Thank you so much for being here.

I'm Vicki Austin, Chief Development and Education Officer with WBIA.

Let's start with the word, semi-quincentennial, which we've been practicing here for about six months now.

This evening's lecture is part of our America 250PA semi-quincentennial.

Tonight, we honor 250 years of American innovation in Pennsylvania.

Support for this celebratory lecture is provided by the Pennsylvania Commission for the United States Semi - Quincentennial.

We would particularly like to thank Governor Josh Shapiro, Drew Popish, Northeast Regional Director for the Governor, Cassandra Coleman, Executive Director, America 250PA, and Amanda Levan, Administrative Manager, America 250PA, who is here with us this evening.

Forged in Northeast Pennsylvania, 250 years of American innovation is presented tonight by Kenna Krepke, Regional Manager for Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Now, I hope you are prepared with a paper and pencil, and you will be taking copious notes.

While your history teachers are likely not present here tonight, we may have a pop quiz this evening at our reception in the Frieder Family Center for Education.

You can review what you have learned on WBIA.org, where we will be posting this evening's presentation.

Now, I'd like to invite Amanda Levan, Administrative Manager for America 250PA, to share her remarks and introduce Ken.

Good evening, everyone.

It's an honor to be here at WBIA in beautiful Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.

I'm Amanda Levan, Administrative Manager for America 250PA.

We are the Pennsylvania's official commission working across all 67 counties, and more than 400 local communities, to lead this once-in-a-generation celebration of the semi-quincentennial.

We've launched more than a dozen initiatives, and an epic statewide calendar is now in full swing.

We're here tonight because this milestone year is also an invitation to learn together.

The Lecture 250 series is rooted in the belief that history is not something that lives behind glass.

It is in our communities, in the stories we share, and in the questions we ask.

We're incredibly proud of WBIA for stepping up to facilitate tonight's program.

I'm thrilled to see so many people in the audience seeking a deeper connection with your neighbors, your commonwealth, and the heritage that helps us make sense of who we are, and where we are headed.

To stay up to date on everything happening across Pennsylvania in the weeks and months ahead, visit americatwofiftypa.org.

There you can sign up for our mailing list, explore upcoming events and local programming from our partners, listen to our podcast, and follow us on social media.

Now on behalf of America 250 PA, Chairman Pat Burns, and Executive Director Cassandra Coleman, I'd like to thank you for the warm welcome, and for being part of the thoughtful conversation we're about to begin.

Enjoy Forged in Northeast PA.

Well, thank you very much for that introduction and welcome us here.

If we could get a big round of applause for the team at WBIA.

Without WBIA working with America's 250 in Pennsylvania, this program would not be possible.

So we want to thank them very much for their time and energy and then hosting us here tonight.

I hope that two things happen here tonight.

Number one, as you're going home, you think, wow, I learned something new about Northeastern Pennsylvania that I didn't know before I joined you all here tonight.

Number two, is that you get a perspective that the history of the economy in Northeastern Pennsylvania is reflection of the personality of our great region.

What we're going to do is we're going to talk about a handful of stories about entrepreneurs.

The fact that building a technology company today in 2026, has some of the same pitfalls as building manufacturing companies and industries back in the 1800s.

You'll learn a little bit about immigrants that came to Northeastern Pennsylvania, created companies that have lasted 134 to 197 years, still in operation over all of that time period.

We'll talk about coal and steel and textiles, lumber, and then we happen to have the oldest brewery in America.

So we're going to take a few moments to talk about beer as well.

So we're going to start where you knew we would start, the anthracite capital of the world, 485 square miles, the coal fields represented here in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

In Columbia County and Northumberland, as you go to our west, if you move down into Pottsville and Schuylkill County below, and then of course here in Northeastern Pennsylvania, Lackawanna, Luzerne County, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, and Hazleton, you have the coal fields of the anthracite coal.

There are really a couple of folks who get credit for helping to accelerate the use of anthracite coal.

Obadiah and Daniel Gore in Wilkes-Barre used coal in their blacksmith's forge, moving air across it to do the things that blacksmiths do, whether it's making horseshoes or other iron-based products.

And then Judge Jesse Fell gets a lot of credit that on February 11th, 1808, which sounds like a very specific day, but that's the date that's on the placard on Northampton Street in downtown Wilkes-Barre, and Judge Jesse Fell actually put coal on a grate and showed that you could use it as a heating product, which then became a tool that was used all across the country for anthracite and bituminous coal to heat as a home heating product, starting in 1808.

And what I wanna do across, we only have a little bit of time here tonight, so I'm gonna move through these industries pretty quickly, but I'm gonna help you understand the size and enormity of the industries here in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

We start with anthracite coal, when we talk about it, we're talking about in 1917, the peak production was over 100 tons of coal a year during that time period.

And it was the closest, next closest state was about one-tenth of that production.

There were 776 mines here in Northeastern Pennsylvania at that time, and it employed 156,000 people.

Think about it, at that time in Northeastern Pennsylvania, there were 600 to 700,000 people that lived here in Northeastern Pennsylvania, and that's almost one in six went into the mines and worked for the companies that mined anthracite coal.

I wanna give you a sense of how much coal was taken out of Northeastern Pennsylvania, about five billion tons of coal.

