Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Near North Gate Hazleton, PA

Hazleton is a city in southern Luzerne County and, with 29,963 residents at the 2020 census, it is the second-most populous city in the county after Wilkes-Barre.

Hazleton got its name from the hazel trees of the 'Hazle Swamp' along the old Warrior's Trail; Moravian missionaries came to the area in 1782 to bury soldiers killed in the Sugarloaf Massacre of September 11, 1780, in which 15 men died.

Hazleton's founding father was Ario Pardee, a young engineer who bought up local coal land and incorporated the Hazleton Coal Company in 1836 after anthracite was discovered nearby at Beaver Meadows in 1818, laying out the patch town that became the city.

Hazleton was incorporated as a borough on January 5, 1857, and as a city on December 4, 1891, the same year it became only the third city in the United States to establish a citywide electric grid.

On September 10, 1897, the Lattimer Massacre occurred near Hazleton, when a sheriff's posse shot and killed 19 unarmed striking miners — mostly Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian, and German immigrants — in an event that became a turning point in the history of the United Mine Workers union.

Hazleton's anthracite coal helped fuel the blast furnaces of Bethlehem Steel, and the city's population boomed from about 1,000 people in 1860 to a peak of roughly 38,000 in 1940.

Hazleton's Duplan Silk Mill, opened in 1899, grew into one of the largest and most productive silk mills in the country, employing between 1,800 and 2,000 local residents, many of them women and girls from mining families.

The 2020 census counted 10,872 households in Hazleton, and the city — nicknamed 'The Mountain City' — sits at an elevation of about 1,689 feet.

Hazleton has been transformed by immigration twice: first by Irish, German, Italian, Polish, and Slovak coal miners, and more recently by Latino newcomers — Hispanic or Latino residents made up 63.1% of the city's population in the 2020 census.

Hazleton has the highest percentage of Dominican residents of any place in Pennsylvania and the fourth-highest in the entire United States, with many families tracing their roots to San José de Ocoa in the Dominican Republic.