By Hannah Frances Johansson
NewsWorks Lab staff writer
Bob Sink doesn’t necessarily miss his neighbors, knowing they got a good deal on their properties. He can’t say exactly when they left, or when their homes were demolished, since the whole thing took so long.
“I’m the last man standing, basically,” he said. “I’m the mayor of my own town.”
Over the past 20 years, coal companies have bought almost every parcel of land in the small village of Oak Forest, a community inside Center Township, six miles south of Waynesburg, property records show. Almost all of the buildings have since been torn down.
While it remains unusual to purchase an entire community, experts told NewsWorks Lab, coal companies sometimes take these kinds of preemptive measures before longwall mining, which can cause the land above to sink and lead to cracks in foundations or even collapses.
Iron Senergy applied for a permit renewal from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection that allows them to remove coal from the Cumberland Mine, which runs under Oak Forest, according to documents obtained by NewsWorks Lab.
Officials at Iron Senergy could not be reached for comment despite repeated attempts.
Three longwall mining panels — sheets of coal delineated on a map — were “completed” in 2021, 2022, and 2023, according to data from the state Department of Environmental Protection.
Since his last neighbor died in June, Sink has lived alone at what remains of the town center: three homes in a small valley. The other two houses are empty, he said. Contura Pennsylvania Land, an Iron Senergy subsidiary, owns both parcels, according to Greene County records.
The rest of the former community in Center Township has been reduced to not much more than stretches of grass at the intersection of Oak Forest Road, Water Street and Maple Run Road. That’s where drivers turn in front of a large gray and black sign erected on a stretch of grass near where the church used to be, pointing toward Portal No. 9 of Iron Senergy’s Cumberland Mine.
Julian Giordano
A native New Yorker, Julian Giordano moved to Waynesburg to continue work on the history of coal mining in southwestern Pennsylvania that he started during his senior year at Harvard University in Boston.
“I had never owned a car before,” he said. “I had never lived in a rural place.”
Less than 400 miles from home, Giordano felt like a foreigner in his own country, he wrote on his Substack page, Carbon Footprints. From his blue-brick apartment building in Waynesburg, he watched fracking trucks drive by all day. From the back porch, he could see coal trains.
“The history of southwestern Pennsylvania was deeply linked to my own upbringing,” he wrote. “Here were the steel mills that built Manhattan’s skyscrapers, the coal mines that fueled the city’s boilers, and the natural gas wells that powered my gas stove.”
In June, Giordano posted in a Facebook group called Greene Connections, soliciting memories of Oak Forest. In more than 100 comments, former residents and friends of residents tagged each other, and shared photos, emails and names of the people who used to live there.
Several shared memories of, and connections to, the Willow Inn, once a restaurant inside an old farmhouse. It has since been demolished.
Nancy Hurd Jones responded that her family sometimes provided Pat Varner, an owner of the inn, with foraged mushrooms.
“It was a sad day when Pat died,” she wrote. “An era came to an end.”
Giordano first visited Greene County for a project on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.
“But it’s impossible to really understand sites of methane emissions without understanding the history of coal mining in Pennsylvania,” he said.
At first, he saw methane-emission sites primarily through the lens of climate change. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas.
“Now I also see them as a safeguard for miners underground,” he said. “If methane isn’t vented out of the coal mine, dangerous levels build up and lead to explosions and casualties.”
Now that he is back in Massachusetts, Giordano plans to write an academic article about the history of Greene County, as a microcosm of the impact of longwall mining on the area.
Longwall mining
The Pittsburgh coal seam is kind of like the middle layer of a Costco cake, said Daniel Bain, associate professor in the Department of Geology and Environmental Science at the University of Pittsburgh.
“There are very few things that are as thick and as continuous globally,” he said. “…They called it the Saudi Arabia of coal.”
The thick, flat coalbed is good for longwall mining methods — but only where surface subsidence is “acceptable,” according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Longwall mining involves a machine that shears coal from inside using a massive head of rotating teeth, while hydraulic props hold the mine in place temporarily, said James Schmid, an ecologist and environmental consultant who specializes in the impacts of mining.
Once the job is done, the jacks are removed and the roof is allowed to collapse. This causes “subsidence” on the surface above the mine, which is when the ground sinks to fill the empty space below that coal once occupied.
“If it just dropped two feet, and your house is sitting there and it was flat, now your house is sitting tilting, because one corner of it’s down in the sunken down part, and the doors won’t open or shut,” Schmid said. “That’s not very pleasant for the homeowner.”
Other types of underground mining can cause surface subsidence, but with longwall mining it is expected, experts told NewsWorks Lab.
Longwall mining became easier to conduct in Pennsylvania after a 1994 amendment to the Bituminous Mine Subsidence and Land Conservation Act, which the DEP uses to regulate bituminous underground mining. The amendment, known as Act 54, allowed for subsidence, Schmid said, calling it a, “‘you break it, you fix it’ law.”
Now, in Washington and Greene counties, the practice of longwall mining is widespread: A map from the DEP’s Bureau of District Mining Operations shows a dense cluster of longwall mining panels in the farthest southwest corner of Pennsylvania, and a smattering of panels across Armstrong, Indiana and Cambria counties.
If a coal company has decided to undermine a property, the owner can either come to an agreement about how to repair it before or after the damage, according to Act 54.
Sometimes, the company decides to buy the property instead, said David Cressey, president of the Cornerstone Genealogical Society in Greene County.
Neil Stewart
Neil Stewart, 77, has lived around Oak Forest his entire life.
“I went to school here for six years,” he said. “And I went to church here, and I knew all the people here at one time. Everybody helped everybody; it was really good people.”
