Pennsylvania: From Founding State to Resource Powerhouse (and What It Did to the Land — and How It Recovered)

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When you read my posts here, you’ll see that my interests and curiosity cover a lot of different subjects. One of them is history. Everywhere I’ve ever lived, I’ve looked up the history of that place. Many times I found I knew more about the local history than many lifelong residents. With that said, here’s a bit of the history of Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania is one of the original colonies of the United States, and one of the thirteen states that signed the resolution for independence. It’s home to the Liberty Bell and the First Continental Congress.

But like any other state in the union, it also has a broader story about how it has contributed to the nation through its resources.

Pennsylvania has a long history of providing raw materials and energy to the country. With that history came some nearly devastating ecological consequences.

In this post I’m going to walk through, in plain English, some of the major contributions Pennsylvania has made, the environmental costs that came with them, and how the state has started to recover while still helping power the nation as new needs arise.

Pennsylvania leads the nation in the production and export of hardwood lumber. Our forests are the source of diverse secondary wood products ranging from veneer, cabinetry and flooring, to baseball bats, snowboards, drumsticks and much more!

Pennsylvania is the nation’s second-largest natural gas producer after Texas, with n“atural gas marketed production in the state totaling almost 7.6 trillion cubic feet in 2023.

Pennsylvania is the third-largest coal-producing state after Wyoming and West Virginia, and is the fifth-largest coal exporter to foreign markets.

In 2023, Pennsylvania ranked second after Illinois in electricity generation from nuclear power. However, since 2019 natural gas has surpassed nuclear energy as the largest source of in-state electricity generation.

Over half of Pennsylvania households use natural gas as their primary home heating fuel, and the state’s 49 underground gas storage sites–the most for any state–help meet regional heating demand in winter.

Pennsylvania is the second-largest net supplier, after Texas, of total energy to other states. EIA Gov

Here are the topic headers you can jump directly to:

Timber

When Pennsylvania was first settled, the land was over 90 percent forested.

But as more and more settlers moved in, this abundance of timber was harvested. Water-powered sawmills sprang up in the interior and mountainous areas of the state and lumber was harvested for all types of construction. Tall and straight, Pennsylvania’s white pine and hemlock trees were much in-demand for ships’ masts.

By 1900, most of the original forest was gone, leaving hillsides of stumps, slash, and frequent wildfires. Seeing how bad things had gotten, the state had already begun buying up the burned-over land—more than 100,000 acres by then—to start what would eventually become the state forest system.

During the Great Depression, the Civilian Conservation Corps took that idea and ran with it. CCC crews built roads, trails, and fire towers, and planted tens of millions of trees across the state, helping those stripped hillsides slowly turn back into real forests.

Today, “Penn’s Woods” has mostly grown back as a second-growth forest. Roughly 60 percent of the state—about 16–17 million acres—is forested again, a mix of privately owned woodlots and 2.2 million acres of state forest that are managed for both timber and long-term conservation.

Sources for this section:

Coal

Just like timber, coal was one of those abundant resources that was discovered very early in Pennsylvania’s history. The first coal mine opened near Pittston, Pennsylvania, in 1775.

In the beginning, coal was used mainly to support the colonial iron industry. By the 1800s, Pennsylvania coal was fueling the industrial growth of the entire country and was the primary fuel source for western Pennsylvania’s growing steel industry.

Coal stayed important well into the 20th century. It provided the energy to fight both World Wars. When the steel industry declined in the late 1940s, more of that coal was redirected into generating electricity. Today, coal still supplies a big share of the fuel for electric power generation in Pennsylvania and across the nation.

For over 200 years, though, coal was mined with almost no consideration for what it was doing to the land and water. When the coal was mined out in a given area, companies usually just left and moved on to the next seam, without doing anything to reclaim or heal the land. In total, more than 15 billion tons of coal were removed from Pennsylvania’s ground, and about 250,000 acres of mine lands were left abandoned.