So I want you all to close your eyes for a second and imagine a pile of coal, five billion tons big.

I don't know if you can do it, but I can't do it either.

That sounds pretty big to me.

So what I wanna do is give you a perspective of how much coal that was.

To heat a home, it takes about four tons of coal.

And so if you took the number of homes, not in the 1800s, but the number of homes in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania today is about 4.4 million single family homes.

You multiply that two numbers, you get 17 .6 million tons of coal.

You could heat every house in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania right now for 284 years based on the amount of coal that came out of Northeastern Pennsylvania.

And if we said, hey, well, let's look at the country, there are about 85 million people who have single family homes in the United States of America.

The reality is that's about 340 million tons of coal.

You could heat every house in this country for 14.7 years from the amount of coal that came out of Northeastern Pennsylvania.

And that's data that comes from the Pennsylvania Bureau of Mining Programs.

The size and the enormity of what was happening here in Northeastern Pennsylvania was so important that when the strike from the coal miners happened in 1902, the president of the United States got involved because the coal that came from Northeastern Pennsylvania heated homes across the country.

It also heated the forges.

It heated and it supported manufacturing that affected not Northeastern Pennsylvania, not the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but it affected the United States of America.

He brought John Mitchell and he brought other mine operators, the union leader John Mitchell and mine operators down to Washington, D.C.

to solve the mine strike because it had an impact on our entire nation at that time.

Actually, the president didn't come to Northeastern Pennsylvania until 1910 to see exactly what he had learned about a few years earlier.

And when we talk about the impact that it had, the Breaker Boys, you can see a picture here of one of the breakers in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

And the reality is, no pun intended, but they became the poster children for child labor laws that we still see here today in the United States.

And the challenge with this industry, like many of the others we're gonna talk about tonight, is that it ended very abruptly.

Remember, we were talking about 150,000 workers that were part of this industry at its peak year.

But the challenge is, as you move toward World War II and different heating sources, and then you had the Knox Mine disaster on January 22nd in 1959, and those mines then became flooded, you had an industry that was driving the economy in Northeastern Pennsylvania, fueled the iron furnaces, which we'll talk about, that produced the steel that was manufactured and distributed all across this country.

But it became a great gap and a hole in the economy here in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

And so today, there still are four to six billion tons of coal in reserves here in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

The challenge is, and in positively, there are companies like BlastJet Anthracite and famous Redding Anthracite in Mahanoy City and in Pottsville, where they still mine coal, it's mostly surface mining at this point in time in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

You can see the volume of coal over 39,701 short tons of coal that were mined in 2022.

All of that is primarily mining that takes from the surface.

The mines obviously are flooded at this point in time.

There are boreholes from Old Forge all the way to Jetto, three boreholes.

The borehole in Old Forge, not sure if you knew this, but there's 55 million gallons of water that comes out of that borehole every single day, and it comes out to relieve the pressure that's under that when the rainwater goes into the mines, it relieves the pressure up and down the valley.

So the mines in Northeastern Pennsylvania in Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, and Hazleton are obviously a challenge to have any of the mining that we remember from those old days.

So that's the energy that came out of coal that affected the entire country.

We've got another bite at the apple here in Northeastern Pennsylvania, in the sense that the Marcellus Shale region runs from West Virginia all the way through Northeastern Pennsylvania up and into upstate New York.

There are 400 to 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that are here within that Marcellus region.

It's a 30 to 40 year supply of natural gas.

They produce about 21 billion cubic feet a day, about 7.7 trillion cubic feet in 2025.

And how has that affected in Northeastern Pennsylvania and in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania?

Well, we happen to be the second largest producer of gas in the United States.

About 12,200 wells can be found all across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

We produce about 18% of the total U.S.

production in natural gas.

And if you look just to the north of us, we're in Pittston, Pennsylvania, just to the north in Susquehanna and Bradford in Wyoming counties, those wells produce 40% of Pennsylvania's natural gas.

The industry itself has made a significant investment in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, over $3.12 billion have come back to the Commonwealth, the residents through leases and taxes and investments by the industry in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

The simple fact of the matter is that natural gas is going to play two roles in the history of the United States of America going forward.

Number one, if you want an energy independence strategy for this country, that natural gas field is going to play a role, at least for the next 30 to 40 years.

And when we talk about data centers and them being powered, you're going to have to add capacity of energy in order for your cell phones and your Netflix and all of the things that stream information that moves through those data centers.

So we have a second bite when we talk about energy.

We're in a place in a country, probably one of the only places next to Texas that has energy and opportunities like this.

Just to stay in line with what we showed on the industry that was coal, that 400 trillion cubic feet, there are some studies that say there's 500 or 600 trillion cubic feet.

It takes about 70,000 cubic feet of natural gas to heat an individual home.

You already know that that first number is Pennsylvania.

If you only heated houses with the natural gas that's in the Marcellus Shale, you could heat, for 1,298 years, you could heat all of the homes in the Commonwealth.

And for the United States of America, it's 65 to 70 years worth of natural gas.

So what I tried to do is put it in perspective as to actually how much gas is available to create energy and to be a valuable resource in the United States of America.

So we're gonna shift back to a little bit earlier than now.

We go back to 1840, and we're gonna talk a little bit about iron and steel.

