Scranton gets its name from the Scranton family, the first Americans to build iron rails in America.  Although originally called Harrison after President William Henry Harrison from the 1800’s, the town’s name was ultimately changed to Scrantonia and then transformed once more into the modern moniker of Scranton.  Over the course of the mid-nineteenth century, the Scranton family had helped to oversee massive furnace constructions and then began building large amounts of rail for export throughout the nation.  Soon, one in six tracks in the nation would be Scranton rails.

Settlement in the Northeast Pennsylvanian region which the city now occupies dates, of course, to times well before the emergence of the Scrantons.  A home to various Indian tribes, Quakers came into Pennsylvania and the first recorded settlers were the Abbott brothers and Slocum brothers, both pairs operating a gristmill and ultimately adding on a charcoal furnace for iron production.  It was years later that the Scrantons, with their Lackawanna Iron and Steel Company, entered the picture of the town’s past.  

The town’s namesake company, however, moved to Buffalo in 1902, and so coal replaced iron and steel as the main export of Scranton, which now became dubbed the “Anthracite Capital of the World.”  But with the decline in demand for coal after World War II, Scranton fell on more hard times and the early 1990’s were characterized by ever-increasing deficits.  With help from the Pennsylvania state government though, Scranton was able to get its economic act together, and as a new century starts the city seems to continue to ride the wave of this recent economic rebound.