems. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared the river “unfishable” in 1973, citing the disappearance of once-plentiful shad and striped bass populations.

Clean Water Act of 1972

Although sewage treatment plants had yet to meet standards mandated by the DRBC, the Clean Water Act of 1972 imposed federal restrictions on wastewater and pollutants. In addition, the region’s widespread loss of factory jobs, while leaving behind contaminated properties, over time minimized industrial discharge into the river. By the early 1980s, local fishermen reported improved conditions and greater visibility. Although Philadelphia’s trash incinerators complied with federal emissions standards, lawsuits, beginning in 1971 and accusing the city of air polluting, forced their closure. Until the mid-1980s, New Jersey stood as the primary recipient of Philadelphia’s trash. By then, a number of regional landfills, such as Lipari in Pitman, New Jersey, and Tybout’s Corner in Wilmington had been shuttered and declared Superfund sites. The struggle to rid itself of garbage earned the city the unflattering nickname “Filth-adelphia,” a source of national embarrassment.

By the 1990s, the environmental justice movement bore significant fruit in greater Philadelphia. Whether addressing mesothelioma among former asbestos workers in Ambler, Pennsylvania; residential proximity to oil refineries in southwest Philadelphia and railyards in Camden; or excessive jet engine noise in Tinicum, Pennsylvania, several communities challenged the parallels between racial and class discrimination and pollution. This became especially evident in Chester, which in 1996 the New York Times labeled “the waste-processing capital of Pennsylvania.” Already polluted by decades of steelmaking, shipbuilding, and heavy manufacturing, the impoverished, black-majority city’s waste plants handled all of Chester County’s trash and 85 percent of its sewage. While surrounded by affluent suburban towns, the EPA declared the city had the state’s highest infant mortality rate while the Center for Disease Control (CDC) found excessive lead levels in more than half of the city’s children. Lead poisoning, from tainted water, soil, or household paints, also threatened low-income families in North Philadelphia, Bridesburg, and Kensington. In Camden, New Jersey’s most impoverished large city, officials beginning in the 2010s spent nearly $5 million annually to remediate illegal dumping sites while groups such as South Camden Citizens in Action brought lawsuits against smelting, cement grinding, and gasoline station operations that threatened the environmental health of the Central Waterfront neighborhood. The city’s Covanta Energy Recovery Center, a massive incineration plant adjacent to Newtown Creek, discharged more than 350 pounds of lead into the air each year; as of 2019, the center processed more than one thousand pounds of solid refuse each day.

Greater Philadelphia confronted myriad sources of pollution in the early twenty-first century. Many cities contained Superfund sites in various stages of remediation and brownfields in need of development, with notable successes at Wilmington’s Justison Landing, Trenton’s Waterfront Park, and Philadelphia’s Reading Viaduct Rail Park. Yet the region continued to witness dangerous cases of pollution. In 2012, a Conrail freight train derailment in Paulsboro, New Jersey, caused thousands of pounds of vinyl chloride to spill into the air, leading to eye and lung ailments among residents. Five years later, the notorious “El Campamento,” an illegal squatter camp populated by victims of Philadelphia’s opioid crisis, was forcibly cleared from a Conrail-owned underpass in Kensington. Nearby residents had long complained of human waste, discarded syringes, and debris littering the area. That same year, greater Philadelphia ranked as the second-worst Northeastern metropolitan area (behind Washington, D.C.) for smog contamination. And in June 2019, a massive explosion and fire at the Philadelphia Energy Solution (PES) Oil Refinery terrified nearby residents with worry over airborne pollutants.

As one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country, greater Philadelphia continued to cope with pollution and its many sources. Although attempts to monitor and limit contamination began during the colonial period and intensified with subsequent generations, the region continually confronted threats to the air, land, and water.

Stephen Nepa teaches history at Temple University, Pennsylvania State University-Abington, Rowan University, and Moore College of Art and Design. He is a contributing author to numerous books and journals, and regularly appears in the Emmy Award-winning documentary series Philadelphia: The Great Experiment. His current research explores food and drink at the 1876 Centennial Exposition. He received his M.A. from the University of Nevada and his Ph.D. from Temple University. (Author information current at time of publication.)

Philadelphia emerged as a petroleum hub in the second half of the nineteenth century. As an industrialized port city with global networks and extensive unbuilt land available on the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, the city offered the necessary rail and water infrastructure as well as access to water for the new industry. Extensive construction of refineries, storage tanks, pipelines, and railway lines began in the 1860s. Once consolidation of the refineries on a handful of sites, notably on the Schuylkill, was complete, the oil industry presence continued to influence spatial decisions into the twenty-first century.

