The reclaimed old Honeybrook strippings off North Street in Kelayres, PA. Slope deep mining began around here in the 1850s before McAdoo and Kelayres existed. This region is near the westernmost end of the Audenreid coal basin. Only the #8 works at Hunkydory and Green Mountain went farther west into the near wilderness. Later, deep mining was succeded by strip mining operations leading to the digging of the several mile-long, steep-sided Honeybrook pits. As late as the 1960s the area at left, along North Street, was a high bank of slate and rubble from the excavations.

These holes were filled and the banks leveled in in the late 1990s after a youngster fell down one of the pits and was killed. The operation was a State of PA reclamation endeavor which lasted several years and cost several $Million.

Picture: January, 2002.

January, 2002: This is the area looking northwest from the viewpoint of the picture at left. We called it Number 5, after the #5 slope and breaker of the Honeybrook Coal Co. that once existed here. A wasteland as late as the 1960s, it is obvious that reforestation is now in progress. This whole region of wasted, stripmined terrain extended several miles farther west to the mine drainage tunnels at the foot of the Green Mountain Slope near Oneida, PA.

The Black Creek runs through it.

The Black Creek, headwaters of the Catawissa, was McAdoo's sewerage outfall. There were many similar Black Creeks in the Region.

YORKTOWN

February 2003, after the big snow. This rough terrain once was Yorktown, PA, a coal patchtown east of Audenreid on the boundary between Carbon and Schuylkill Counties. It was demolished because of mine subsidence and for strip mining in the early part of the 1900s. The view is directly north from Jackson Street in McAdoo, PA