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Commemorative park · Dedicated May 8, 2025

Discovery Park

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Discovery Park at the corner of Third and West Market streets in downtown Pottsville — a brick plaza with American flags and a painted fire hydrant beneath the DISCOVERY PARK sign, Megan Price's firefighting-history mural on the wall to the right, and a church steeple and wooded ridge rising behind.
Discovery Park occupies the corner of Third and West Market streets in downtown Pottsville, across Third Street from the Free Public Library. Schuylkill Hub
Location
301 West Market Street, Pottsville, PA
Dedicated
May 8, 2025
Designer / maker
OOMBRA Architects (park) · Megan Price (mural)
Status
Extant
Coordinates
40.6848458, -76.1972915 · Open in Maps · Approximate location
Approximate — the Google Maps pin sits on the compact corner lot at Third and West Market Streets, immediately north of the confirmed mural building at 307 West Market. The park's own lot carries no county assessment record, so its identity can't be confirmed against the parcel layer.
Walking tour
Stop 3 of 11 on Historic Downtown Pottsville Walking Tour

Discovery Park is a small interactive park at the corner of Third and West Market streets in downtown Pottsville — directly across Third Street from the Pottsville Free Public Library. It is at once a children’s play-and-learning space, a memorial to the late Mayor Terry Reiley, who first imagined it, and a wall-sized mural of the city’s firefighting past. It was dedicated in 2025 on a corner lot that had carried a working building for most of a century and then stood empty for four decades.

The lot before the park — the “Market Street House”

The Discovery Park parcel, 301 West Market Street, is not raw ground reclaimed for a park; it is a cleared building lot with a commercial past reaching back to the 1800s.

In the early 1890s the corner was an established hotel. A Pottsville Republican classified of April 1892 offered it plainly: “HOTEL FOR SALE — Known as the Market street House. An old stand on easy terms. Apply at 301 West Market street.” The phrase “an old stand” tells us the Market Street House was already a long-running establishment by 1892 — a corner hotel of the sort that kept a barroom. That barroom surfaces two years later, when the saloon’s “fixtures, ice box, [and] holders of beer” at 301 West Market were advertised for liquidation in The Miners’ Journal of 1894–95.

By the mid-twentieth century the corner had turned from hospitality to professional offices; a 1973 advertisement places the Richard B. Ryon real-estate agency at “301 West Market Street,” boasting that its business was “26 years young.” The building was demolished around 1980, and the corner then stood empty. A 2021 Republican & Herald account of the park plans reports that the lot, “vacant for 40 years, was purchased by the city’s Redevelopment Authority in October [2020] from AT&T, which had owned it” — fixing both the going-vacant date and the intervening owner, and accounting for the four decades between the old building and the new park.

What the mural commemorates — Pottsville’s volunteer fire companies

The mural that dominates the park is, in effect, a painted history of the Pottsville Fire Department. The city’s firefighting tradition is nearly as old as the borough (chartered 1828), and the mural’s declared span, 1829 to 2018, brackets almost the whole of it.

The Schuylkill Hydraulian (1829)

The oldest company was the Schuylkill Hydraulian Fire Company. The fullest account is the fire-department history compiled by Ella Zerbey Elliott and reprinted in the Pottsville Evening Republican’s 1926 “Anniversary Number,” which dates the Hydraulian’s founding to about 1829 and quotes the Borough Council minute book on its earliest apparatus. During the Civil War “all the members of the company practically enlisted,” and in 1867–68 the Hydraulian reorganized under a new name, the Phoenix.

The Humane, from the Pottsville Fire Company of 1833

The other company rooted in the town’s earliest years is the Humane, organized as the Pottsville Fire Company on September 4, 1833 and later renamed. Its members trace a bucket-brigade origin to 1829, so both dates stand in the record at different thresholds: the 1829 origin and the 1833 institution as a fire company. Good Intent was organized in 1846, and the “Rough and Ready” — later renamed American Hose Company No. 2 — in 1848; the Good Will, West End, and Yorkville companies followed in the 1880s and ‘90s.

The Great Fire of 1914

The single event the mural leans on most is the “Million-Dollar Fire” of December 17, 1914, the largest in the city’s history. The original front-page coverage describes a fire that by eight o’clock had “practically wiped out the entire block from Norwegian to Mahantongo, from Centre to Second.” Among the businesses lost was Harry Little’s café — the “Café Little” the muralist worked into the wall, using the real windows of 307 West Market Street.

