The Miners National Bank Building

The Colonial-revival banking house at 120 South Centre Street — addressed today as 121 South Progress Avenue, and now the boutique hotel The Miners 1928 — opened in 1927 as the home of the Miners National Bank of Pottsville. It is a building with two histories: the 1927 marble-and-brick temple that stands today, and the pioneering cast-iron-fronted bank of 1830 it replaced on the same ground.

The bank of 1828

The Miners’ Bank of Pottsville was chartered on February 7, 1828, when Governor John Andrew Shulze approved an act of the Pennsylvania legislature (No. 44 of the 1827–28 session) incorporating a bank at Pottsville with capital of up to $200,000 and a charter to run until 1840. It was among the town’s very first institutions — its charter predated Pottsville’s own incorporation as a borough (February 19, 1828) by twelve days, and D. G. Yuengling would not brew his first beer until the following year. Banking began on October 28, 1828, in a rented building at the southeast corner of Centre and Norwegian streets; the first piece of business was discounting a note for John Plumer of Bloomsburg. The first president was Francis B. Nichols, remembered at his death in 1847 as a War of 1812 midshipman wounded aboard the USS Chesapeake and a grandson of Michael Hillegas, the first Treasurer of the United States.

John Haviland’s iron front (1830)

By 1830 the young bank was building, and what rose on this site was, for its day, extraordinary. “The whole front,” the Miners’ Journal reported, was “to be of cast iron plates,” with iron substituted for wood “for all the perishable parts of the building” — a method that “has never before, we believe, been introduced into our country.” The work was “under the superintendence of Mr. Haviland” — the Philadelphia architect John Haviland, designer of Eastern State Penitentiary. The item was reprinted in the Philadelphia press within days. A cast-iron building front was a genuine novelty in 1830, and the architectural historian Matthew Baigell, examining Haviland’s Pottsville work in a 1967 study, counted the Miners’ Bank among the two he judged of importance to American architectural history. The bank’s early years were dramatic in other ways: a false report in 1830 that it had stopped payment — which the press attributed to the rival Harrisburg Bank — had given way by November to a four-percent dividend. Haviland’s iron-fronted building served the bank until it was pulled down in 1926 to make way for the present one.

A banking temple of 1927

By the 1920s the bank had outgrown Haviland’s building. The banking house that stands today was designed by the New York firm Uffinger, Foster & Bookwalter — successors to Mowbray & Uffinger, the bank-building specialists who had lately designed Pottsville’s Schuylkill Trust building — a firm named as the architects both in the bank’s opening-day newspaper advertisements of November 1927 and in the building’s National Register nomination. In September 1926 the board awarded the construction contract to New York’s George A. Fuller Co. and the vault to the Mosler Safe Co. of Hamilton, Ohio; the old bank was demolished that October by the New Philadelphia contractor P. S. Canfield. What replaced it was a Colonial-revival banking house of red Harvard brick and white Georgia marble — “white pilasters support[ing] an elaborate marble entablature and pediment,” a marble head of Mercury on each side of the façade and Pluto, “god of the lower world and giver of the wealth in mines,” above the door. Inside, the main banking room rose fifty-five feet to a polychrome vaulted ceiling lit by twelve chandeliers, walled in French limestone and floored in Roman travertine “with insets of colored marble.” The vault door — thirty-six tons, twenty inches of solid tool-proof steel, twenty-four four-inch bolts, four time locks — was “so delicately poised on a heavy crane hinge that a child can swing it.” In the marble doorway hung “wrought bronze grill doors, depicting the coal mining industry,” modelled by Peters & Erdmann and executed by the General Bronze Corporation, the firm built around John Polachek’s bronze works.

Opening day, 1927

The new bank opened for public inspection on Friday, November 4, 1927, from one to ten in the evening; an orchestra played among baskets of flowers sent by the city’s other banks. On a walnut table in the center of the floor lay the bank’s original 1830 keys, “clumsy but efficient,” lent for the occasion by the Schuylkill County Historical Society — now itself housed in a former grammar school a few blocks north. Business began the following Monday, November 7; its first depositor was six-year-old Laura Elizabeth Ulmer, granddaughter of the bank’s president (whose opinion, the paper noted, “was not solicited in the matter”). Overhead, the pediment carried two dates, “1828” and “1928” — the year the Miners’ Bank was chartered and, cut a year early, its centennial.

From bank to hotel

The Miners National Bank kept its name into the 1990s; renamed Heritage National Bank in 1995, it merged into Berks County Bank in 1999, then into Sovereign in 2002 and Santander in 2013 — a branch operating in the building throughout, the pediment’s “1828–1928” still overhead. In 1985 the city renamed the railroad street along the building’s rear “Progress Avenue,” which is how the old bank came by its 121 South Progress address. The branch closed around 2023, and the building has since been redeveloped as The Miners 1928 — a boutique hotel, event venue, and spa that keeps the bank’s centennial year for its name.