Those folks on the pictures right there, that's George and Selden Scranton.

They were brothers on the top and the bottom.

And then Joseph Scranton is right there in the middle.

Essentially, and there was a third person, William Henry, who actually came out as a geologist, and he did an assessment of the resources in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

He came out, that geologist came out and said, hey, we think that the region is ripe for an iron mill.

He found iron ore, he found lime, he had water to create power for the factory, they had coal to be the heat source.

And so he thought they had all the right components to put an iron mill here.

George and Selden, the two brothers, were running a facility in New Jersey, and so they said, hey, as entrepreneurs, we see an opportunity, let's go make our way to what was Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Wilkes-Barre was the real metropolitan area.

Scranton didn't exist.

It was one or two buildings at the time.

It was really country along the river.

And so this geologist goes back, convinces them there's a great opportunity.

They raise money from their friends and family.

Joseph happens to be a cousin of George and Selden.

And they come to Northeastern Pennsylvania, they buy some land, they build an iron mill.

The challenge is, William was a little wrong.

The resources weren't as robust as he had anticipated.

They start to make nails for the people who are traveling from the east to the west, moving across the country.

And essentially, they have one of those great challenges that all entrepreneurs, not all, but many entrepreneurs have is that you build your first product or your series of products, and if they aren't that good, that becomes a challenge.

And so what's interesting is you would assume that the Scrantons were all wealthy, they all did well, and the success story that we're gonna hear in a second was dynamic and absolutely, truly remarkable in the wealth that they created.

Two of the people that were part of this original four actually died penniless or without resources.

William Henry decided to leave Northeastern Pennsylvania, made some investments that didn't work out, and Selden went back to New Jersey because what happened is they panicked when things didn't go right.

So as entrepreneurs, you have your first product, you see your first market opportunity, and when things don't go right, you can either leave and quit or you pivot, find a new product, find a new opportunity, and move forward.

Two of those four didn't have the fortitude to carry forward and actually lived a life that was none of the opulence or the wealth that the other two did.

Actually, George and Joseph became congressmen and they managed the steel and the coal and the railroad properties that have made Northeastern Pennsylvania famous.

They created innovative technologies around creating T-rails for the railroads.

So what happened, where did their big break come?

In 1845, the Erie Railroad was looking for a bid to produce the steel rails from Port Jervis, New York to Binghamton, New York.

And the challenge is there was a time constraint.

They only had two years to put this line in place.

And the challenge is they would have normally just gone to Great Britain and they would have pulled their steel there, but the timing didn't allow for it.

So they gave these two folks, when they put their bid in for this contract, they gave it to the Scrantons.

Now, the Scrantons had a challenge.

They didn't have a furnace big enough to make the rails, they didn't have the technology to make the rails, and they didn't have the money in order to pull it all off.

But they still convinced the folks to give them the contract out of the necessity.

And then they went and raised more money, they built the iron furnaces here.

And so they got over the first hurdle, they figured out how to make the rails.

And you would think that would be easy, right?

We made the rails, we're gonna serve the contract.

But in today's day and age, you would put those rails on a flatbed truck, you drive them out Interstate 84, a crane would pick them up and put them in place.

It's pretty simple if you did it today.

But back then we're talking about farmland.

So not only did they have to figure out how to make the rails, they had to figure out how to get them from Scranton, what was Slocum Hollow at the time, now Scranton, out and they had to go across farmer's fields who weren't that keen on carriages and horses and really heavy beams destroying their property.

So they had to figure out how to engage the farmers and the landowners to get the steel beams there.

And they figured it out like good entrepreneurs, they were creative, and they fulfilled the contract like four days before it was done.

And once they figured that out, they built railroads from here to the other connecting points of the country.

And then the success that they had was pretty significant.

They built a steel company that employed 3 ,000 people.

Just to give you a perspective, the largest employer in Northeastern Pennsylvania, I believe is the Tobyhanna Army Depot.

And they have between 3,000 and 3 ,500 people that work there or are part of contractors.

It was on a 60 acre campus, you can see the iron furnaces there that are still there today if you wanted to, just south of the University of Scranton.

And steel that came out of that plant was obviously served to build the railroads across this country.

And they were found in the Panama Canal and the Golden Gate Bridge.

And just to help you understand the size and the enormity, when we do things in Northeastern Pennsylvania, we do them at a very big level.

We just talked about the billions of tons of coal that came out of our region.

In 1865, they were the largest iron producer in the United States.

And by 1880, the second largest producer to Pittsburgh in the world.

And they eventually, in 1894, produced one sixth of all the steel rail in the United States of America.

So how much steel did they make?

At peak in 1894, they produced 500,000 tons of steel.

How much steel is that?

That's enough steel to produce about 22 million feet of rail.

And if you said, well, how far does that go?

It goes about 2,000 miles.

So in one year, out of that iron furnace, those 3,000 people made 2,000 miles of track, which means you could go from the rail that they produced in Northeastern Pennsylvania, from Scranton to Phoenix, and you would understand how much rail that they made here in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

And similar to coal, the challenges in 1902, there's a merger, and the assets from that steel industry moved to Buffalo, New York, Lackawanna, New York, outside of Buffalo, and those 3 ,000 people lose their jobs or have to move.