The 1948 American LaFrance

At the visual center of the mural is a fire engine: a 1948 American LaFrance stationed at American Hose Company No. 2, which fire historian Michael R. Glore has called the first cab-forward truck in the city’s history. Its arrival, at least, is firmly on the record. Under the headline “American Hose Company To Observe 100th Anniversary,” the Pottsville Republican of May 27, 1948 reported a “truck housing” open house for a new “American Le-France pumper with a capacity of pouring 1,500 gallons of water per minute,” bought for $20,960, during the company’s centennial month — a century after the “Rough and Ready” of 1848.

The 2024–25 merger

By the twenty-first century the Bureau of Fire counted eight volunteer companies. In October 2024 the two oldest — the Humane and the Phoenix, both tracing their roots to 1829 — announced they would consolidate, and in 2025 they merged into the new Pottsville Fire Company, a lineage that runs today through Pottsville Fire Company No. 1. The mural, unveiled in May 2024, thus caught the companies just as two of the founding names were about to combine.

The vision: Mayor Terry Reiley

Terrence P. “Terry” Reiley — a graduate of Pottsville Area High School, Villanova, and Widener, and the city’s youngest elected mayor — conceived a downtown interactive park but died of leukemia in February 2000, at thirty-three, before it was built. (His death year is sometimes given as 1997, including on the architect’s project page; the primary Republican & Herald tribute, “Terence P. Reiley: 1966–2000,” settles it at February 2000.) “The idea for Discovery Park originated with the late Mayor Terence Reiley,” city administrator Thomas Palamar said at the 2024 mural dedication, and the schematic remained largely his. His father, John D. W. Reiley — himself a later Pottsville mayor — attended the opening in May 2025, and his brother Hugh Reiley was there as well.

The mechanics followed two decades on. After the 2020 land purchase, a December 2021 $120,000 DCNR Community Conservation Partnerships matching grant was announced for the park — one of ten Schuylkill County park grants that year — with a local match arranged through the Pottsville Area Development Corp. OOMBRA Architects of Philadelphia designed the park.

The mural

Megan Price — an artist who studied at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia and had earlier painted a mural at a playground in Saint Clair — worked on it for roughly two years from a hydraulic lift, using ordinary exterior house paint and, by her count, about fifty brushes; she called it the largest mural she had ever done. She drew from about a dozen photographs supplied by fire historian Michael R. Glore, co-author of Schuylkill County Firefighting. It is composed, Price said, “from a child’s perspective” — a large child’s face at the left looks out over nearly two centuries of the city’s firefighting history, from the Schuylkill Hydraulian of 1829 to the modern department.

The park today

Discovery Park is, in its designers’ words, a new interactive public space “for residents, children, and families to read, learn, play, relax, and gather.” Its elements include a story area, a whispering dish, a kugel sculpture honoring departed firefighters, a sundial, a compass, a music component, and the firefighting mural, with a sustainability demonstration tied to on-site wind and solar power. The mural was dedicated on May 9, 2024, during the week Pottsville hosted the county Firefighters Convention; construction began the next day, and the park itself was dedicated on May 8, 2025, with about seventy-five people on hand. It is owned and operated by the City of Pottsville and the Pottsville Redevelopment Authority. Free and open to the public, with street parking on the surrounding blocks, it is a stop on the self-guided downtown Pottsville walking tour.

Timeline

Each entry is graded by how firmly it is sourced — confirmed against a primary document or official record, corroborated by an authoritative secondary source. Weaker leads are left off.