You can see the damage coal has done to Pennsylvania in some pretty scary facts:

  • Pennsylvania leads the nation in the number of abandoned mines.
  • The state has fewer than 50 active mines, but roughly 5,000 abandoned underground mines. Many of them are still leaking toxic metals and other contaminants into our water, and dangerous methane into our air—adding to local environmental problems and the broader climate crisis.
  • Acid mine drainage from old mines can contaminate groundwater and surface water, turning streams orange and harming—or even killing—local fish, wildlife, and people.

The good news is that Pennsylvania has started to clean this up, slowly. But it shows how long the bill for “cheap” energy can hang around.

Sources for this section:
• PSU – background on early coal mining in Pennsylvania
• PA state reports on abandoned mine lands
• Conservation Pennsylvania – abandoned mines and acid mine drainage

Recovering the Land

The damage from two centuries of mining didn’t just disappear when the coal companies left. But Pennsylvania has slowly been trying to clean up the mess. The state’s Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation (BAMR) spends its time doing very unglamorous work: grading steep spoil piles, filling in dangerous highwalls, spreading clean soil, and planting grass and trees so the land doesn’t wash away again. Over time, bare coal scars start to look a little more like woods and fields again.

Water is the other half of the story. Old mine tunnels still leak orange, acidic water into creeks all over “coal country.” To deal with that, BAMR runs a mix of active treatment plants and passive systems. The active plants use lime and other chemicals to neutralize the water. The passive systems look more like ponds and wetlands that quietly do the same job using limestone and bacteria. Right now the state operates about eight active treatment plants and directly maintains 46 passive systems, with more being built or upgraded over time.

Then there are the black culm piles themselves—the waste rock and low-grade coal that were left behind. Instead of just pushing those piles around, Pennsylvania built a small fleet of coal-refuse power plants that actually burn this material in special boilers. That does two things at once: it generates electricity, and it gets rid of some of the ugliest piles on the landscape. Industry reports say these plants have already chewed through well over 200 million tons of coal refuse and helped reclaim thousands of acres of old mine land.

More recently, researchers at Penn State’s Center for Critical Minerals have started treating those old coal waste piles and acid mine drainage as a resource instead of just a liability. They’ve shown that coal refuse, ash, and mine drainage in Pennsylvania contain rare earth elements and other “critical minerals” — the stuff that ends up in electric-vehicle motors, wind turbines, and high-capacity batteries, where China currently controls most of the mining and processing. By developing new extraction and purification methods, Penn State teams have been able to pull out high-purity mixed rare earth oxides from mine drainage sludges and coal waste, turning legacy pollution into a potential domestic supply of battery metals while cleaning up streams at the same time.

You can see what that looks like on the ground in places like Ehrenfeld in Cambria County. For years the town sat next to a massive coal refuse pile—about 3.2 million tons of waste—towering over homes and the river. A multi-year project finally dug it up, hauled it away, blended it with alkaline material, and re-shaped the site. Roughly 60-plus acres of dangerous mine land were turned into usable ground that can become park space and future development instead of a constant landslide and pollution risk.

None of this gives the land back exactly the way it was before mining, and there are still hundreds of piles and polluted streams left to fix. But between re-grading, re-planting, cleaning up the water, and literally burning the waste piles for fuel, parts of Pennsylvania’s coal regions are slowly turning from black back toward green.

Sources for this section:

Oil

The history of oil in Pennsylvania started long before derricks and drill rigs. Long before settlers arrived, the Seneca (part of the Iroquois Confederacy) were skimming “black water” from natural oil seeps in what’s now northwestern Pennsylvania and western New York. They used it as a salve, mosquito repellent, purge, and tonic, and treated it as a gift from the spirit world, passing that belief down through generations. Petroleum Service Company

Early European settlers also noticed these seeps, especially along Oil Creek. People literally dipped oil off the surface, and at good sites they built baffles in the creek to trap it in eddies and fill kegs. At one famous seep on the Hamilton McClintock farm along Oil Creek, historical accounts describe as much as 1,250 gallons of oil being collected in a season when the creek wasn’t frozen or in flood.