So you have, essentially, one of the largest steel producers in the world.

We are kicking on all cylinders and building out the infrastructure for the railroad industry that moved goods and services all across this great nation.

And the challenge is, in 1902, it abruptly ends.

So now, I'm gonna transition to the textile industry.

You hear in 1902, the steel industry has left Northeastern Pennsylvania, the coal industry is waning, and in New York, you have a very strong textile industry.

And so, around 1920, there are 44 textile mills in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

By 1971, there are 170, that dot all of the small towns and cities here in Northeastern Pennsylvania, and eventually, employing 11,000 workers.

And so, we're gonna talk now about three companies, because I think they give three different examples of the impact that the textile industry has had here in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

And you start with Scranton Lace.

In 1890, we become one of the largest producers of Nottingham lace in the world.

You can see a picture up in the upper corner there.

It's the curtains and tablecloths.

I know when I was a kid, if I went into anyone's house, either it was a holiday or a fancy room, there was one of those lace products there.

I never knew where it came from, but it came from Scranton, Pennsylvania.

And by 1890, we produced a third of all the U.S.

silk in the world.

The reality is, when we do things in Northeastern Pennsylvania, we do them really, really big.

And those looms that you see there, you could see them today.

If you go to the lace villages, which is what is now in place at that same location, there's a loom, that loom that you see right there is a massive 20 - ton loom, 50 feet long, two and a half stories high, and you can go stand right and stand in the awe of the manufacturing that took place within that building.

This building and the complex was 34 buildings.

It was built on an 8.4-acre campus.

You think about where you go to work today, how many people go to work in a campus with 34 buildings on 8.4 acres?

It had a bowling alley, had basketball courts, a theater, an infirmary if you got sick.

Do you have all of these amenities at the place you work at today?

They created tablecloths, they created curtains that I mentioned, they also, during the war effort, created parachutes and camouflage.

I wondered when I was putting this presentation together, my granddad jumped out of an airplane on the 509th in Africa, one of the first to jump into combat in the world, and I wondered where the parachutes, did they come from Scranton, Pennsylvania?

This facility employed 1,600 people.

We talked about the folks that made steel, a company that employed 3,000.

This company employs 1,600.

They manufactured silk for over 100 years in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The difference in this company is, when Scranton Lace closed in 2002, the industry stopped and they quit making silk.

And it sat idle for more than two decades.

Today, it's the Lace Villages.

It's apartments, it's event spaces, and if you wanna stop and see that large loom, you can see that as you walk from the parking lot to the event space, and then you can see their logo right there from Scranton Lace.

We're gonna move across town now to a company called the Sequoia Silk Mill.

This was founded in 1873 by Alfred Harvey.

It's the oldest continuously operating company in the city of Scranton.

There were 13 buildings in this complex, and they hired 750 people to make silk.

Pretty cool picture there.

As you can see, this was a company photo.

I don't know if you know, I have any relatives that were standing on one of those rails or looking out the windows.

But it's impressive, the number of people that were part of that complex.

Just like Scranton Lace, across town, they had a community and provided a welfare association.

They even have a women's baseball team called the Silk Sox.

I pulled this article from Pennsylvania Magazine.

125 years of women that came and worked in the textile mills, specifically the Sequoia Silk Mill.

This industry gave the flexibility for the women who came in the textile mills, the flexibility to work from home, or work, not from home, but work in flexible hours.

It also, this article talked about the fact that the women who came to work at the Sequoia Silk Mill had the leadership positions in the organization.

Whether they were four women and supervisors, had an opportunity to make business decisions that kept this company moving and operating for 125 years, and thought it interesting to put how much they made, 18 to 20 cents an hour, and the article notes that that was a great supplement to the family's income, or replaced the family's income for the minors that no longer had employment.

And then the challenge is that in 1997, the textile industry, just like the other industries we referenced, really went away as a result of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Act, that moved these companies to Mexico and other places.

But this story turns out a little bit different than the others.

You can see in 1997, at that point in time, now we're back to only 20 garment factories here in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

But this company has a different ending than our friends at Scranton Lace, because in 1997, before Sequoia Silk Mill closed, they created a new company that was the legacy that evolved technologies associated with the industry, from silk to nylon fibers, and then to coated nylon fibers.

And so this company now, and they merged in 2005 with the Sequoia Silk Mill Company.

So two companies merged together.

The technology and the knowledge and the manufacturing carries forward.

They're the innovation hub for textiles located in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

300 people come to work every day and put silver on fiber.

There's an interesting thing about silver, it's antimicrobial.

So it originally started out as a product for carpets, a product called X-Static, removing static as you walked across it so you don't shock people.

And then they created a product for ophthalmic sutures because silver kills bacteria.

So that pair of socks that you see right up there, if you took that pair of socks, put them on, ran a marathon, played a basketball game, took the socks off, put them back on, did it again the next day, the socks would smell the same the first day to the second day because of that property that the silver has on the fiber.

You can see in the other picture, you can see heat signatures of individuals using the fiber, products with the fibers are coated in silver.

It reduces the heat signature.

Obviously that has medical applications and military applications.

So the legacy of Sequoia Silk Mill is now there within Noble Biomaterials in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and that continues to operate to this day.

And the third company I wanted to talk about is a company called A. Rifkin.

