August 1, 2026 - Justin Emershaw mentioned some of the sights that he would like tourists to see in a coal mine beneath Hazleton.

In a mine that slopes 884 feet below ground, Emershaw, a mining engineer, has seen photos and videos of cathedral ceilings, a hospital, stable, repair shop, electric substation and foreman’s office.

“Visitors will be able to do a tour … and understand what these guys did and how they went to work,” Emershaw said.

He and other volunteers in a nonprofit group Underground Miners have teamed with Hazleton Mayor Jeff Cusat to explore the idea of reopening a mine for public tours near Hazleton Shopping Center on West Broad Street. In addition, they would like to build a replica coal breaker, restaurant and brewery and museum.

Northeast Pennsylvania currently has four mines open for tours, generally from April to November each year. Two are in Scranton and the others are in Ashland and Lansford.

“What makes this mine very different from all the other tours,” Emershaw said, “is this would be by far one of the largest to open.”

Hazle Mines Colliery that the group wants to reopen first shipped coal in 1838 and was later renamed Hazleton No. 1. By 1875, the colliery was part of the holdings that earned Ario Pardee $1 million a year and employed 1,672 workers with a monthly payroll equivalent to $1.4 million today.

Filmmaker Timothy Novotney brought some of that underground world to the screen in “The Secrets Beneath Hazleton,” a documentary he made for WVIA-TV. A 10-minute version of his film released two years ago inspired the idea for a mine tour in Hazleton, but Novotney debuted a longer version for donors in WVIA’s studio on July 29.

“He really did a great job of making it emotional to the point you can appreciate your heritage,” Emershaw said.

A day after the premiere, engineers and geologists talked informally about opening a mine tour in Hazleton during the summer meeting the Penn Anthracite Section of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration at Top of the 80s restaurant, three miles north of the city.

Mike Korb, perhaps the longest serving engineer in the Anthracite Region, gave an review of the city plan with which others concurred.

“I think it’s a great idea that probably will never work,” Korb said.

About 10 years ago, Korb got a cost estimate of $2 million for building a replica coal breaker at Eckley Miners Village Museum that would have been smaller than the breaker proposed in Hazleton.

“It’s a good idea, but the amount of costs …” Eric Bella of Lehigh Engineering in Pottsville said.

“I don’t think you’ll find the money,” John Ackerman, a consulting engineer in Hazleton, said, but he added that a partnership between the city and private businesses to operate the brewery and other features might make the project viable.

The mayor is trying to line up grants, donors and other financing for the project that he and Emershaw said is just a idea for now.

Emershaw said he and other experts in Underground Miners would have to study how to reopen the mine and meet current safety standards.

“Pretty much when you run a tour mine, the government looks at it as an operating mine,” he said. “We want something that is safe and economical.”

The study will examine how much timber will be needed to prop up the roof and look at repairing and replacing wiring, lighting and rails on which cars would carry tourists.

“Ventilation laws from the 1950s have drastically changed,” he said while adding that abandoned workings must be sealed, but the mine would need more than one escapeway and an overall cleanup.

“We do know the mine is very clean for its age and not in rough shape,” Emershaw said.

Other advantages are that the mine is dry and the roof wasn’t prone to falls. The rock formation over the coal is quartz pebble conglomerate.

“It’s extremely robust,” he said.

Emershaw said he wasn’t very interested in the history of Northeast Pennsylvania while growing up in Dallas, 35 miles from Hazleton. That changed when he left a job in Minnesota in 2015 to join Atlantic Carbon, now American Anthracite, where he is engineering manager in Hazleton.

“I got exposed to the mine maps. They kind of lured me into history,” he said. “I wanted to know what happened, why did it stop, how did they do this?”

For Underground Miners, Emershaw wrote a 29-page history of mining in Hazleton that is posted on the group’s website.

His history details operations of Hazle Mines and the breaker built there in 1889 and demolished in 1934 when an underground passage for rail cars moved coal to Hazleton Shaft Colliery off Cedar Street where Lehigh Valley Coal Co., the successor to Pardee, opened a larger, more efficient breaker.

“It’s amazing the amount of rail infrastructure there. Mine workings extend all the way under the whole heart of the old city of Hazleton,” he said. “The history you uncover is phenomenal. Hazleton was a powerhouse back in the days that fueled industry.”

As fuel preferences changed to oil and gas, demand for coal dropped at home and abroad fell. Persistent flooding in the 1940s and early 1950s interrupted production and added to costs at mines in Hazleton.

Lehigh Valley, after a loss of millions and a shakeup on the board of directors, closed Hazle Mines in 1954. Hazleton Shaft closed a year later after being flooded by Hurricane Diane.

When talking about the history of mining in Hazleton, Emershaw thought back not to the finish, but the beginning.

After their first shipment of coal from Hazle Mines reached Philadelphia in 1838, directors of Hazleton Coal Co. celebrated at their year-end meeting by approving a sketch of the layout of the future city.

“If they hadn’t succeeded,” Emershaw said, “who knows what Hazleton would have looked like?”

James LaRegina, a geologist who has studied and written about Hazleton’s history for the Standard-Speaker, said after attending the Penn Anthracite summer meeting that he hopes the effort to reopen Hazle Mines for tourists has as much success as did the early coal company.

His grandfather, Pasquale Juliano, worked there for 43 years.

“It would be great someday to take a tour of his handiwork,” LaRegina said in an email, “and raise a beer in memory of him and others who worked there.”