In 1854, the Westmoreland Coal Company began mining coal in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, primarily for sale to steelmakers, railroads, and coal gasification plants. Within a few decades, the company was providing coal to fifty-eight gasworks along the east coast. Today, the company is one of the coal industry’s oldest independent companies.
The company's biggest growth period occurred after World War I, when it began a period of acquisition and expansion well beyond its original Westmoreland County fields, beginning with a 1917 merger with the Penn Gas Coal Company and the Manor Gas Coal Company.
This ca. 1935 photograph is from the company's colliery in Stonega, Virginia. The colliery was originally part of the Stonega Coke & Coal Company, a company on founded in 1902, for the purpose of acquiring an operating a colliery plant leased the Virginia Coal & Iron Co., a land company partly owned and managed by John S. Wentz, a coal magnate who was also a major shareholder in the the Westmoreland Coal Company.
The two companies shared a complicated history; following collapses in the coal industry in the late 1920s, the Stonega Coke & Coal Company briefly took over the management of the Westmoreland Coal Company. The two companies maintained separate corporate identities, but were managed by a common board of officers, headed by Edward B. Leisenring, whose family had controlled the company since 1882 (Leisenring was also a nephew of John S. Wentz).
This arrangement persisted for decades, as both firms continued to grow by merger and consolidation while operating alongside one another until 1961, when Edward B. Leisenring was seceded by his son, Ted Leisenring, Jr., who merged the two companies on April 30, 1964.
This photograph is from Hagley Library's Westmoreland Coal Company photographs and videos (Accession 1993.233) collection, which contains a broad range of materials dating from 1876 to 1983 that includes records from both the Westmoreland Coal Co. and from the firms it absorbed. This collection has not been digitized in its entirety, but our Digital Archives offers a selection of material from the collection primarily comprised of photographs dating from 1915 to 1960, mostly of the Stonega Coke and Coal Company mine and hospital at Stonega, Virginia as well as images related to the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway Company.