Climb the long grade out of the Lehigh Valley and the air thins, the trees give way to scarred ridgelines, and a tidy grid of a city appears on a plateau nearly 1,600 feet up. This is Hazleton, built on the hardest coal in the world. For the better part of a century, the story of the Italians in Hazleton was the story of the place itself: men who came up from the Mezzogiorno to dig anthracite, women who turned company-town poverty into bread and feast days, and a community that left its name on streets, churches and luncheonettes you can still walk into today.
The Place
Hazleton sits on a high plateau in Luzerne County, in the heart of Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal region, roughly two hours north of Philadelphia. The land here gave up the cleanest, hottest-burning coal in America, and that single fact shaped everything that followed.
The town was the creation of Ario Pardee, a New York engineer who surveyed the deposits in the 1830s, bought up the land and incorporated the Hazleton Coal Company in 1836. It became a borough in 1857 and a city in 1891, growing fast on the backs of immigrant labour.
Today Hazleton is a small city of around 30,000 people, no longer mining, and remade once again by newcomers. But its bones, the row houses, the broad numbered streets, the steeples, were laid by the Europeans who came to work the breakers, and Italians were among the largest groups of all.
How It Became Italian
Hazleton’s first immigrants, in the 1840s and 1850s, were mostly German and Irish. The second wave, which ran from the 1860s into the 1920s, was a different sea altogether: Italian, Polish, Russian, Lithuanian, Slovak and Montenegrin families pouring into the coalfields to do the most dangerous work in industrial America.
Recruited for the breakers
The coal companies needed bodies, and they went overseas to get them. By the late 1870s and 1880s, newly arrived miners of Slavic and then Italian descent began to outnumber the earlier German and Irish workers in the anthracite patches around Hazleton.
Most of the Italians came from the south, the Mezzogiorno: Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Basilicata, Calabria and Sicily. They were farmers and labourers from hill towns where land was scarce and hunger was close, and the coal companies’ promise of steady wages, however brutal the work, was enough to set them sailing.
They did not arrive to comfort. Italians often built their own homes at the edges of the company towns, clustering in informal settlements much like the villages they had left, with a church near the centre and small houses raised by the workers themselves nearby.
Lattimer, 1897
The price of that labour was paid in full on 10 September 1897, a few miles east of Hazleton at the Lattimer mine. Several hundred striking miners, mostly Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German, marched peacefully toward Lattimer to press for fairer pay and the right to shop outside the company store.
Luzerne County Sheriff James Martin and a hastily deputised posse met them on the outskirts of the patch. The deputies, armed with new Winchester rifles, opened fire on the unarmed crowd. At least nineteen miners were killed and dozens more wounded.
Martin and his deputies were tried and acquitted, after the defence painted the dead foreigners as dangerous invaders. The massacre, more than any speech, drove the immigrant miners of Hazleton into the arms of the United Mine Workers and turned the region into union country for generations. The Italians who survived it understood, in their bones, that they belonged to a working class now, not just a paesano clan.
Building a community above ground
What the Italians built in Hazleton was not only labour but institutions. They raised their own Catholic parish, Most Precious Blood, an Italian national church, so they could worship in their own idiom and bury their dead with their own saints.
They opened bakeries, groceries, barbershops, tailor shops and theatres. North Wyoming Street, in particular, grew into a thriving stretch of Italian eateries, theatres, barbershops and retail, an unofficial Little Italy on the plateau.
By the time the federal census measured ancestry in 2000, Italian was the single most commonly reported heritage in Hazleton, claimed by roughly a third of the population. For a coal town built by Europeans, that was as close to a defining identity as any group achieved.
The Maddon family, in miniature
No single family tells the arc better than the Maddons. Carmen Maddonini came up from Italy in the early twentieth century, became a US citizen, and shortened the family name to Maddon, the story goes, so it would read as Irish and make work easier to find.
In 1936 the family opened C. Maddon and Sons Plumbing, and in 1949 relatives opened the Third Base Luncheonette, a corner counter that became a Hazleton institution. Out of that household came Joe Maddon, the World Series-winning baseball manager, who grew up in an apartment over the plumbing shop and has spent his fame insisting that Hazleton, and its immigrants, made him.
The Landmarks
Most Precious Blood Church, 131 East 4th Street. The mother church of Italian Hazleton, founded as a national parish so southern Italian families could worship in their own tradition. Now part of Our Lady of Peace Parish, it remains the spiritual anchor of the community and the home of its great summer feast.
The Madonna del Monte Festival, Most Precious Blood, East 4th Street. Hazleton’s Italian feast has run for more than 120 years, a procession and street celebration descended from the shrine of Our Lady of the Mountain in a cave at Anzi, in Basilicata. Each summer the statue is carried through the neighbourhood, and the smell of sausage and zeppole fills the air around the church.
Third Base Luncheonette, 704 Garibaldi Court. In the family since 1949 and reached, fittingly, by a street named for the Italian hero Garibaldi. Joe Maddon’s mother Albina, known across town as Beanie, worked the counter into her eighties, and the luncheonette’s hoagies have travelled to spring-training clubhouses as edible ambassadors of Hazleton.
Senape’s Bakery, 222 West 17th Street. A long-running family Italian bakery famous across the region for its cold tomato “pitza,” sold by the tray, along with Italian breads and rolls. For generations of Hazleton families, a Senape’s tray is the centrepiece of every wake, christening and Sunday.
