Emergency Biohazard Cleanup Near North Old Forge Old Forge, PA

Old Forge is a borough in Lackawanna County, about 5 miles southwest of downtown Scranton.

Old Forge Borough was incorporated on May 2, 1899, from Old Forge Township, and it is named after an abandoned iron ore forge that had been deserted because of the poor quality of the local iron ore.

The 'old forge' itself was built in 1789 by Dr. William Hooker Smith, a Revolutionary War army surgeon who settled in the area that year, together with James Sutton.

In the early 1900s Old Forge's main industry was anthracite coal mining, and during the 1920s its population reached an all-time high of more than 14,000 residents.

Old Forge had about 8,500 residents at the 2020 census, and in 2010 it had 8,313 people living in 3,734 households.

Old Forge calls itself the 'Pizza Capital of the World,' famous for Old Forge Pizza — a rectangular pizza baked in trays and sold by the 'cut' rather than the slice, topped with a blend of cheeses on a crispy, thick crust.

Old Forge's pizza tradition traces to the Ghigiarelli family in the 1920s, when Mrs. Ghigiarelli began serving her homemade pizza to coal miners who gathered at her family's bar to play cards.

Old Forge has a sister-city relationship with Felitto, Italy, the hometown of many of its early immigrant miners, and 41.3% of its residents reported Italian ancestry in 2010 — one of the highest shares of any community in the United States.

Old Forge has its own small school district, the Old Forge School District, with Old Forge Elementary School and Old Forge Junior/Senior High School serving the borough's roughly 1,000 students.

Ebenezer Drake secured a post office for Old Forge in 1848 and served as its postmaster until 1885, while his father Charles Drake had run the only stagecoach inn between Wilkes-Barre and Carbondale in the 1820s.