The American oil story began in western Pennsylvania, where Edwin Drake (1819-80) drilled for oil in 1859, but the natural resource had to be transported elsewhere to be refined and ultimately consumed. As consumers discovered new uses of petroleum— in particular, it was quickly replacing whale oil for lighting— new businesses rapidly expanded storage, refining, and shipping capacities. The production of oil increased from some 4,450 barrels in the first year, to 220,000 barrels in 1860 and 2,114,000 barrels in 1861, almost a 500-fold increase in two years. Once oil had been found, the main challenge was transportation to appropriate sites for refining; horsecarts, ships, trains, and pipelines all played a role starting in the early years of the industry.

During the industry’s first ten years, a large number of oil interests battled each other. Among them was John D. Rockefeller, who based his fortune on the control of refineries and railways rather than oil sources. Companies initially built refineries close to the sites of production. Within a few years, however, they were established in transportation hubs such as port cities. Cleveland, with the advantage of access to the Great Lakes, rapidly overtook Pennsylvania’s Titusville area in the volume of oil refined. Building on its long history as a port city, its emergence as a rail center, and its early transportation connections to western Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, soon caught up, initially as home to a large group of oil investors.

From the earliest days of the oil industry, Philadelphia developed into one of the major storage and refining sites for petroleum, constantly competing with other east coast oil ports, notably New York, but also Baltimore, Boston, and Portland, Maine. By the 1860s, Philadelphia as a city of more than 600,000 inhabitants was a major industrial site and port with a multitude of different manufacturers. As shippers, traders, and refiners inscribed petroleum flows into fixed infrastructures, they shaped a set of urban patterns in the city for decades to come. Located on the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, well connected by railways and some one hundred miles by river from the sea that connected it to Europe and the rest of the world, the city was a perfect location from which to export oil.

Positioning Refineries

The location of oil facilities within the city depended on a range of factors, importantly access to water, both for industrial processes and shipping. In the early years of the new industry, companies built oil storage sites and refineries in multiple locations throughout the city. By 1866 the city listed seven petroleum storage facilities and six refineries in several locations throughout the city. Several more appeared before 1875. Security issues became relevant after a range of disasters, which made the dangers of oil quickly evident. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported several incidents of refinery fires, big and small, with and without insurance, in the city or beyond its borders. After fire destroyed some of these facilities, affected companies sought more isolated locations at the urban periphery.

Environmental considerations became an additional reason for relocations, as was the case with the Belmont Petroleum Refinery, owned by Newhouse Nusbaum & Company. Located in an area that would become Fairmount Park, it was confined between the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and the river, just above the Columbia Bridge where the Pennnsylvania Railroad split from the Junction Rail Road. This facility produced some 2 million gallons in 1868, but concerns mounted that its waste-water endangered the city’s water supply. As it was located on the Schuylkill River upstream from the Water Works, city officials feared for the quality of the drinking water. Together with other mills and industrial properties, the Belmont Refinery ultimately closed when the state failed to protect the city’s drinking water by buying up land for park purposes.

Despite such state action, the Schuylkill still was not safe from petroleum waste pollution after the Belmont refinery stopped operations. Refineries simply moved farther downstream and closer to the meeting point with the Delaware River, starting the growth of the industrial hub that subsequently defined the city’s southern boundary. In the late nineteenth century, a refinery cluster emerged on both sides of the Schuylkill, with one facility at Girard Point and the other at Point Breeze. Dating to 1866, Point Breeze initially refined lighting oil and subsequently became the oldest continuously operating petroleum facility in the world. A second petroleum center, later closed, emerged on the Delaware River at Greenwich Point, south of the existing port on the Philadelphia side.

Many of the early refineries close to the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers were built on agricultural land (though still within the city limits), making it easier to create industrial complexes and to run new railroads to them. By 1867, oil was so important in the city that the Philadelphia Inquirer asked whether petroleum had come to rival “King Cotton.” The Inquirer recognized the Atlantic Petroleum Storage Company as one major oil player. Established as a corporation in 1866, Atlantic was active in all the parts of the petroleum industry from drilling to refining and shipping. It occupied a seventy-acre property on the Schuylkill, offering eight hundred feet of wharf frontage “substantially finished” just below the Point Breeze Gasworks.

A Devastating Fire

In 1874, Standard Oil purchased the Atlantic company as part of its attempt to consolidate the oil transporting and refining business a single enterprise that was capable of weathering even major setbacks such as the destruction of its entire facility. This happened in 1879, when lightning destroyed the Atlantic Oil Refinery along with several ships that were moored on its wharves. Two thousand men lost their jobs and many of the seamen from the ships lost all of their belongings. The Standard Oil Company carried no insurance and had to pay for the reconstruction.

