PSU Fayette seeks new home for 'family history' of artifacts at coal and coke center

In the basement of the library at Penn State Fayette, The Eberly Campus a few miles north of Uniontown, sits one of the largest collection of artifacts of the region’s bituminous coal and coke-producing industries.

The fate of the 48-year-old Coal and Coke Heritage Center and its 8,000 artifacts and extensive exhibits is unknown as the Fayette campus is scheduled to close at the end of the 2026-27 academic year.

“I want to make sure it is cared for and preserved … and make sure it will get the best preservation. We are not throwing anything away,” said Abby Tancin, who has been archivist at the center since 2022.

A committee of five university officials is compiling a list of potential sites for the heritage center, but there is no deadline for making that decision, Tancin said. They want the Coal and Coke Heritage Center to remain in the area.

One of the challenges will be to find a place that is climate-controlled for the artifacts, Tancin said, so the items in storage do not become moldy.

If the Penn State campus is sold to another educational institution, it could remain on the campus, said Tancin, who is a Penn State employee overseeing a center funded by endowments and donations.

“We’ll have to wrap it up in 2027,” Tancin said, adding the university has not said whether the center’s closure will coincide with the final graduation ceremony that spring.

Until then, visitors will get to see the fruits of a two-year $8,000 renovation completed this summer. Tancin oversaw a change in center from more text-filled exhibits to one with more photos and signage. The library had been closed for renovations and the center had been closed from 2023 to this past summer, Tancin said

The center offers a glimpse of a miner’s family life, the company store where they spent their paycheck for food and clothing, what they wore on the job and tools they used. A coal-fired kitchen stove and a curio cabinet came from a family’s home in a Fayette coal patch town, Tancin said. There is a replica garden with the vegetables that families would preserve and miners’ lunch buckets at a model store owned by the coal company, which deducted their purchases from their paychecks.

There are historical photos of the United Mine Workers of America from a century ago, featuring longtime leader John L. Lewis and delegates to a union convention. One display case of photos related to one of the darkest days of the union — the UMWA-engineered assassination of former union leader Joseph “Jock” Yablonksi, his wife and daughter, on New Year’s Eve 1969 at their home in Clarksville, Washington County.

The display contains photos of the state police at the Yablonski house, the bodies being placed in a hearse and a packed church at the funeral. The UMWA president at the time of Yablonski’s murder, W.A. “Tony” Boyle, was found guilty of conspiring to murder Yablonski and his family.

The center also has some 1,800 oral histories and documents — such as maps and photographs, Tancin said. There isn’t enough room to show the three storage rooms full of more artifacts, she said.

Tancin said they will reach out to as many families that donated artifacts as possible, to see what they want to do with their donations. The staff realizes how important the artifacts are to the families that have been donated to the center for the past decades.

“This is family history. This is generational history,” Tancin said.

Center beginnings

The Coal and Coke Heritage Center began in 1977 as an outgrowth of an oral history project overseen by professors Dennis Brestensky, who has retired, and the late Evelyn Hovanec.

The students brought back boxes of mining artifacts from fathers, grandfathers and other family members who were miners. Families had held onto the items for so long and no longer knew what to do with the items, Tancin said.

One organization that may have some space for the artifacts is the Fayette County Historical Society, which is creating a coal mining exhibit at its 98-year-old Fairview School along Route 40 in the Menallen village of Haddenville, said Christine Buckelew, president of the county historical society.

Buckelew said the society hopes to have the coal mining exhibit open by the end of the year. In the meantime, historical society members have expressed concern about the fate of the Coal and Coke Heritage Center, but the organization has not been approached about possibly housing the collection.

“We certainly will do the best we can to make it possible” if asked to become the new home for the Coal and Coke Heritage Center, Buckelew said.

The school, once a part of the Uniontown School District, will house the hundreds of artifacts, primarily from the late 1800s through the 1920s, that were donated to the historical society, Buckelew said.

“Any and all opportunities should be explored” to keep the heritage center in Fayette County, Buckelew said.

“We care about it. It would be so much of a loss,” Buckelew said of the loss of the heritage center and the campus.