It's led by a fifth generation of the Rifkin family, Darcy Buck, and they've been around for 134 years.

You can see in that top corner, you see the original Rifkin family members who came to Northeastern Pennsylvania from Tsarist Russia.

They landed in Whitehaven, and they created a dry goods store, eventually realizing there was better opportunity in Wilkes-Barre.

So they moved from Whitehaven to Wilkes-Barre.

They created dry goods.

They created clothing for the workers.

And then, I don't know if you've ever held one of those bank bags, bags that hold money.

You see that in the lower corner.

They are the oldest manufacturer of bank bags in America.

And you can see they were innovative because that's the patent that supports that locking mechanism, and there are numerous extensions of that locking mechanism out and still today.

So they're the oldest manufacturer of bank bags, but then as time evolved, so did the product offerings that they have.

I don't know, anybody here ever voted in an election?

Maybe?

So I always wondered, what happens when I take that piece of paper and I put it in that machine?

Like, where does it go?

Well, the reality is it happens to go in one of their bags.

And then it's full, they take it out, and then if it ever needs to be a recount, it goes back into the machine, or it can be counted by hand.

So those bank bags are also made in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

And then the third thing that they've done, as well as other product offerings, is they bought a uniform company from Hope, New Jersey, moved it to Rosetto, which is outside of the Lehigh Valley, kind of halfway between the Lehigh Valley and the Poconos.

And so if you've ever been at a parade and you see a first responder that has a uniform that looks like that, there's a chance that it was made out of a Rifkin team's employees.

And so that's an example of a company that came, immigrants came to Northeastern Pennsylvania, they built a company, and it's lasted for 134 years, and now managed by a fifth generation, and we open expect that they'll be around for another 134 years.

I'm gonna transition now to the lumber industry.

Williamsport, Pennsylvania was, in the time, the lumber capital of the world.

That's the Susquehanna boom in Williamsport.

In 1860, we were the top producing lumber company in the United States of America.

Think about this, each time I hit one of these industries, we are the best.

We have the most product that's being produced.

And between 1861 and 1891, for that 30 years, we produced 5.5 billion board feet.

That's billion with a B, not with a million, just out of that area.

There were 60 sawmills alone between Loyal Sock and Lycoming.

It's like a seven to 15 mile radius.

And for our reference, as I move forward on some of these slides, I'm gonna note that the definition of a board foot is one inch thick by 12 inches wide by 12 inches long.

The board foot could be a different area based on how you do that formula, but for our purposes, to keep the math pretty simple, we're gonna show you that a board foot is 12 inches long.

That Williamsport log boom, this is the largest boom in the world.

It's seven miles that they have carted off a part of the Susquehanna River.

So what happens is the lumber's cut in the woods, it's brought down to the river, the sawmill and the owners of the sawmills have a specific marking, they put the logs in the water, then as they come down the boom, when they get to the ends, then they're sorted by the sawmill and directed to the appropriate place.

It was constructed in 1846.

That boom would hold 300 million board feet of wood at any given time.

What it allowed the industry to do out in the central part of the state is then operate year round so that the logs come in, they have a continuous movement, and then all of those sawmills continue to operate for the entire time during a 12-month period.

That boom alone, just the boom, not the rest of Pennsylvania, that boom alone was responsible for eight billion board feet over a 45 - year period.

And it was 70 years of prosperity until the industry crashed in 1890.

The challenge is wood is a renewable industry.

So you have two stories here.

One is that we use the wood and it framed out the houses and the buildings, and it was the raw material of choice.

They didn't have plastics, they didn't have carbon fiber.

The country had wood.

So that wood is some of the best hardwood in the world.

Even today, it's shipped around the world, turned into cabinets and other products, and then shipped back to us.

But in the challenges, that industry had a crash, and then we had one of the greatest stories of regenerating an industry with Governor Pinchot and the Pinchot Forest.

And today, there are industries that continue to operate, and people are continuing to pull wood out of the forests in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Quick side note, the high school team in Williamsport is called the Williamsport Millionaires.

As that lumber industry happened to create the most per capita millionaires in the country.

That's the reason for that name.

There were actually 18 millionaires per 19,000 residents, so almost one in every 1,000 people were a millionaire at that time.

And the purchase power of a million dollars, little different a million dollars today versus then.

Today, it would be worth about $37.56 million for each one of those millionaires.

So when we talk about the amount of wealth that was created as a result of this industry, it was pretty significant.

So like we did for coal, and like we did for Marcellus Shale, I wanna put in perspective how much wood has come out of the forests in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

It's 400 billion feet.

The Pennsylvania Lumber Museum gave me this data point so that there's 400 billion board feet that came out of Northeastern, and I asked you to close your eyes and imagine how far is 400 billion board feet.

So I'm not even gonna try to have you try to figure it out.

So I'm gonna show you.

In a couple different ways, I'm gonna show you.

If you were gonna frame a house today, a 2,500 square foot house, I'd assume the houses were smaller back then, but if you were going to frame it, you need about 11,000 board feet to frame a house.

If I took that 400 billion board feet, how many houses do you think, those that do math really quickly in your head, how many houses do you think you could frame?

It's 36.36 million houses could have been framed, and that's houses that are 2,500 square feet.

