Manufacturer: Syracuse China
User: Hotel Jermyn, Scranton, Penn.
Date of service plate: 1910
Notes: The Hotel Jermyn at 326 Biden Street in Scranton, Penn., was built by John Jermyn, Scranton businessman, and formally opened on April 8, 1896.
After immigrating from Suffolk, England, in 1825, Jermyn spent his career working in coal mining, first as a general manager, later as a developer of coal mines, and eventually worked in initiating private mining operations. He also became one of the largest landowners in Scranton.
According to the Historic Scranton Facebook page, the Hotel Jermyn "was designed in the Romanesque style by local architect John A. Duckworth as a seven-story steel and stone structure with over 200 guest rooms. When it was completed in 1896, over 10,000 people came to the opening night to view the elegant interior. After John died in 1902, the Jermyn estate continued to run the hotel until they sold it in 1923. The hotel changed ownership numerous times, but continued to be the place to be in downtown Scranton into the 1960s."
It now (2024) serves as residential apartments.
Interestingly, the hotel as initially lavishly designed and decorated did not hint at Jermyn's love of coal mining, but it was his heirs who initiated a major renovation in 1910 that included the renaming of the original billiard parlor to Grill Room and with it, according to a story in the Dec. 16, 1910, Times-Tribune titled, "Hotel Jermyn – One of Scranton's Finest Show Places," a frieze of images painted by Pittsburgh artist Carl T. Shoffer that glorified coal mining, making "the large room distinctive and inviting."
"Special mention should be made of Mr. Shoffer's pictures," the article says, "not only for their artistic worth but more particularly for their historic value to the anthracite region. The series begins with the rolling hills and the sparsely settled Lackawanna Valley of half a century ago, and leads from one subject to another through the various stages of the development of this corner of the state as the greatest hard coal region in the world.
"The breaker boys, the dinky coal cars, the breakers, the culm piles and all the other scenes familiar to local people, but strange to a large proportion of the traveling public, are treated with an intimate charm that is altogether admirable. The one of a night view of a burning culm pile is particularly good, the color effects having cause[d] a great deal of favorable comment."
More than a century later, this description, completely unfiltered as it is from an environmental, human rights and animal rights viewpoint, is enlightening, but it absolutely identifies this china, with its green border of a coal mine and coal car, a coal breaker, individual miners, and seemingly carefree children riding a mule.
The Explore PA History website confirms that "Boys as young as eight years old worked in the breakers and in the mines, and became known as "breaker boys." And also that "Mules – many spending their entire lives in a mine – were a common means of transporting coal and workers in the 19th and early 20th centuries."
Sources:
Historic Scranton Facebook page
Lackawanna County Visitors Bureau
Scranton Times-Tribune, Dec. 16, 1910
Texas Transportation Archive
Explore PA History
Contributors:
ID: Larry Paul
ID and additional research: Roland Burritt
Plate photos: Susan Phillips