WEHRUM
Ghost Town — Wehrum, Pennsylvania
Status: Abandoned · Access: Restricted access
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/wehrum-wehrum-pennsylvania/

Former mining settlement on the Black Lick Valley rail corridor.

Wehrum is a ghost town in Wehrum, Pennsylvania. Former mining settlement on the Black Lick Valley rail corridor. Warren Delano developed this mining town, once containing 230 houses, a hotel, company store, jail and bank. County parks identifies it as a vanished settlement along the Ghost Town Trail.

Wehrum is the company town that evaporated — the Lackawanna Coal & Coke settlement founded in 1901 by Judge A.V. Barker and Warren Delano (FDR's uncle) and named for the company's general manager. It was a complete town: 250 houses on a gridded plan, a bank, a hotel, a jail, a company store, two churches, and the mines that fed Lackawanna Steel in Buffalo.
The mines made the town and killed it — a 1904 gas explosion took four men, a 1909 explosion took twenty-one, and when Bethlehem Mines closed the operation in 1929 the town had nothing left to hold it. The last residents left in 1934; the houses were sold for their lumber and the foundations went under the woods. What remains is the jail and the street grid ghosting through the trees, now a stop on the Ghost Town Trail that follows the old railroad bed.
The file keeps Wehrum: the planned town, the two explosions, the 1929 closure, and the foundations in the forest where a thousand people lived.
Wehrum is the archive's company-town file — the Lackawanna grid, the mine disasters, and the town the woods took back.

WHY THIS FILE MATTERS
Wehrum is the archive's company-town file — the 1901 planned settlement, the fatal explosions, and the Ghost Town Trail ruins.
A town built for a mine keeps its jail — the file's suggestion being that Wehrum's hold is the totality of the erasure: a complete town built, worked, and abandoned within a single generation.

HISTORY — 1 documented facts
· Warren Delano developed this mining town, once containing 230 houses, a hotel, company store, jail and bank. County parks identifies it as a vanished settlement along the Ghost Town Trail. A ghost town's file is unusual: the emptiness itself is documented, and this entry is part of that record. The record holds it as fact — documented, not retold. 'Ghost Town Trail History' documents the entry. It is the kind of fact the rest of the dossier leans on.

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Ghost Town Trail History — Indiana County Parks & Trails
  https://indianacountyparks.org/our-trails/ghost-town-trail/ghost-town-trail-history/

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