CHARLEMAGNE TOWER, FOUNDER OF TOWN
Charlemagne Tower, the founder of Tower City, was born April 6, 1839, near Waterville, New York. He attended private elementary schools, graduated from Harvard University, and studied with the greatest legal minds of the day. He practiced law in New York City for several years until the death of his father when he returned to his home to manage the family business enterprises. The business became bankrupt in the depression of the late 1830s.
Alfred Munson became so impressed with the talent of Charlemagne, that he employed him to travel through Michigan, Ohio, and Kentucky, to investigate his thousands of acres of land he had purchased for speculative purposes. Tower was so successful that Munson sent him on a more important mission. Munson held claim to 8,000 acres of land he had purchased in the western part of Schuylkill County. Tower set upon the task of securing the deed to the lands by court proceedings and evicted those who had sq1uatted on the land. He reported back to Munson of the great coal deposits on most of the acreage.
In June 14, 1847, Charlemagne Tower was married to Amelia Malvina Hartle in the county seat of Orwigsburg.
After the death of his employer, Alfred Munson, Tower proceeded with his usual work under the direction of Munson’s daughter, son and wife. He was offered one-half share of the royalties and any profits realized from the lands, in addition to his regular retainer.
During the Civil War in which he was a captain of a volunteer company, Tower was appointed Provost Marshal for the county and assumed the duty of drafting men for military service. This was an unpopular chore and he received numerous threats upon the life of himself and his family. The draft was so vigorously resisted by the miners of the Heckscherville Valley that they gathered a mob of 3,000 people to march on Tower’s home. Tower retaliated and fought back the attackers.
After the war he leased the 1503 acres to two independent coal companies for 15 years ago a royalty of 30 cents per ton. Tower Colliery, later known as East Brookside Colliery, was opened in 1868 and Brookside Colliery (later known as West Brookside Colliery) early in 1869. During the latter year, the combined production of both operations was 800 tons, but the tonnage increased in subsequent years until the sale of all Tower’s land and that of Munson and Williams, a total of 11,000 acres, in 1871 to the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company, for a grand total of $3,000,000.
In 1868 Tower laid out his first town with assistance of William H. Yohe, J. W. McCool and Preston H. Miller, surveyor. Within four years it was a humming business community but suffering an acute shortage to accommodate the influx of hundreds of persons seeking employment in the mines surrounding the town of Tower City.
After the sale of his land, he left the county and moved his family to Philadelphia. Tower invested heavily in the stock market, mainly stock of Northern Pacific railway and bought 65,000 acres of land in Minnesota and Dakota Territory which he immediately began to settlers at a tremendous profit. in 1874, he laid out another Tower City in North Dakota, but lot sales were not as brisk as in his Pennsylvania community, for there was no mining industry to entice purchasers.
Tower persisted, and in 1880 he explored the Vermillion Range in northeast Minnesota, where he found excellent quality ore in vast quantities. He proceeded with his usual vigor to acquire 20,000 acres and in 1881 organized the Minnesota Iron Company and transferred his vast acreage to the corporation. He obtained from the legislature the right of way along the Duluth and Iron Range Railroad which covered 6,400 acres for each mile of road constructed at a price of $2.50 per acre. Thus, he became the eventual owner of 600,000 additional acres of land, most of it swampy and not suited for farming or industrial purposes. Near the head of his railroad, he founded his third town, Tower, which became a rough mining community but which never achieved the status of the metropolis Tower visualized.
Tower’s health began to fail and in 1887 he sold his interest in his mining company and railroad to a group of investors for $6,000,000. On July 24, 1889, he died in his home in Philadelphia.
In Tower City, Pennsylvania, the mines of Charlemagne Tower are idle, the lands that created his fortune are virtually unproductive, yet his first town survives [in 1968], a beautiful community of industrious people.
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Text above is from the West Schuylkill Herald (Tower City), June 26, 1968, via Newspapers.com, and was also printed in the souvenir book for the Tower-Porter Centennial in 1968.
The portrait of Charlemagne Tower is from the Civil War Project and was first published there on January 26, 2011.
Corrections and additional information should be added as comments to this post.