For me, this isn’t just a story in a book: Oil Creek runs through Oil City, Pennsylvania, where I spent the early years of my life.

In 1859, Edwin Drake drilled a 69.5-foot well along Oil Creek near Titusville. Whether or not it was truly the first oil well in the world is debatable, but it was the first commercially successful oil well in the United States, and it kicked off the country’s first big oil boom. Over the decades that followed, that boom spread across the state, and by Pennsylvania’s own count, “hundreds of thousands” of oil and gas wells have been drilled here since 1859.

The biggest oil-related environmental problem in Pennsylvania today isn’t spectacular spills; it’s what all those old wells are doing now that the companies are gone. Many wells drilled before modern regulations were never properly plugged. The state has documented tens of thousands of abandoned wells, but best-guess estimates put the real number of orphan and abandoned wells somewhere between 300,000 and 700,000, with only a fraction formally mapped so far.

Left open to air and water, those old casings rust out. Studies in northwestern Pennsylvania have found that some legacy wells leak methane not just into the atmosphere but also into shallow groundwater, sometimes carrying dissolved metals like iron and arsenic along with the gas. That means climate damage on one end and potential drinking-water risks on the other.

The fix is slow, dirty, and not very glamorous: find wells and plug them properly. Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection runs a plugging program that sends crews back into old wells to set plugs, pump in cement, cut the casing off below ground, then re-grade and re-seed the site. The work is funded by a mix of state permit surcharges, other state money, and now big chunks of federal infrastructure funding, plus a newer Orphan and Abandoned Well Plugging Program aimed at scaling things up.

With hundreds of thousands of legacy wells scattered through forests, farm fields, backyards, and stream valleys, plugging them all will take decades. For now, Pennsylvania is trying to prioritize the worst methane emitters and the wells closest to homes, streams, and public lands — the places where these old holes in the ground can still do the most harm.

Sources / reading list for this section

Fracking

A quick note on fracking
I’m not covering modern fracking and shale gas in this post on purpose. There’s a lot of heat and not a lot of honest signal in that conversation, and I don’t want to feed either the “it’s all evil” or the “it’s perfectly harmless” camp. Unlike the early days of timber, coal, and oil—where it really was a wild free-for-all—fracking came in under a modern regulatory framework. The long-term impacts are still being studied, and I’d rather wait for better data than pretend I can settle that argument in a few paragraphs here.

In simple terms. I don’t want to deal with the bullshit. Sorry, this is not a political blog. I refuse to deal with politics here. Just the way it is.

Where Pennsylvania is today

Even while Pennsylvania is still cleaning up and repairing the ecological damage from the last 200 years, the state is also moving forward and still providing the nation with needed resources.

Today, Pennsylvania is the nation’s second-largest natural gas producer after Texas. At the same time, the state is starting to reuse degraded or previously industrial land for cleaner projects — things like solar and wind farms, and even re-purposing old industrial sites and mines for data centers and other modern infrastructure.

It’s not perfect, and the cleanup work is far from done, but the story isn’t just “dig, burn, and walk away” anymore. There’s at least an effort to fix what was broken while still keeping the lights on.

Final comments

I love history. It’s lessons learned: what worked, what didn’t, and how we became who we are today. We should never forget our history — good, bad, or ugly — and we should always try to learn from it.

Going into this article, I thought I already knew most of what I was going to write about. And in a way, I did. But a few things hit a lot harder once I started digging and putting it all in one place.

  • How many abandoned mines there really are in Pennsylvania.
  • How dangerous they still are to humans and wildlife — not just because of pollution, but because so many of them aren’t secured.
  • How many uncapped oil and gas wells are still out there, quietly leaking and causing problems for the land, air, and water around them.

These aren’t just “old problems from the past.” They’re long shadows from decisions made over a hundred years ago that we’re still dealing with today.

So what’s next after a couple of heavier posts like this one? For the next article, I’m going to shift gears a bit. Still informative, but not quite as intense: a practical look at free, open-source applications you can use instead of high-priced proprietary software.

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