Coaldale borough (Bedford County), PA

Coaldale is a borough in Broad Top Township, Bedford County, Pennsylvania, tucked along Six Mile Run northeast of Hopewell. The place began as Fair Play, then picked up Six Mile Run when the post office opened in 1851. Amos W. Evans owned the land surveyed for the town in 1855, and Lemuel Evans had already opened a store there the year before. A hotel followed, and an 1861 Bedford County map still labeled the settlement Fair Play. The borough incorporated under Coaldale on September 9, 1865, but the name collision with Coaldale in Schuylkill County left the post office using Six Mile Run—a small bureaucratic wrinkle locals have lived with for generations.

The setting gives the town its shape: a narrow valley, a run flowing toward the Raystown Branch, and the Broad Top hills around it. The old coal-region label fits the wider county, though Coaldale’s own story begins just as much with a store, hotel, post office, and lodge as with mineral wealth. The local scoop is that you can arrive looking for Coaldale and find the address marked Six Mile Run; both names belong to this same compact Bedford County borough.