The Huber Breaker
Twilight at the Huber Breaker, shortly before demolition
Updated June 13, 2022 | By Matthew Christopher
The Huber Breaker was built in 1939 by the Glen Alden Coal Company in Ashley, Pennsylvania to replace their Maxwell #20 breaker. Named after Glen Alden Chairman Charles F. Huber, the Huber Breaker produced Glen Alden's famous blue-dyed anthracite coal. Coal was shipped in via train from local mines to a specialized building that flipped the cars to dump the coal onto a conveyor. The conveyor transported the coal to the top of the breaker, where young boys would pick out slate, rock, and bone by hand, sometimes losing fingers in the process. After the coal was sorted out, it would begin a descent through the eleven story building's machinery, which would clean and crush it.
As oil and natural gas replaced coal as fuel sources for heating homes after World War II, many of the collieries struggled and either closed or operated at reduced capacities. Diesel burning locomotives replaced coal burning ones, and oil and nuclear power plants replaced ones that used coal to generate electricity. The Huber Breaker ceased operations in the late 1970s.
As oil and natural gas replaced coal as fuel sources for heating homes after World War II, many of the collieries struggled and either closed or operated at reduced capacities. Diesel burning locomotives replaced coal burning ones, and oil and nuclear power plants replaced ones that used coal to generate electricity. The By the early 1970s the Huber Breaker operated as the Lucky Strike Coal Company. The colliery ceased operations in the late 1970s. The Lucky Strike Coal Company was later fined by the Department of Environmental Resources for illegally discharging wastewater into a nearby stream and went bankrupt in 1991. Documents released during the bankruptcy proceedings have lead to speculation that former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa disappearance may have been related to his association with shady land deals involving the Huber Breaker in the mid 1970s.
The interior of the abandoned Huber Breaker was a maze of deteriorating stairways
After the closing, the Huber Breaker sat abandoned for years and remained Ashley's most visible structure. It became a popular hangout for local youths and a well known destination for urban explorers despite the fact that some of the interior areas were badly deteriorated and extremely dangerous. The structure actually weathered the elements comparatively well due to the tar coated sheet metal it was constructed with. Efforts to preserve the site as a part of the region's heritage seemed to be gaining traction, and it was hoped that tourist revenue would provide more beneficial to the area in the long run than the scrap value of the estimated 900 tons of steel in the structure.
In 2013 the building was sold to Paselo Logistics, LLC, who planned to scrap it. Though there were concerns about asbestos and other pollutants that would be released when the breaker was torn down and the demolition was briefly halted, when the breaker finally came down in 2014 there was an enormous black cloud of dust that billowed hundreds of feet into the air. One woman filming the event unhappily observed that it was moving toward the section of town where her house was.
I photographed the Huber Breaker many times over the years and always marveled at how unique and intricate it was. It is an odd sensation to be inside a tremendous, decaying machine. Watching the video of it collapsing, I felt an unexpected ache. The old colliery had been abandoned longer than I have been alive and in some way I suppose I expected it would always be there, a shadow of Pennsylvania's vanishing coal mining past. Like a riddle no one knows how to solve any more, in some ways these places show us how foolish we really are when it comes to placing value on the things that formed our identities. Beyond the financial motives, beyond the hollow promises of progress and hope and healing, I suspect we cannibalize our own past specifically so it can no longer stand defiantly out in the open and challenge us with the terrifying prospect that maybe we know much less than we think we do, that the proudest technological achievements of today will be little more than fodder for the scrap heap of tomorrow.
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