The interplay of oil ownership, transportation opportunities, and refining capacity made the early oil trade a complex business. Landowners and oil traders were not necessarily the same. The Pennsylvania Railroad’s oil interest in the early years extended beyond transport to the purchase of large plots of land in Philadelphia, notably on the Delaware at Greenwich Point, about 1¾ miles south of the Navy Yard. The Greenwich facility grew rapidly to bring together several oil companies in 1875. The Pennsylvania Railroad owned the land of the oil facilities on the Delaware, whereas independent producers controlled the oil business. Together they entered a price war over shipping rates that pitched them against Standard Oil and the Baltimore & Ohio, New York Central, and Erie Railroads. Ultimately, the PRR lost the contest and sold its own oil interests to Standard Oil. The Delaware facilities continued to work until 1911, then disappeared.

In the late nineteenth century the area experienced a major surge in the oil industry. By 1880, the Standard Oil Company controlled the refining of 90 to 95 percent of all oil in the United States, and the Atlantic Petroleum Company expanded its facilities. By 1891, 50 percent of the world’s illuminating fuel and 35 percent of all U.S. petroleum exports came from the 360-acre Atlantic refinery in Point Breeze that featured a navigable waterfront of 1.7 miles and 6 miles of private railroad track. The facility was burning 350,000 tons of coal each year to refine 40,000 barrels of petroleum daily, emphasizing a connection between Philadelphia as a center of coal transport and as a petroleum hub. As of 1907, petroleum products exported by the Atlantic Refining Co. accounted for 22 percent of the city’s export trade and were valued at $23,647,194 in foreign gold (surpassing cotton, which held 2.5 percent). Meanwhile a competitor had emerged in Philadelphia after 1901, as the region witnessed a second surge in the oil industry. Joseph Pew (1848-1912), co-founder of Sun Oil, built a refinery in Marcus Hook just outside Philadelphia in Delaware County for refining and resale of Texan crude that his company shipped on coastal tankers to avoid Rockefeller’s railroads.

The invention of gasoline-powered automobiles and their industrial production provoked new demand for petroleum as an engine lubricant and as fuel, prompting consumers and companies alike to push for further oil drilling. But as oil production and consumption increased and globalized, Philadelphia’s role as a major oil refiner decreased. Pennsylvania and New York had already reached a peak in production of 33,009,000 barrels in 1891. These states had already been overtaken by Russian production in 1888. The discovery of new oilfields in the United States, notably in Texas, between 1880 and 1905 had further reduced Pennsylvania’s prominence as a producer. The growing political and geopolitical importance of oil made it a major factor in colonialism, as European nations struggled to maintain their hold over the resource, and investment flowed outside the United States. As German submarines sank American oil ships during World War I, traffic along the Eastern seafront (including to Philadelphia) decreased and the United States promoted the construction of pipelines within and across the country in another major blow to the port. Over the next decades both the port and the oil industry in Philadelphia declined even further.

The end of Philadelphia’s role in the oil industry seemed close in 2011, as the price of imported crude oil rose and SUNOCO, formerly known as SUN oil, announced it would exit the refining business, threatening to close its struggling refineries on the Schuylkill River. Local and regional forces pushed to keep the plants open and maintain employment for its remaining 850 workers. The shale oil boom revived the financial viability of the refineries, as shale oil started to arrive by rail from North Dakota as no pipeline system was available. In 2012, SUNOCO entered a joint venture with the Carlyle Group under the PES name to update and expand the refineries.

Throughout the twentieth century, oil companies and states sought to transport oil from the production sites to the refineries and, ultimately, to the consumer. As inventors created new uses for petroleum products and as companies aggressively brought them to markets, oil became a dominant resource in daily life around the world. Because petroleum extraction sites were located far from sites of consumption, major oil companies expanded their distribution networks, built new shipping fleets, and established ports in Indonesia, Russia, the Middle East, and South America.

Throughout this process, as Philadelphia went from being a major oil exporter to being an importer, the city’s oil facilities on the Schuylkill continued to work: when production, distribution, and consumption patterns completely changed; when oil companies reinvented themselves with the emergence of the car as the main consumer of oil products; and as companies figured out how to produce a multitude of other products from oil. In the early twenty-first century, they even attracted oil business back into the city, exemplifying how oil logistics shape urban development, producing distinct spatial frameworks, infrastructure, land ownership patterns, and fixed production sites that linger well beyond their original function.

Carola Hein is Professor and Head, Chair History of Architecture and Urban Planning at Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands. She has published widely on topics in contemporary and historical architectural and urban planning— notably in Europe and Japan. Among other major grants, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue research on The Global Architecture of Oil and an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship to investigate large-scale urban transformation in Hamburg in international context between 1842 and 2008. Her current research interests include transmission of architectural and urban ideas along international networks, focusing specifically on port cities and the global architecture of oil. (Author information current at time of publication.)