Danville and Pottsville Rail Road Company

The Danville & Pottsville Railroad Company was incorporated under the laws of Pennsylvania on April 8, 1826, and received letters patent on February 18, 1831. The object was to form a portage between the Schuylkill and upper Susquehanna valleys. Stephen Girard, the Philadelphia merchant who owned 28,500 acres of coal and timber lands along the route was the principal stockholder. Gen. Daniel Montgomery of Danville was the first president. Girard's death on December 26, 1831, retarded the project, but the investment was continued by his executors. In September, 1834, the first section opened from Wadesville on the Mount Carbon Railroad near Pottsville to the eastern edge of the Girard coal lands. As laid out by Moncure Robinson, the railroad required six inclined planes to cross Broad Mountain. In 1837, twenty miles of the Western Division from Sunbury to the coal fields near Shamokin were opened. The intervening section was never completed, and financial conditions led to the abandonment of the Eastern Division in 1838, while the track on the Western Division deteriorated to the point where locomotives could no longer be used. The company assigned its property to trustees in 1842 and became inactive. The Western Division was sold at foreclosure on December 28, 1850, and conveyed to the Philadelphia & Sunbury Railroad Company, eventually becoming part of the Pennsylvania Railroad System. The Philadelphia & Reading Railroad built a line parallel to the old Eastern Division in the 1860s.