24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Forest City, PA

Forest City is a borough in Susquehanna County that sits exactly where Susquehanna, Lackawanna and Wayne counties meet, a three-county corner marked by a monument in the Forest City Industrial Park.

Forest City began as a lumber settlement known as Forest Mills in the 1850s, and from 1879 to 1886 its post office was called Pentecost, after early settler William Pentecost, who started the area's lumbering and milling industries.

Forest City took its present name in 1886 and was incorporated as a borough in 1888, a few years after the Jefferson Branch railroad was built through the settlement between 1866 and 1871.

Forest City boomed on timber, lumber, silk and anthracite coal, and at its early-twentieth-century peak it held close to 6,000 residents behind a busy Main Street.

Forest City had only 1,780 residents at the 2020 census — less than a third of its coal-era peak — after the Great Depression and the collapse of mining emptied much of the town.

Forest City's 1,911 residents lived in 817 households at the 2010 census.

Forest City's town center is strikingly compact and orderly, laid out as just four avenues by ten blocks, with about 87% of the borough's population living 'in town.'

Forest City covers only about 0.9 square miles, yet for decades it supported its own silk mills, coal breakers and a busy railroad corridor along the Lackawanna River valley.

Forest City is served by the Forest City Regional School District, a small district of roughly 780 students whose elementary school and junior-senior high school stand together on Susquehanna Street.