Wanamie, PA

Wanamie is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Newport Township at the southwestern end of Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley. South Branch Newport Creek forms its eastern boundary, then flows northeast through the township toward Newport Creek and the Susquehanna River. The village uses the Nanticoke postal area and sits within a township shaped by several named communities, including Alden, Glen Lyon, Lee, Ridgeview/Sheatown, and Wanamie. Its name comes from the Wanami people of the Lenni Lenape.

Newport Township was incorporated in 1790, and its nineteenth-century landscape changed as coal companies bought farmland and opened mines, sawmills, and related works. Wanamie became one of the township's mining villages. That history still shows in the valley roads and in the creek system that carries water toward Nanticoke. Greater Nanticoke Area School District serves the community, while township offices and meetings are based in Wanamie. The place is a neighborhood-sized center inside a larger Wyoming Valley municipality, with Indigenous naming, coal-era growth, and the South Branch shaping its map.