This 1862 illustration of the coal mines at Bear Gap in Wiconisco Township, Pennsylvania is one of my favorites from years of researching Coal Region history – largely because it depicts a place I know well.
The image appears in the upper right corner of an 1862 map of Dauphin County, now preserved by the Library of Congress and the Pennsylvania State Archives, and offers a rare Civil War–era view of industrial life in northern Dauphin County.
The illustration shows the operations of the Short Mountain Coal Company and the Lykens Valley Coal Company at the height of the Civil War, just north of the mining communities of Lykens and Wiconisco.
In the images, which I have cropped and zoomed to show more detail, we can see the breaker and culm bank of the Short Mountain breaker on the west (left) side of the Gap.
In the middle, we can see the small brick worker homes that once occupied the center of the Gap along the waters of Bear Creek. We can also see the head house of the Lykens Valley slope that descended hundreds of feet below Bear Gap and Big Lick Mountain during the Civil War era.
On the right (east) side of the Gap, we can see the Lykens Valley breaker and the top of the “Inclined Plane” railway that took loaded coal cars down the mountain through Wiconisco to the Lykens Valley Railroad.
In 1862, coal would have been taken west along the Lykens Valley Railroad to Millersburg and then either picked up by trains on the Northern Central Railroad or placed on arks on the Wiconisco Canal to be shipped south to Harrisburg…