The reality is the wood that came out of Northeastern Pennsylvania was shipped all across this country as we built the infrastructure for the United States of America.

And if we wanted to go by distance, eight billion board feet, if we're just talking about the Susquehanna boom, so we're not talking about mills that were in Pike County or in the northern tier or out in the western part of the state, it would create 1.51, just the boom, the seven-mile boom that eight billion board feet came out of, it'd create 1.51 million miles of wood.

That's 60 times around the earth.

The circumference of the earth is a little over 24,000, just short of 25,000 miles.

Or Artemis, we're all captured by Artemis moving from here around the earth, and it'll be home soon.

The reality is you could go to the moon 3.16 times from the distance that the wood that came out of just the boom in Williamsport.

If I wanna do that for the 400 billion board feet for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, well, we're really talking about going around the earth a little over 3,000 times, and we could go back and forth to the moon 158 times.

So I'm trying to put in perspective how much wood came out of northeastern Pennsylvania and the impact it had when it was put on rail cars and shipped across the country to be a supply that built out the better part of America.

And today, because of that great conservation story, there are still companies that are serving the forests and processing the wood that comes out of it.

We all know of Knoebel's as one of the greatest amusement parks in the history of the country or the world.

They celebrate 100 years, but the Knoebel family actually goes back to 250 years being a part of that lumber industry out in Elysburg.

And Deer Park Lumber in Tunkhannock, today they still process 15 million board feet of wood that comes out of the forest in Pennsylvania, gets processed there, and then that wood is literally shipped all over the world.

And so we're gonna keep moving.

We had miners, we had people in the textile mills, women in the textile mills, we had people working in sawmills.

The reality is I'm sure they were all thirsty, guaranteed that they were all thirsty.

So David Yingling comes from Wittenberg, Germany and settles in the coal mining town in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and starts what is now the oldest brewery in America in 1829.

They've been brewing beer in Pottsville, Pennsylvania for 197 years.

And the reality is this company, why did they come to Pottsville?

He landed actually in Philadelphia, came north for two reasons.

One is the water supply, and two, if you've ever toured Yingling and you have an opportunity to do that anytime, go down and tour their facilities.

They actually have caves that kept the beer cold and allowed it to age and then ship it off to wherever it needed to go.

They're now led like a Rifkin by the fifth generation.

Dick Yingling's daughters, Wendy, Debbie, Cheryl, and Jennifer are leading the operations at Yingling.

And the challenge you have, again, as every great entrepreneur's story or entrepreneurial story goes, you know, there were clearly challenge in each generation.

Think about this, a company that had a product, they start making it, and sometime in the 1920s, they decide, well, this product is now illegal and you can't make it, right?

So the generation at that time has to pivot a little bit, maybe make ice cream, maybe make soda, and then eventually come back to brewing beer that when you say, give me a lager, most people just know, of course, that's a Yingling and Yingling's product and brand.

I need to come a little bit sooner.

And since we're celebrating America's 250th birthday, the official beer of American PA in 250 happens to be the Runaway Train Brewery's Brew Declaration.

You could find that on taps all across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

And if you wanted, maybe this weekend or sometime this summer, you say, hey, I'd like to find out a little bit more about the beers across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

In Northeastern Pennsylvania, there are 44 breweries and 500 beers that are made in our region.

If you go to Discover NEPA, you can see the tours.

I'd encourage you all, somebody get a designated driver, but you could take a look at their tours, three different tours where you could hit these different breweries.

And as you're doing that, these are some of the brands that you'd recognize, Wallenpauppack, Susquehanna Brewing, Barley Creek out in the Poconos, Turkey Hill is in the Bloomsburg area.

So these may be brands that you might run into as you go on that tour.

And as you move across the Commonwealth, don't hesitate to also check out Discover NEPA as we celebrate the bells across PA.

So there are bells that reflect the history of each of the communities in our region.

And so they're all designated as a tour and you could take a look at them.

There is one special bell that's up in Montrose.

This bell happens to be on the oldest continuously operating African American farm in the United States of America.

And that bell there is up in Montrose, Pennsylvania.

So if you have an opportunity, go visit the Dennis Family Farm.

So I'm gonna catch my breath.

And we have seen coal, steel, textiles, and the challenges each of these industries had very highs and lows.

And in challenges by 1945, World War II is ending.

There are manufacturing companies that were supportive of the war effort.

And our region is in a really complicated place, a really complicated place.

As a matter of fact, so complicated people are leaving and there are people saying, you know what, we just can't do this anymore.

You cannot save Northeastern Pennsylvania.

It's time to go, time to roll up the streets.

Thank you very much for being the best in the world.

Thank you for fueling the Industrial Revolution.

Thank you for building the infrastructure of this great nation.

But you're done.

That's how people felt.

And so much so that Dr.

Dessen and a group down in Hazleton called their organization CanDo to offset all the people who said it can't be done.

And so what happened is you have two organizations here and we'll talk about some of the others.

But Slipko, the Scranton-Lackawanna Building Corporation was actually, they raised $500,000 in bonds in a day and then they go out and raise another million dollars to buy land and it's now the Stauffer Industrial Park in Scranton.

So the strategy was buy land, build buildings and attract companies to Northeastern Pennsylvania because our industries have had highs and lows.