One recent afternoon, he sat on the tailgate of his red truck, parked at the edge of the grass plot where there used to be several houses lined up next to each other. He wore a Vietnam veteran’s hat and carried a large framed photo of the feed mill his dad owned and operated.
Walking along an empty grass plot, Stewart pointed out: “This was a feed mill. My dad ground corn and stuff for people.”
Stewart said that in 2010, a coal company offered to buy his farm outside town.
“I told them that their name would never be on the deed, cause I hate coal companies,” he said. “I was born and raised here. If the good Lord takes me, this is where I want to be.”
Stewart said the company mined under his house and then paid him $319,000 to build a new place. He and his wife live there now, not far from the old one.
“Nighttime you could hear a crack and everything moving and my wife was scared,” he said. “She thought we was going to fall 800 feet, because that’s how deep the coal is.”
Population
Greene County lost 7.1% of its residents from 2010 to 2020, and another estimated 5.7% from 2020 to 2025, according to data from the United States Census Bureau.
“We’ve lost so many residents over the years and continue to lose residents,” said Daniel Stoneking, a Center Township supervisor.
When towns like Oak Forest and nearby Holbrook, another unincorporated community in Center Township that suffered a similar fate, are bought up for natural resource extraction, that exacerbates the problem, he said.
According to locals and researchers, the practice of buying land just to have it sit unused, at least on the surface, is common. Stoneking said he lives next to an abandoned property owned by a mining company that he thinks is an eyesore.
“It’s not good,” Stoneking said. “It’s not good for our community.”
Cressey, president of the genealogical society, said the population in Greene County declined after World War II. He agreed that it could be attributed, in part, to fossil fuel companies. Most of the small prewar villages are gone now, he said. He said he wishes coal and natural gas companies would care more about preserving history.
“People are in the way for that whole process,” he said.
Bridget Vernon
Before the demolition crews arrived last summer, Bridget Vernon, who lives up the road from the center of Oak Forest, took an interest in the vacant properties, collecting photos and salvaging items.
“I’m not usually a thief,” she said, “but I stopped a couple of days before they started tearing them down, and I got some mementos that are in my flower beds now,” including carvings of a squirrel and cat.
Vernon is warm and brave in her exploration of the demolition sites. She drives a truck and is unafraid of walking through tall grass and rubble — or trespassing.
“I don’t have air conditioning in my truck,” she said, sweating as she pulled over beside a plot of land that once belonged to the Willow Inn. “I’m a windows-down person anyway.”
On Facebook, Vernon posted photos of the Willow Inn being demolished.
“My heart is breaking just thinking about the murals that Pat painted in the Inn. He was a talented artist,” someone commented.
The Inn’s owners, Varner and Ralph Wilson, bought the 18th-century farmhouse and restored it together, opening the restaurant in 1973, the Observer-Reporter reported in the 1990s. When Wilson died of liver cancer in February 1998, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette dedicated nearly a quarter of a page to his obituary.
Vernon said she found the demolitions creepy. In the rubble of the demolished church, she said she saw Bibles.
“It was just weird, and it was kind of sad,” she said.
Schoolhouse
Sink, the “last man standing,” lives in what happens to be the old Oak Forest schoolhouse, which he’s fashioned to look like a log cabin. In his driveway, he keeps several cars. Behind an electric fence, horses and longhorn steers roam on his massive property that extends into the hills above and behind him.
Somewhere on his land, there is a gas well, which Sink said stopped the miners from wanting to drill under him.
If a mine intersects with a gas well, it can be deadly, according to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration. Natural gas contains methane.
When the coal industry approached his neighbors with offers to buy their properties, Sink said they came to him for advice about their decision. He advised them to take the offer.
Several residents sold their homes and land for more than $100,000, many times their appraisal value, according to records from the Greene County assessor’s office.
“It’s kind of like a necessary evil,” Sink said, about mining.
Before retiring at 50, Sink said he worked for his uncle as vice president at a construction company that serviced the natural gas, sewage and coal industries.
Sitting at his bar inside a shaded room as fans whirred against the heat outside, Sink’s eyes stood out as lighter than the rest of his face. The tinkle of what sounded like an indoor fountain added to the dampness of the warm day, and a cat threaded itself through the barstools.
Sink said his dad grew up in a coal mining town, where workers were paid in scrip, company money used to buy food at the company store.
His dad became an executive in the milk industry, moving his family all over the country for well-paid jobs in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
Sink said that although the company did not undermine his land, he still felt the impact of the work nearby. His house shifted a foot forward, damaging it. His well water went cloudy, and the mining company paid for a water buffalo and pump system. Now, he said his water is high in sulfur.
He is also concerned that the stream nearby could flood his property. In 2024, Iron Senergy applied for a permit from the DEP to restore the stream, which subsided due to undermining.
More than a quarter of stream miles undermined using longwall methods in Pennsylvania suffered adverse effects — flow loss, fractured riverbeds, or pooling — according to the state’s most recent Act 54 report, a recurring assessment of Pennsylvania’s underground mining regulatory program.
Sink’s years working with extractive industries seem to have made him savvy, or at least confident in dealing with the mining company: His advice is to hire a good attorney, and not a local one.
“Because a lot of times they, you know, they’re part of the whole system,” he said.
Outside, Sink bats the flies away from his horses’ eyes. The gold chains around his wrist and neck glint in the humid sunlight.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the name of the Washington County newspaper.
NewsWorks Lab is a public-benefit company owned by Trib Total Media to produce high-impact, accountability journalism as a free, open-source resource. You may find more information at NewsWorksLab.com. You may reach Hannah Frances Johannson at hjohansson@newsworkslab.com.
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