Plymouth

Plymouth, a borough of Luzerne county, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., on the north branch of the Susquehanna river, immediately west of and across the river from Wilkes-Barre, of which it is a suburb. Pop. (1900), 13,649. Plymouth is served by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western railroad. The borough is finely situated in the Wyoming Valley among the rich anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, and its inhabitants are chiefly engaged in the coal industry; in 1906 and 1907 (when it shipped 24,081,4 9 1 tons) Luzerne county shipped more anthracite coal than any other county in Pennsylvania. In 1905 the total value of the factory products was $9 02 ,75 8, 6 9.4% more than in 1900. Before the coming of white settlers there was an Indian village called Shawnee on the site of the present borough. The township of Plymouth was settled in 1769 by immigrants from New England - many originally from Plymouth, Litchfield (disambiguation)|Litchfield county, Connecticut, whence the name - under the auspices of the Susquehanna Company, which claimed this region as a part of Connecticut, and Plymouth became a centre of the contest between the "Pennamites" and the "Yankees" (representing respectively Pennsylvania and Connecticut), which grew out of the conflict of the royal charter of Pennsylvania (granted in 1681) with the royal charter of Connecticut (granted in 1662), a matter which was not settled until 1799. (See Wyoming Valley.) In its earlier history the region was agricultural. Two brothers, Abijah and John Smith, originally of Derby, Conn., settled in Plymouth in 1806 and began shipping coal thence in 1808; this was the beginning of the anthracite coal trade in the United States. The borough was incorporated in 1866, being then separated from the township of Plymouth, which had a population in 1890 of 8363 and in 1900 of 9655.

See H. B. Wright's Historical Sketches of Plymouth (Philadelphia, 1873).