Carmen’s Bakery and Deli, 37 East Broad Street. A downtown Italian bakery and deli still turning out bread, cold cuts and prepared food on the city’s main commercial spine. It is the kind of counter where the recipes and the accents both carry the south of Italy in them.
Jimmy’s Quick Lunch, 123 East Broad Street. Not strictly Italian, but a downtown survivor that anchors the old commercial district the immigrants built, serving its famous Jimmy Dogs with house mustard and chili since the era when North Wyoming Street and Broad Street together formed the heart of working Hazleton.
The Lattimer Massacre site, near Lattimer Mines, east of the city. A monument marks the ground where nineteen immigrant miners were shot dead in 1897. It is the most important labour-history landmark in the region and a place every descendant of the coalfields, Italian included, knows by name.
Where They Came From
The Italians of Hazleton came overwhelmingly from the Mezzogiorno, the impoverished south that sent the great majority of the more than five million Italians who reached America. Their home regions were Abruzzo, Molise, Campania, Basilicata, Calabria and Sicily, a belt of mountain and farm country where holdings were tiny and emigration was often the only way forward.
Migration ran in chains. One man would secure work in a Hazleton breaker, then send for brothers, cousins and neighbours from the same village, so that whole stretches of a Basilicata or Abruzzo town could be reassembled on a single Hazleton street. The Madonna del Monte feast, rooted in the shrine at Anzi in Basilicata, is the clearest surviving fingerprint of exactly where these families began.
They came because anthracite paid, and because the alternative at home was hunger. They stayed because, for all the danger underground, Hazleton let them own a house, raise a family and build a church in a single lifetime, something the old country had never allowed.
Hazleton Today
The mines are gone, and so is the demographic world they created. Hazleton today is majority Hispanic, more than 60 per cent at the 2020 census, transformed since the 2000s by newcomers, many of them Dominican, drawn by warehouse and distribution work in the valley below the old coal plateau.
That change has been wrenching at times, and Hazleton became briefly notorious in the late 2000s for hard-line local immigration ordinances. But the deeper story rhymes with the Italian one: another wave of working families, recruited or drawn by jobs, building churches and storefronts and feast days of their own on the same streets.
The Italian Hazleton has not vanished so much as thinned and concentrated. It lives now in the names on the war memorials and the parish rolls, in the trays from Senape’s and Carmen’s, in the Madonna del Monte procession that still winds out from Most Precious Blood each summer, and in the diaspora of Hazleton Italians, Joe Maddon among them, who carry the town’s name out into the wider country. The coal that brought them here is finished, but the community they hauled up from the ground endures.
For families tracing the same anthracite arc, Hazleton’s Italian story sits within a wider Northeastern pattern. The same forces shaped the Italians in Waterbury, Connecticut, the Italians in Worcester, Massachusetts, the Italians in Rochester, New York and the company-town Italians in Endicott, New York. Within Pennsylvania’s own immigrant coal and steel belt, Hazleton’s Italians shared the plateau and the era with the Poles in Erie, Pennsylvania and the Slovaks in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Italians settle in Hazleton, Pennsylvania?
Italians came to Hazleton to work the anthracite coal mines, which boomed from the 1860s into the 1920s and recruited European labour aggressively. Most arrived from southern Italy, where land was scarce, drawn by steady wages that the old country could not offer. They became one of the largest immigrant groups in the city.
How many Italians live in Hazleton today?
By the 2000 census, Italian was the single most commonly reported ancestry in Hazleton, claimed by roughly a third of residents. Since then the city has become majority Hispanic, so the Italian share is smaller, but Italian heritage remains deeply woven into Hazleton’s parishes, surnames and food traditions.
What is the Madonna del Monte Festival?
It is Hazleton’s Italian feast, held at Most Precious Blood Church and running for more than 120 years. The celebration descends from the shrine of Our Lady of the Mountain in a cave at Anzi, in the Basilicata region of southern Italy, and features a procession of the Madonna’s statue through the neighbourhood each summer.
Was Joe Maddon’s family from Hazleton?
Yes. The baseball manager Joe Maddon grew up in Hazleton, the descendant of Carmen Maddonini, an Italian immigrant who shortened the family name to Maddon. The family ran C. Maddon and Sons Plumbing and the Third Base Luncheonette, and Maddon has often credited Hazleton and its immigrants for shaping him.
What was the Lattimer Massacre?
On 10 September 1897, a sheriff’s posse opened fire on a peaceful march of unarmed striking immigrant miners near Lattimer, just east of Hazleton, killing at least nineteen. The victims were mostly Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German, and the event galvanised the immigrant working class, including the Italians in Hazleton, into the United Mine Workers union.
Where can I taste Italian Hazleton today?
Senape’s Bakery on West 17th Street is famous for its cold tomato “pitza” and Italian breads, while Carmen’s Bakery and Deli on East Broad Street keeps downtown’s Italian counter tradition alive. The Third Base Luncheonette on Garibaldi Court, the Maddon family’s place since 1949, is a beloved corner institution.
If your family’s story passed through Hazleton, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hill town in Basilicata or Abruzzo to a breaker on the anthracite plateau, to wherever you are now.