Nesquehoning High School

Written by in the A Place in Time category and the Spring 2004 issue Topics in this article: Carbon County, Chris Carson, Christine Ussle, Jacob Ehrenhardt Jr., Knipe-Moore-Rupp Farm, National Register of Historic Places, Panther Valley School District
A Place in Time spotlights a significant cultural resource - a district, site, building, structure or object - entered in the National Register of Historic Places.

The four-story Nesquehoning High School, built between 1917 and 1919 in the fashionable Classical Revival-style of the day, dominates the main thoroughfare of this small an­thracite mining community in Carbon County. A well-preserved example of the type of school design promoted by educational reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the building exemplifies the increasingly central role of public education in the lives of the working class, immigrant community and, more broadly, the transformation of American educational philosophy in the course of the modern industrial era.

Equal in significance to the education that Nesquehoning High School provided was the role it played in building the community and bringing together an ethnically and religiously diverse group of students and their families. The school fostered friendships and relationships that proved vital to residents who chose not to leave Nesquehoning during the difficult years of the hard coal industry’s decline in the mid-twentieth century.

For more than four decades, until a 1964 merger with the Panther Valley School District, the Nesquehoning High School served the community. After closing, the building housed the community’s police department until 1982. It was then vacated. After nearly twenty years of neglect – during which it deteriorated severely – the building was purchased in 1997 by its current owner, which launched a three-year rehabilitation project utilizing the Federal Historic Preservation Tax Credit program. Once identified by Preservation Pennsylvania as endangered, the building now serves many of its alumni as a low- and moder­ate-income apartment house and as a senior citizens’ community center. Nesquehoning High School, a vital link to the area’s past, is one of borough’s most architecturally significant buildings and its only surviving school building.

 

Recent Additions to the National Register of Historic Places

Ker-Feal
Chester Springs, Chester County
November 7, 2003

Jacob Ehrenhardt Jr. House
Emmaus, Lehigh County
November 7, 2003

Knipe-Moore-Rupp Farm
North Wales, Montgomery Township
November 7, 2003

Narbrook Park Historic District
Narberth, Montgomery County
November 7, 2003

Ellen and Charles F. Welles House
(Boundary Increase)
Wyalusing, Bradford County
November 15, 2003

Ashton-Hursh House
Fairview Township, York County
November 15, 2003

Nesquehoning High School
Nesquehoning, Carbon County
November 21, 2003

Fricks Locks Historic District
East Coventry Township, Chester County
November 21, 2003

St. Peters Village Historic District
Warwick Township, Chester County
November 21, 2003

Colver-Rogers Farmstead
Morgan Township, Greene County
November 21, 2003

Franklin and Marshall College Campus Historic District
Lancaster, Lancaster County
November 21, 2003

Dager-Wonsettler Farmstead
Amwell Township, Washington County
November 21, 2003

Frederick and Catherine Leaser Farm
Lynn Township, Lehigh County
January 14, 2004

 

The editor acknowledges the research of Chris Carson and Christine Ussler, of Artefact, Inc., Bethlehem, who prepared the nomination entering the Nesquehoning High School to the National Register of Historic Places.