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Kato
Centre Daily Times June 18 2002, page C1
Thriving mining community of Kato died out when coal dried up
"Kato - A foot-wide beech tree grows in the middle of crumbling walls.
It's been that long since Kato died.
Eighty years ago, a general store stood on the ruined foundation, now all mossy and tangled with vines and branches. Not much else remains of the former coal mining community on the banks of Beech Creek and Wolf Run, tucked into a remote Snow Shoe Township valley.
"It's a ghost town," said Bill Hall, 85, a lifelong Mountaintop resident and curator of the lions David House in Snow Shoe.
Hard to imagine, but the dirt road that winds northeast of Clarence into Sproul State Forest once led to the store, a post office, a one-room schoolhouse and several homes. The New York Central Railroad, Kato's main link to the rest of the world, stopped regularly
Coal lured the Kato Coal Company into the hills in 1890 and the mines on the ridge above town drew workers, many of them Hungarian, Polish, Austrian and Italian immigrants. In the Kato area, the 1920 federal census listed about 260 men, women and children, representing more than 40 families.
But by World War II, the company was gone, with only a handful of residents left. Today, there's nothing but a couple of hunting camps. A visitor bounces down Kato-Orviston Road past defunct mine pits, crosses Beech Creek on a steel bridge and hears only rushing water and the wind rustling through the trees.
The old railroad bed is merely a puddly path, though wooden crossing beams peek from beneath the road's gravel. Except for the store's foundation and some swampy depressions where houses stood, Kato exists as just a name on the map.
"Probably, if we really had ghosts, they could tell us all about Kato," Hall said.
Birthplace
Paul Veneziano lives near Clarence now but, long ago, he called Kato home.
He was born there, the son of a railroad employee, and spent the first six or seven of his 81 years in a wooden home across the road from the store.
"We lived in the last house on the row," said Veneziano, a former coal miner and highway worker.
Porches fronted some homes, he recalled, and many families, his included, tended small vegetable gardens.
Across the creek, up what's now Panther Road, he walked a short way to the school snuggled against the hill. Like the rest of Kato, the room had no electricity.
For entertainment, kids played games such as hopscotch, and there was always the train pulling into the depot in front of the Kato Supply Company store.
'They sold everything -- food, clothes," Veneziano said.
Above the town, miners extracted coal around the clock. A cable system delivered laden cars to waiting trains.
'The full load would pull the empty car up," Veneziano said.
Hustle and bustle
Back in 1890, however, the coal lay buried below "howling wilderness," as reported in the Jan. 17 edition of the Keystone Gazette. A week earlier, according to the paper, the mines had opened, the start of a "lively, bustling coal mining town."
Cato, originally named after the Roman senator - but the spelling later changed for reasons still a mystery - grew quickly. A correspondent visited almost a year later, noting with surprise the "commodious" storeroom, the 20 new dwellings planned and the 150 tons of coal pulled a day from the company's 500 acres.
"Kato was an important part of coal production in the Mountaintop," Hall said.
It was rugged territory, the woods full of rattlesnakes and the roads rough on buggy wheels and thin tires, but it wasn't isolated. Thanks to the New York Central, which leased Beech Creek Railroad tracks, Kato residents could head toward Snow Shoe or Beech Creek, then connect to other lines.
"You could pretty much go anywhere," said Don Watson, 65, of Moshannon, who grew up in the Mountaintop area.
Mail service was another tie to the outside. The town's first post office lasted from 1890 to 1894, the second from 1914 to 1937. C.T. Chesman doubled as the first postmaster as well as director of the mining operation.
Life wasn't always quiet in Kato. In July 1912, according to a Centre Democrat article compiled by Mountaintop historian Cordes Chambers III of Clarence, two young children were accidentally shot on the railroad platform in front of the store. Annie Duke was killed instantly; her brother John died later in Clarence.
John Masarosch, who had fired his revolver during a wedding celebration, was convicted of manslaughter.
Eighteen years later, the Democratic Watchman reported another tragedy. Kato resident May Alexander was found drowned in Beech Creek near the town, a week after her disappearance triggered an extensive search and a visit from a county detective.
'The coal ran out...'
Kato's heyday might have been around 1911, when the Centre Democrat reported the company, with 10,000 acres, planned to construct 37 dwellings, a large boarding house and a new tipple for loading coal onto trains.
The Great Depression hastened Kato's demise. The town began to shrink, overshadowed in the 1930s by the nearby barracks of Civilian Conservation Corps Camp No. 79.
"It pretty much was Kato by then," Hall said.
Joe Shutica, 90, a former miner from Poorman Side, visited Kato in a Model-A as a young man. He remembers the store, school and a few brick residences among the homes. He also recalls how quickly the town folded.
'The coal ran out and the people moved out," he said. 'There was no work there."
A few hung on, but by 1947, township tax ledgers included just one property owner and no tenants. Don Watson can recall the abandoned store, derelict but still standing, in the early 1960s. Then it was torn down and the tracks pulled up. Kato became a local party spot.
"It's kind of desolate now," said Pearl Robert, 75, of Snow Shoe. "Nobody goes down there unless they're hunting."
Noted Hall: "It was just a town that disappeared. "
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