The Schuylkill Trust Company Building

The eight-story bank-and-office tower at 101 North Centre Street — at the corner of Centre and Market Streets in downtown Pottsville — was built in 1924–1925 as the home of the Schuylkill Trust Company, to the design of the New York bank architects Mowbray & Uffinger. It is commonly dated to 1923; the contemporary Pottsville newspapers place the construction contract in February 1924 and the opening in May 1925. The bank was consolidated with another in 1964, and today the former banking hall houses a cannabis dispensary, with the upper floors the subject of a funded plan to convert them into apartments.

The bank that outgrew its home (1921)

The Schuylkill Trust Company did not begin at Centre and Market. In late 1921 it sold the building it then occupied to the clothing firm Doutrich & Co., in what the Pottsville Republican called “one of the biggest mercantile real estate transactions in the history of the city.” The paper reported on November 23, 1921 that “Doutrich & Co., one of the biggest retail clothing firms in Eastern Penna., has purchased the Schuylkill Trust Co. building, now occupied by this banking institution” — a “magnificent three story building.” That earlier home stood at 11 North Centre Street, where Boyd’s Pottsville Directory for 1919–1921 lists the bank’s own advertisement — “The Schuylkill Trust Co. Rents Boxes in its Fire and Burglar Proof Vaults” — at 11 North Centre St., with professional offices above it. Selling that building left the company needing a new home, and it built one a short distance away, at the Centre-and-Market corner.

That corner had its own prior life. The new tower, the Republican recalled at the 1925 opening, “occupies the site on which stood for many years the Thompson hardware store, which was operated until his death by the late L. C. Thompson, later by a stock organization.” The hardware store was cleared to make way for the bank.

An eight-story “sky-scraper” for Centre and Market (1924)

In February 1924 the Schuylkill Trust Company accepted plans from Mowbray & Uffinger for an eight-story building at Centre and Market and awarded the construction contract. The Pottsville Republican of February 26, 1924 ran an architect’s rendering above the announcement: “Centre and Market St. corner is to have another building of about the same height as the Thompson Building that now stands on one corner,” the paper reported, “for the Schuylkill Trust Co., has accepted the plans of Mowbray and Uffinger, architects of New York, for an eight story building.” (The “Thompson Building” the paper used for scale was a separate structure on another corner of the intersection, not the L. C. Thompson hardware store that was cleared from the building site itself.) The construction contract went to a New York firm the paper named the Clough-Borne Corp.; at the 1925 opening the Republican printed the name as the Clough-Bourne Corp., the spelling used here.

Mowbray & Uffinger were a New York partnership formed in 1895 and, by the firm’s published history, specialists in banks and bank vaults — credited with more than four hundred of them across the country before the Second World War. The firm still carried Mowbray’s name when it took this commission, though Louis M. Mowbray, one of its two founding partners, had died in 1921; it reorganized as Uffinger, Foster & Bookwalter in 1927. In that later form it designed the rival Miners National Bank building a few blocks south, which opened in 1927, two years after this one.

The 1924 account described the building that would rise: “The base of the building will be granite, above this to the third story will be lime stone, from there up to the top story buff brick will be used and the top story will be finished in lime stone. The building will be absolutely fire proof throughout and will contain two elevators…” The program mixed banking, retail, and offices: the bank took the rear basement and the first two floors; a barber shop went in the front basement and a news-and-cigar stand in the lobby; the floor above the bank held seven stores “arranged as an arcade”; and the floors above carried offices — “17 to a floor or 85 in all,” each with hot and cold running water. A standard architectural survey, Buildings of Pennsylvania, later filed the result as a “typical small-town ‘skyscraper,’ with six stories of offices above a banking hall.”

Opening day, 1925

The building opened in the middle of May 1925. On May 18 the Pottsville Daily Republican gave it a multi-page feature under the banner “Schuylkill Trust Company’s New Sky-Scraper.” The first tenants were among the town’s professionals, several of whom moved their practices into the new offices. Dr. W. H. Hertz, a dentist who had kept parlors at 22 South Centre Street, took Room 202, “equipped with the most modern dental appliances.” Dr. G. H. Moore, an eye-ear-nose-and-throat specialist who had previously rented offices “in the Thompson building,” took “a half dozen offices in the new bank building.” The investment house West & Co., members of the New York and Philadelphia stock exchanges, was among the congratulatory advertisers. The city directories confirm the pattern, listing tenants by room number in the “Schuylkill Trust bldg” — the 1926 directory lists Dr. Hertz a floor higher, at “302 Schuylkill Trust bldg.”

This is why the profile dates the building to 1924–1925. A standard architectural reference gives 1923, and later accounts — down to the dispensary now in the banking hall — have followed it; the contemporary Pottsville press is the earlier record.

The Schuylkill Trust Company, 1887–1964

Chartered in 1887, the Schuylkill Trust Company was older than the tower it built. Pennsylvania corporate records give its original name as the Schuylkill Real Estate Title Insurance & Trust Company of Pottsville, later shortened to the Schuylkill Trust Company — a state-chartered trust company. By 1916 the county’s biographical history noted it in passing as “a reliable banking concern.”

In June 1930, at the leading edge of the Depression, the Pottsville Republican reported “Talk of Local Banks Merging” — a proposed consolidation of the Schuylkill Trust Company with the Miners National Bank, under which banking would move to the Miners’ newer building on South Centre Street. That merger did not proceed as described: the company kept its own name, and twice carried its objection to Pennsylvania’s tax on its shares to the U.S. Supreme Court — Schuylkill Trust Co. v. Pennsylvania, 296 U.S. 113 (1935) and 302 U.S. 506 (1938). It went on operating from this building — the city directories list it here for decades — until August 1964, when, as the Republican announced, “Schuylkill Trust-Berks Consolidation In Effect”: the Schuylkill Trust Co. of Pottsville consolidated with the Berks County Trust Co. of Reading “to form American Bank and Trust Co. of Pennsylvania.” Its last president, Daniel A. Morris, became a senior vice-president of the new bank, and customers were told the same people who had served them at the Schuylkill Trust would continue to do so.

From bank to dispensary

The banking hall stayed in bank use for most of a century. The Schuylkill Trust operated here until 1964; the hall then carried the American Bank and Trust name and, through later mergers, latterly a Wells Fargo branch. That bank use has since ended. Since December 2021 the former banking hall has housed the BEYOND/HELLO cannabis dispensary, operated by Jushi Holdings, its retail fit-out set into the old bank’s interior.

The upper six floors are the subject of a redevelopment. In November 2022 the developer Pottsville Centre, LLC was awarded a $3 million state Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program grant to convert them into sixty market-rate apartments. Announcing the grant, State Senator David Argall said the floors had “been vacant for many years,” at “one of the best-known business locations in Schuylkill County.” As of the most recent public coverage, the conversion had not been reported complete.

The building stands within the Pottsville Downtown Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 — a district listing rather than an individual one. A few blocks south, the Miners National Bank building — the rival with which the Schuylkill Trust was linked in the 1930 merger talk, and the work of the same architects’ successor firm — has itself been redeveloped, as a hotel.