We need to diversify the economy.

And frankly, the people in here need jobs.

And so what happens is in Scranton, they do that.

In Hazleton, they get very creative.

They create a dime a week campaign.

So you could actually in your paycheck have a dime taken out.

They actually, just to show how supportive the community was not just business leaders, they had people donate dimes and for one mile, they placed them all the way down Broad Street to show that the community was willing to step up and invest in itself.

And they eventually raised $14,000.

They bought 500 acres.

That's now Valmont Industrial Park in Hazleton and they raised another $740,000.

The Wyoming Valley Chamber, which was the Wilkes - Barre Chamber at the time, they did the same thing.

And so this affected not only, listen, nobody else was going to invest in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

They became the investors of Last Resort and we had to pick up ourselves off of our bootstraps.

And essentially that investment led to billions of dollars of investment in companies that have come to Northeastern Pennsylvania.

All total, those three organizations alone created 24 business parks, $4.11 billion of investment.

There's 37 million square feet of roof in those business parks and they've created almost 100 ,000 jobs.

And what we're gonna do is show you in a second how that diversification has happened here in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

This is a list of other economic development organizations across our region from Williamsport to Schuylkill County to Pittston to the Tunkhannock area.

These are organizations that did the same thing.

The reality is in the 40s, the 50s and the 60s, Northeastern Pennsylvania had to invest in itself because the people from New York and around the country weren't going to invest in our region.

And what did it lead to?

Well, it eventually, because of the success, it led to private investment.

A Miracles organization now has 28 million square feet of roof.

If you go up and down Interstate 81 on both sides in Pittston, you can see Centerpoint Park.

And those other organizations are national organizations that invest in buying land, building buildings and recruiting companies to come to communities.

In the 40s, 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s, that wasn't happening.

Those entities would not have invested in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Today, it's just commonplace.

We accept it as, yep, there's a company that's recruiting companies to come here to create jobs.

And why is this happening?

Well, something else happened.

We realized that you're sitting in one of the most strategic places in North America.

Right now, where you're sitting, here in this building, because from here, you can make a product and ship it to 96 million people.

That's a third of the U.S.

population and it's half of the Canadian population.

So if you want to build a product and you want to move a product, this is literally where you need to be.

It makes the most sense from a corporate structure and a revenue-producing opportunity.

At the bottom there, you see the site selectors magazine.

All of the governors every year collect the data around the economic development projects that happen in their states.

The reality is, Northeastern Pennsylvania, for the last few years, has been in the top 10 of most number of deals for communities our size.

And this year, we're sixth in the country.

Not sixth in Pennsylvania, not sixth in the Northeast, we're sixth in the country.

And when I pull the lens out and look at that even from a little different perspective, the only cities that have more economic development deals going on at the size and the scope that we have here in Northeastern Pennsylvania are really small cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore.

In the Lehigh Valley, we're giving them a little credit because in our category, they were first.

But the reality is, for the entire part of the Northeastern Corridor, we have the most number of deals to any community that would be a little bit larger or smaller than where we are.

And these are other organizations that are here to help from an economic development perspective for entrepreneurs, the SBDCs, TechBridge, for international trade and loan programs, NEPA Alliance, and then NEPRC works with manufacturers.

And of course, I have to talk about my organization, Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeastern Pennsylvania.

We invest money in technology companies.

I can invest $900,000, up to $900 ,000 in a technology company that's going to create jobs in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

And we can put $50,000 toward a manufacturing project if it helps to create new products or improves process improvement.

And for every dollar I invest in those companies, the reality is those companies provide a $4 return to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in tax revenue.

And the companies here that you see listed, these are companies we've invested and they've created over 3,000 jobs in our community.

You already heard all about Noble Biomaterials.

Galaxy Brushes is the industry leader in pig brushes for the oil industry.

PSA is one of the top 10 robotics integrators in the country.

If you ever use Gore-Tex, every machine that makes Gore-Tex comes out of Duryea, Pennsylvania.

Signal Amp Health was one of the fastest growing healthcare companies in the country for a number of years.

They had a telehealth program that was pre - COVID.

And then once they hit COVID, obviously everybody cared about doing medicine over the telephone.

And then TMG Health provides an automated solution for open enrollment for healthcare companies.

And I figured, think about this for a second.

How many of you think you've interacted with these companies over the last six months, 30 days, or within the last year?

The reality is you look at that and you say probably none of these.

But American Paper Bag happens to be the fastest, greenest bag manufacturer in North America.

And I wonder, has anybody received one of these in the last 30 days to 60 days?

When you receive it, next time look at the bottom of this bag, it says Made in Sugar Knots, Pennsylvania, American Paper Bag.

So my gut tells me you may not have interacted with the others, but I bet there's a chance there's one or two people here that interacted with this company.

139 employees here, and then they're launching the same operation in Reno, Nevada.

So what happened?

This strategy to buy land, create buildings, and diversify our economy, there are 52,000 people who go to work every day and make stuff in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

It's about 10% of the workforce in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania around manufacturing.

There are about 1,000 different firms that make products in our region.

And we've diversified this industry.

I'm gonna give you some of the other companies that you may or may not know that are here in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

If you ever ate yogurt, there's a chance that the cup is made at Griner in Pittston.

