Wehrum

Take a walk in the woods along Pennsylvania’s Ghost Town Trail, and you’ll find traces of old streets and fragments of felled buildings hidden among the trees. They’re the ruined remains of Wehrum.

Wehrum was founded in 1901 as a coal mining company town. It was a bustling little hub, complete with 250 houses, a bank, a hotel, a jail, a post office, and churches.

The men who lived in the town worked in the nearby mines. The coal they scraped from the earth was then shipped throughout Pennsylvania and New York. It was a dangerous job, and multiple tragic accidents soon occured.

It was perhaps these deadly explosions that led to the town’s demise. After a number of incidents, the mines were sold to the Bethlehem Mines Corporation in 1922, which abruptly shuttered them seven years later. The houses were vacated and eventually stripped for lumber, while other buildings were torn apart and sold for scrap.

Now, only a few remnants of the former town remain scattered among the trees. While wandering within the woods, you’ll come across the cemetery of the Orthodox Church. The graves are trapped beneath tangles of vegetation, but many still preserve the names of those who once lived in a village now gone from memory. Go deeper into the woods, and you’ll also find the surviving bits of the Wehrum Dam.