Ashley

If Wilkes-Barre was the business center of the Wyoming Valley, then Ashley was literally where the dirty work took place.
Ashley is the site of the Huber Coal Breaker, a tall, imposing structure where large chunks of coal were literally broken into small pieces for easier shipping and sale. Breakers were easily identified from a distance because of their dark, coal-like color and sloped roofs. In its day, the Huber Breaker was one of the largest ever built, and the work force inside consisted of boys as young as 8 and 9 years old, and former miners who were either disabled or too old to work the mines. While not open to the public, the Huber Breaker is a monument to the region’s robust past, and is visible from I- 81 and Route 309 in the Borough of Ashley.
The biggest challenge mining companies faced was getting anthracite over the valley’s confining ridges to the lucrative markets to the south. In an ingenious act of engineering and daring, the miners in the 1840s constructed a series of steep, inclined planes at Ashley. These planes rose 1,000 feet above the valley floor and were equipped with tracks, on which railroad-like coal cars were lured downhill by gravity, and empty cars were pulled back uphill by powerful stationary engines.