Calumet, PA

Calumet is a Westmoreland County census-designated place in Mount Pleasant Township, laid out in 1888 by the Calumet Coke Company as a company settlement along Sewickley Creek. The original plan held twenty double houses, twelve single-family houses, and a small set of commercial and industrial buildings. Miners worked the Calumet mine and coke ovens, and the Southwest Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad moved the output. The town’s shape makes sense when you know the work it was built around.

That industrial system also left a hard local history. A bitter 1894 strike took place at Calumet, the coke works closed in the 1920s, and the mine shut during the early-1930s Depression. Calumet and Norvelt were counted together in 2000 and separated into two CDPs in 2010; Norvelt grew from a federal homestead project, while Calumet carries the older mine-and-company-house pattern. Today Sewickley Creek, the surviving housing rows, and Mount Pleasant township services provide the main orientation. Calumet is a place where a coal company’s former street plan still tells the story of the community.