Mar. 13—SAINT CLAIR — A pair of homes occupied by miners in the mid-19th century are fading into history, like the coal company that built them.

Located on Mill Street at the extreme northern border of the town, the unoccupied homes are being demolished.

Believed to be located on land owned by Reading Anthracite Co., they were in an advanced stage of disrepair.

Bob Scherr, a St. Clair Community & Historical Society board member, said the homes were built by the owners of the Johns Eagle Colliery in the 1840s or 1850s.

At the time, large numbers of immigrants left Ireland for jobs as miners in the burgeoning Schuylkill County coal industry.

The practice was for coal mine owners to build homes, referred to as company houses, and rent them to their workers.

Throughout the coal region, company houses sprung up in clusters, or patches, near mining operations.

Thomas and William Johns built the colliery that bore the family name around 1831, and operated it for about 25 years.

The Johns family lived on the site, roughly where the Coal Creek Commerce Center is located, in a large home known as the "Johns Mansion."

Visible in old photographs of the colliery, the mansion was destroyed by fire in the 1980s.

An 1870s map in Beer's Atlas shows 23 company houses around the intersection of Mill and Nicholas streets, known as Johns Patch.

Randy Keller has lived in a former company house in the 300 block of Mill Street for about 20 years.

"A little bit of history is going," said Keller, 69, a retired truck driver.

Keller's house still has the original green octagon-shaped shingles that were standard on company houses.

Keller's understanding is that the company houses around where he lives, a block or so from the homes being demolished, were originally occupied by residents of Parvin's Hill.

A passage in "Our Town: Saint Clair's Sesquicentennial" book says Frank Nicholas opened Parvins Colliery on the Primrose Vein, north of Wade Road, in 1825. It was later run by a succession of mine owners, including Burd Patterson, one of the early mining innovators who is remembered in a Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission marker at his house on Mahantongo Street in Pottsville.

Contact the writer: rdevlin@republicanherald.com; 570-628-6007