Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Williamstown, PA

Williamstown is a borough in northern Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, about 38 miles northeast of Harrisburg in the Williams Valley, and it is part of the Harrisburg–Carlisle metropolitan area.

Williamstown was settled in 1869 and incorporated in 1877, and it takes its name from a Revolutionary War-era traveler who passed through the region and operated a sawmill nearby.

Williamstown grew up around the Williamstown Colliery, where tunneling through Big Lick Mountain began in 1856–57 and the first anthracite coal was shipped in 1866 — 67,643 tons in its first year alone.

Williamstown's colliery shipped nearly 300,000 tons of coal in 1869 and ranked in its earliest years as one of the largest anthracite producers in the world, later becoming a subsidiary of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Williamstown's miners eventually worked coal seams as deep as 1,600 feet below the surface, and the colliery operated from 1866 until 1942.

Williamstown was the site of Dauphin County's deadliest mine accident on May 25, 1904, when coal gas suffocated miners in the Williamstown Colliery tunnel.

Williamstown had about 5,000 residents at its coal-boom peak around 1904, when nearly 1,000 of them worked at the colliery.

Williamstown's population had fallen to 1,303 by the 2020 census, after the anthracite mines and hosiery mills that once employed the borough closed.

Williamstown packs its residents into roughly a quarter of a square mile, giving it a population density of about 5,000 people per square mile — unusually dense for a small rural borough.

Williamstown is served by the Williams Valley School District, which it shares with neighboring Tower City across the Schuylkill County line.