North Abington Township incorporated.

South Abington Township incorporated.

Keystone Academy was chartered and began instruction the next year in the Factoryville Baptist Church.  In 1870, ground was broken for the first building, Harris Hall, still in use on the campus.  The trustees came to believe that the region needed a quality college education and rechartered the Academy as Scranton-Keystone Junior College in 1934; ten years later the name was shortened to Keystone Junior College.  In 1998, the college expanded to offer four-year Bachelor of Science degrees as well as the two-year associate degrees; its Carnegie classification is among the Baccalaureate/Associate’s Colleges. Click here to learn more!

Amendment # 15 to the US Constitution passed March 30, stating:  “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state, on account of race, color, or any previous condition of servitude.”  Negroes who had been slaves became citizens under the terms of Amendment #14, passed in July 28, 1868.  In 1962 Lincoln abolished slavery in the North, Amendment #13 abolished slavery throughout the entire United States in December 18, 1865.

Construction was completed on the Jefferson House, the only hotel in Thompson, welcoming travelers from the Erie RR Jefferson Branch that had built a station in town.  Soon the town was built up to include five general stores, a hardware store, a boot and shoe store, a drug store, two millinery stores, three blacksmith shops, a wagon shop, a saw and planing mill, a grist mill, the Keystone Creamery, two churches and a graded school.

Nicholson Borough incorporated.

Thompson Borough formed from Thompson Township.

Glenburn Township incorporated.

Telephone service in the region was initiated by the DL&W RR for communication along the line, its shops and stations, in order to relay information about emergencies, late trains and the need for pusher engines.  Local people were allowed to use the equipment upon occasion; it didn’t take long to persuade folks of the utility of the new invention.  Some private lines were hung and service expanded rapidly. By 1895, Nicholson was enjoying telephone service in several parts of town.  Operators were needed for the manually operated exchanges and provided many neighborly services; this included announcing, out of the second story window of their room, World Series scores after each inning, to men gathered below on the steps of Walter Williams Shop.

Hop Bottom Borough incorporated.  The DL&W RR built a station in Lathrop Township and this attracted houses and businesses in enough numbers to justify the incorporation of Hop Bottom as a separate entity.  A history of the town has been written.

Lily Lake Hotel built by Daniel A. Coray on Wall Lake in Dalton.  Opened as a fourteen-room family summer resort, the Lily Lake Hotel offered tasty chicken dinners, swimming, boating and fishing to many workingmen and their families from the noisy and dirty industrial environment of Scranton.  Bandwagons and livery hacks ran regularly between Providence Square and the Hotel, to the advantage of all involved.  However, after several years, the regular delivery of beer to the hotel began and soon led to a very different atmosphere.  Drownings, stabbings, fights; accidents and inexcusable recklessness occurred often enough to have the hotel shut down at the end of the decade.

Factoryville Borough incorporated.

Uniondale Borough incorporated.

Mill on Swale Brook in Tunkhannnock, near the middle school playing fields, produced wooden butter pails and tubs.  By 1894, the mill was turning out shingles.  I n 1902, a flood damaged the covered bridge over the Susquehanna River and the lumber salvaged from the bridge was brought to the mill on Swale Brook for reprocessing.  A portion of the mill was devoted to the production of cider each fall.

Dalton Borough incorporated.  On May 26 a raging fire destroyed a whole block of buildings in the center of town.   A history, Revisiting Bailey Hollow by Norm Brauer, has been written.

West Abington Township incorporated.

East Mountain Lithia Water is offered to the public by the Winola Oil, Gas Development and Improvement Company of Factoryville. Click here to continue.

Nicholson Borough caused poles to be set along town streets to carry electrical wires.  Moses Shields Jr. agreed to provide electricity from the anthracite-burning generator in his stone yard and it ran until 10pm, when the lights went out.  In 1901, the Nicholson Light, Heat, and Power Company was organized and the Borough granted a franchise to the company to supply electric current for Borough needs.   Public buildings, churches and lodges were wired first and were followed soon by stores, hotels and houses.  Power was available between the hours of five and ten o’clock, then the generator was shut down. Click here to continue.

Flood waters severely damaged the covered bridge over the Susquehanna River at Tunkhannock.  A new bridge was formally opened July 4, 1904.

Steam generated electric plant was moved from Swale Brook to Tunkhannock Creek just east of the bridge for the bypass.  This facility produced electricity by waterpower and operated until1929, when less expensive electricity became available from more distant sources.

Nicholson fire devoured twenty buildings on February 26.  Stretching in both directions from Walnut Street, the fire burned an area 150 yards long by 50 yards wide on the west side of Main Street, including twenty buildings.  The water pipes were all frozen and hoses were useless.  This was only the most recent of many destructive fires, and provided the needed impetus to create Nicholson Fire Company #1 three days later.

