Lattimer, PA

Lattimer is a village and census-designated place in Hazle Township, just northeast of Hazleton in Luzerne County. Its name is permanently tied to the Lattimer Massacre of September 10, 1897, when a Luzerne County sheriff’s posse fired on unarmed immigrant anthracite miners who were marching during a labor dispute. At least 19 miners were killed, many of them Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian, or German immigrants. The event belongs to the coal region’s labor history, but in Lattimer it is also a local landscape fact, marked along the roads near the village.

Today, Lattimer shares the Hazleton Area School District and the service network of nearby Hazleton. The community’s small residential streets sit close to the industrial and commercial routes of southern Luzerne County, while the massacre marker and related remembrance keep the nineteenth-century mining story in view. Lattimer’s local character is not a broad-town-center story; it is a place where a compact village carries a major chapter of immigrant labor history. The local scoop is the contrast between its size and the weight of the event attached to its name.