Laflin, PA

Laflin is a small borough in the Greater Pittston area of Luzerne County, tucked into the built-up valley around Wilkes-Barre. It became a borough in 1889, and the name points back to the Laflin & Rand Powder Company. The company’s works once ran along Gardner Creek, where seven powder mills and related buildings occupied a wooded industrial hollow. Local accounts describe blasting-powder mills built chiefly in the 1870s, with an early investment of over $100,000 and a workforce of about 25 men. A general store, breaker, and the mill complex gave the young borough an economic purpose that is easy to miss when looking at its present size.

Today Laflin is folded into the Wilkes-Barre Area School District and the wider Luzerne County municipal network. The borough’s meeting and municipal offices are on Laflin Road, close to the same creek corridor that shaped its beginnings. Laflin reads more like a compact borough woven into the Greater Pittston landscape, with its industrial past carried in the name and the layout of the hollow. That mix of local government, regional schools, and a remembered powder-making history is the useful way to place it.