The Northern Electric Street Railway was incorporated and operated as an interurban trolley between, Scranton and Montrose, through the heart of Tunkhannock Creek watershed.  By acquiring the charters and franchises of the Dalton Street Railway Company, the Scranton, Factoryville and Tunkhannock Railway Company, and the Providence and Abington Turnpike and Plank Road Company, the Northern Electric secured the needed rights of way and began construction in 1906 with a maiden trip on July 1,1907. Click here to continue.

Pennsylvania Witch Hazel Company opened for business at the recently closed canning factory beside Swale Brook in Tunkhannock.  Burned a year later, it immediately ordered new copper stills and returned to business as soon as shelter was built.  Witch hazel was a good cash crop for local farmers.  After their regular crops had been harvested, when heavy frosts had occurred, they could begin to cut branches from the commonly found shrub and continue until buds emerged in spring.  Since the shrubs were fast growing, they renewed themselves in six years, giving farmers a continuing source of income. Each year, hundreds of tons of witch hazel branches were supplied to the factory where they were distilled into a popular lotion for after-shave, soothing mosquito bites and other topical applications.  The final order was shipped in 1936 by rail to the port of New York, and, from there, through the Panama Canal to San Francisco.

Clarks Summit Borough incorporated; a history of the borough was written by John Villaume.

Viaduct at Nicholson over Tunkhannock Creek was begun by the DL&W RR as a part of the Clarks Summit –New Milford cutoff.  This cutoff was designed and built to reduce the height of the rise into Clarks Summit and to maintain that elevation all the way to New Milford.  It would require a new tunnel, two huge viaducts and the blasting of many tons of rock.  Since the DL&W did not permit the transportation of dynamite on their railway, it was shipped on the Lehigh Railroad into Springville and carried to Nicholson by horse and wagon.  In May of this year, work began in Nicholson with the construction of three towers, one at each end, 169 feet high, and one in the center that was 320 feet high (railroad records differ on whether the towers were built of wood or steel).  Cables were strung from tower to tower creating an aerial tramway.  Click here to continue.

Congress passed the Plant Quarantine Act to help reduce the chance for a repeat of a catastrophe like the devastation of the American Chestnut blight. When settlers came to this region, one of the most abundant and perhaps the dominant trees in the Pennsylvania forest was the American Chestnut (Castanea dentata). To learn more about the American Chesnut, click here.

Clarks Green Borough incorporated.

March 1, the “Billy Sunday” snowstorm dumped tremendous piles of snow on the region, interrupting a Billy Sunday Revival scheduled in Scranton and inundating the Northern Electric Trolley tracks in Lithia Valley with drifts eighteen feet high.

A worldwide influenza epidemic caused 20,000,000 deaths, partly because of complications such as pneumonia, bronchitis, and mastoid and sinus infections.  Schools were closed in an effort to limit the spread of the disease; the schools and many other buildings were used as hospitals and filled with beds and the staggering numbers of infected patients.  Public health services were stretched to their limits and funeral parlors ran out of caskets, hiring local carpenters to build boxes that could be used for burials.

Amendment # 18 to the US Constitution passed January 29, prohibiting the manufacture, sale and transportation of intoxicating liquors in the United States and territories.

Waverly Borough re-incorporated as Abington Township.

Amendment # 19 giving women the right to vote was passed.  For at least a century, women in this country had argued and marched and demonstrated and for forty years had introduced amendments in Congress, only to be disappointed year after year.

The Waverly Community House was given to the people of the community by the family of Henry Belin to honor its husband and father. Built on the site of a devastating 1916 fire in the commercial block along the Philadelphia Great Bend Turnpike (Rt.407) it is one of only three comparable institutions in the country.  It housed a host of community activities:  borough council chambers, Post Office, kindergarten, town nurse, barber shop, a gymnasium/auditorium with stage, dressing rooms and moving picture projection room, women’s clubroom with enclosed sun porch, and a canteen with a soda fountain and cigar and candy cases.  Click here to continue.

A total eclipse of the sun witnessed under very favorable conditions Saturday morning, January 29.

A public meeting of the Ku Klux Klan was held at the baseball grounds.  About forty cars, filled with hooded men and women and many who were not robed, came from Lackawanna and Wyoming Valleys.  Burning crosses and K’s attracted people from the town and vicinity, until the crowd was estimated to number 1500.  The meeting opened by singing patriotic hymns and prayer, then the leader made a patriotic speech.  He told his hearers that members of the order were one hundred percent Americans and stood for the United States, its constitution and its laws. Click here to continue.

Christy Mathewson died October 7 at Saranac Lake after a long illness of tuberculosis, aggravated by exposure to mustard gas during service in WWI.  This Factoryville native had captured the imagination of the nation; “he was the greatest pitcher who ever lived.  He had the knowledge, perfect control and form.  It was wonderful to watch him pitch when he wasn’t pitching against you,” according to Connie Mack of the Philadelphia Athletics. To learn more click here.

Equipment for moving pictures with sound installed by C. Elmer Dietrich, owner of the Savoy Theater.