  1. 1829 — The Schuylkill Hydraulian Fire Company, Pottsville’s first, is formed; it reorganizes as the Phoenix in 1867–68. (Corroborated — Elliott’s 1926 compiled history, quoting the Borough Council minutes.)
  2. 1833 — The Pottsville Fire Company (later the Humane) is instituted; Good Intent (1846) and the “Rough and Ready,” later American Hose No. 2 (1848), follow. (Corroborated — Elliott 1926; Schalck & Henning 1907.)
  3. 1892 — 301 West Market is advertised for sale as the “Market Street House,” “an old stand.” (Confirmed — Pottsville Republican.)
  4. December 17, 1914 — The “Million-Dollar” Great Fire levels the block west of Centre Street; Harry Little’s café (“Café Little”) is among the losses. (Confirmed — Pottsville Republican front page.)
  5. June 1948 — American Hose No. 2 places a new $20,960 American LaFrance pumper in service in its centennial month — the mural’s centerpiece truck. (Confirmed — contemporaneous Pottsville Republican.)
  6. ≈ 1980 — The corner building is razed and the lot goes vacant; it later belongs to AT&T. (Confirmed — Republican & Herald, 2021.)
  7. February 2000 — Mayor Terry Reiley, whose idea the park was, dies of leukemia (1966–2000). (Confirmed — Republican & Herald tribute.)
  8. October 2020 — The Pottsville Redevelopment Authority buys the vacant lot from AT&T. (Confirmed — Republican & Herald, 2021.)
  9. December 2021 — A $120,000 DCNR matching grant for the park is announced. (Corroborated — Coal Region Canary.)
  10. May 9, 2024 — Megan Price’s firefighting mural is dedicated. (Corroborated — Republican-Herald via FireRescue1; WNEP.)
  11. October 2024 → 2025 — The Humane and Phoenix companies announce consolidation and merge into the new Pottsville Fire Company. (Corroborated — modern civic record.)
  12. May 8, 2025 — Discovery Park is officially dedicated; about seventy-five attend, including former Mayor John D. W. Reiley and Hugh Reiley. (Confirmed — Republican & Herald.)

Open threads

A few strands remain open. The pre-1980 building’s physical form — its footprint, stories, and the exact razing date — can be pinned from the Sanborn fire-insurance maps at the Library of Congress and Penn State; the full recorded chain of title into the AT&T holding and the 2020 purchase lives at the Schuylkill County Recorder of Deeds; and the founding-era (1829–1830s) company records, which predate the indexed Pottsville newspapers, survive in the Borough Council minute book and the Schuylkill County Historical Society manuscript holdings. This page will be updated as that research is completed.

Megan Price's 2½-story firefighting-history mural at Discovery Park — a large American flag, a red 1948 American LaFrance engine of American Hose Co. No. 2, silhouetted firefighters, and a painted book timelining the city's fire companies from 1829 to 2018.
The mural is the park's signature: Megan Price's history of Pottsville firefighting, on the east wall of 307 West Market Street. Schuylkill Hub

Sources

Frequently asked

What is Discovery Park and where is it?
It is a small interactive commemorative park at 301 West Market Street, at the corner of Third and West Market streets in downtown Pottsville — directly across Third Street from the Pottsville Free Public Library. It combines children's play-and-learning features with a memorial to the city's volunteer fire companies and to the late Mayor Terry Reiley, whose idea the park was.
What was on the site before the park?
An 1800s corner hotel called the "Market Street House," which kept a saloon — advertised for sale as "an old stand" in 1892. By the mid-20th century the corner held professional offices, including the Richard B. Ryon real-estate agency. The building was demolished around 1980; the lot then stood vacant, owned by AT&T, until the Pottsville Redevelopment Authority bought it in October 2020.
What does the mural show?
Pottsville firefighting history from 1829 to 2018, painted by Megan Price on the 2½-story east wall of the adjoining 307 West Market Street. Its centerpiece is a 1948 American LaFrance engine from American Hose Company No. 2 — remembered as the city's first cab-forward truck — and it works the building's real windows into a painted "Café Little," a business caught in the Great Fire of 1914.
How old are Pottsville's volunteer fire companies?
The oldest, the Schuylkill Hydraulian (reorganized as the Phoenix in 1867–68), dates to 1829; the Pottsville Fire Company — later the Humane — was instituted in 1833, with a bucket-brigade origin its members trace to 1829. Good Intent followed in 1846 and the "Rough and Ready," later American Hose No. 2, in 1848. In 2025 the Humane and the Phoenix merged into the new Pottsville Fire Company.
Who created Discovery Park and paid for it?
It was the vision of the late Mayor Terry Reiley, carried out by the City of Pottsville and the Pottsville Redevelopment Authority (which bought the lot in 2020), designed by OOMBRA Architects of Philadelphia, and funded in part by a $120,000 DCNR matching grant announced in December 2021.

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