If you ever had a wet basement, there's a chance that the stuff you put on the walls that keeps it dry is Drylock.

You can find it in every hardware store in America.

That company is in Dunmore, Pennsylvania.

If you got a flu shot this year, it's probably came out of Sanofi Pasteur in Swiftwater, right there in the Poconos.

If you've ever seen a fighter plane, either on TV or at an air show, almost every fixed-wing fighter pilot in the United States and abroad in other countries gets a helmet made in Gentex in Simpson, Pennsylvania.

If you ever went to McDonald's or a hospital or someplace where they have shelving, there's a chance that it was made in Wilkes - Barre at Intermetro.

That bottle or vial, very good chance it was made at Schott.

They Schott glass and durier they make.

Not only those vial products, but all the way to glass for the Hubble telescope.

Cornell Cookson makes the best overhead doors in the world.

If you ever thought maybe I should create a steam engine and put it in my backyard, the reality is a lot of the parts for the steam engine are made at PowerRail, and they can order the rest of the parts so that you can accomplish that feat.

And EAM Moscow is in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, West Hazleton.

If you imagine an automated line where a box comes down and the straps close on it, and then that box moves forward, they make the strapping and the automated equipment that makes that manufacturing process go forward.

Companies literally all over the world.

And then if you've ever traveled down Wilkes - Barre Boulevard in Wilkes-Barre and looked off to your right as you're coming toward the city, on the right-hand side you'll see all of these big metal things on 18 - wheelers.

And Mountain Productions in Wilkes-Barre makes really small stages for events like really tiny ones like Lollapalooza.

And if you didn't know any of those brands, my gut tells me you recognize some of the brands that are here.

I'm not gonna run through each and every one of them, but they are all made here in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

And just for a little fun as we start to come downhill and wrap up this presentation, who doesn't like Ring Pops?

Everybody has to like Ring Pops.

So I ask you to just think, how many Ring Pops are made in Northeastern Pennsylvania?

Just think for a second, what is the number that comes to mind?

How many are made in Music, Pennsylvania?

Turns out it's between 280 and 400 million Ring Pops a year.

It's about 1.5 million Ring Pops a day come out of that facility.

So don't hesitate to go buy more.

They'll keep making them.

And the second fun company that I have here is Mrs.

T's Pierogies.

We all have to love pierogies.

You can't live in Northeastern Pennsylvania without loving pierogies.

So in your mind, how many pierogies are made in Northeastern Pennsylvania?

More, a lot?

700 million pierogies come out of the facility in Shenandoah that are made a year here in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

And one of the other assets that we have in our region are our colleges and universities.

We're rich from trade schools to training doctors.

There are 11,000 graduates.

Almost every company in the country right now has their number one issue is workforce related.

How do I find the people to do or make or provide the services that we provide?

We have 11,000 people every year that graduate from Northeastern Pennsylvania's institutions of higher education.

And I'm gonna wrap this up to help you understand the size of the economy.

I've noted throughout this whole presentation that when we do things, we do them at a pretty big scale.

And our goal was to diversify the economy.

All of these, I'm not gonna go in great detail on this chart, but what I wanted you to see, this comes from Penn's Northeast, is that each one of those circles and those colors are different industries.

So you can see that if one industry were to go away in Northeastern Pennsylvania, there are a significant number of other industries here.

And that chart shows you the diversification of the gross domestic product that is made for the products and the services that are made in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

You can see that we have an economy that's $55.76 billion here in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

It's about 6.67% of the economy in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

And so you may say, well, it's only 6.6%.

That's a small percentage of what happens in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

I'm gonna reemphasize it to show you that according to the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development, the gross domestic product for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is about $850 billion.

There are, according to United Nations, you could argue 195 to 250 countries in the world.

With that gross domestic product, if the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania were a country instead of a state, we'd be the 23rd largest economy in the world between Taiwan and Belgium.

So Belgium, so when you go back to that 6.67%, in Northeastern Pennsylvania, we would rank in the top 100 countries in the world between Jordan and Zimbabwe.

The reality is we have an impact not only on our community, not only on the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but you can see the goods and services here are made and distributed all over the world.

And the size of what we do is pretty significant and pretty impressive.

A couple of thank yous before I wrap up.

I'm not gonna run through each of these organizations or entities.

I had an opportunity over this last two or three months to meet with people, talk with people, and do a little research on Northeastern Pennsylvania in order to put this presentation together.

Here's another list of folks I have a heartfelt appreciation and thank you for all that they've done for our communities and the data and information that made this presentation possible.

And so I'll end with a couple of thoughts.

Number one, the economy in Northeastern Pennsylvania was significant.

When we talk about the output of this region, we talk about B's and not M's.

Billions, not millions, not thousands, but billions of either tons or the number of products that are produced in our region.

I think number two, I would say that our economy has had a significant impact as the steel that came out of Northeastern Pennsylvania was put to the railroads that created the free trade and moved people and goods across the country.

The lumber yards and the sawmills that created the wood helped build the infrastructure of the buildings across our nation and the coal fueled the Industrial Revolution.

Our nation owns a debt of gratitude to the men and women who worked in all of these different industries because they helped to make America the greatest country in the world.

Happy Birthday America and thank you for your time.

Snappy, serene traditional orchestral music