Steamtown National Historic Site

PARK OVERVIEW

Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was originally a private steam-era railroad museum called Steamtown USA that was founded in the early 1960s by millionaire railroad enthusiast F. Nelson Blount. The museum first operated in North Walpole, New Hampshire, before moving to Bellows Falls, Vermont. Due to excess air pollution regulations in Vermont and fighting over the rights to use the state-owned railroad tracks, Steamtown USA moved to Scranton in 1984.

Hoping the new attraction would bring much-needed tourist dollars to the city, the Scranton government and private developers spent $13 million renovating the abandoned Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad railyard in 1983 for the museum’s opening in 1984. Visitation was hoped to be somewhere between 200,000 and 400,000 each year, but by 1987 only 60,000 people were coming to the park. The attraction was a flop, and in 1988 Steamtown USA was $2.2 million in debt. All excursions were cancelled that year.

Two years prior, U. S. Congressman Joe McDade of Pennsylvania began working on turning Steamtown USA into a National Historic Site, and with some last-minute politicking, he successfully inserted provisions for its creation into a 1986 appropriations bill, effectively bypassing the National Park Service’s review of the project. The NPS had already rejected the proposal to turn Steamtown USA into a national park when it was in Vermont because it was not an actual site of historical significance, just a collection of steam-era locomotives and cars, and now here it was part of the National Park System with the passing of the appropriations bill.

Over the next decade, millions of dollars were spent renovating the railyard. As detractors have pointed out, there is nothing historically significant about the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western railyard, and the fact that very little from its historic mid-1800s to early 1900s time period remained made the project less of a renovation and more of the building of a new railyard from scratch. Visitors were first allowed into the park in 1988, but only the railyard was open. In 1991, the ruins of the 1902 roundhouse—the only structure from the historical railyard that remained standing—was renovated, and a new, 90-foot turntable was installed. The Visitor Center and Museum were completed the next year, and in 1995 the park officially opened to the public at its full capacity. However, yearly visitation has never been much more than what it was in the mid-1980s before Steamtown USA closed as a private entity. In 2023, roughly 60,000 people visited the park.