[13] The streetcar tram left from the Jerome terminus every two hours for the 60-minute trip that ended on downtown Johnstown's Main Street.

[14] Property right-of-way was obtained to extend this tram service to the south to Boswell, Jenners, Somerset, and Rockwood, although track construction never commenced.

[20] In 1998, Jerome natives Dick Trachok and Tommy Kalmanir each were inducted into the University of Nevada, Reno's football Team of Century.

[21] Jerome's Tony Venzon (1915–1971) was a baseball umpire for the National League 1957-1971, including 1959, 1962 and 1969 All-Star Games and 1963 and 1965 World Series.

An important and the longest of these efforts was the strike that began on Good Friday morning, April 14, 1922, led by local miner George Gregory, with the assistance of outside union supporters.

[25] Organizers slid past armed company police to circulate pamphlets and leaflets, as seen here and here, to encourage the miners' walk out.

To be sure, Hillman ran these towns with an iron fist; simply entering Jerome by car required inspection by a gauntlet of armed private police, for instance.

But Hillman also built Boswell with a number of extra amenities, such as a high school, central business district, and brick construction for its patch housing.

Hillman even engaged in a significant capital re-investment at Jerome, rebuilding a brick new community center after the initial structure was destroyed in a spectacular, wind-driven fire on April 2, 1922.

[41] The gentle-looking Hapgood, nephew of the U.S.’s ambassador to Denmark, at first evoked much derision among some Union officials, although apparently not among miners, with whom he worked shoulder-to-shoulder deep in the mines.

While more acquainted with the rough-and-tumble than was Hapgood initially, Gregory himself—who went by the nickname "Praying George," because of his frequent and vocal prayers during workers' rallies—was a strict teetotaler, who had been deputized by the local sheriff for a Prohibition squad.

[46] In addition to direct work as a miner, Hapgood relied on three approaches to organize the Somerset coalfields – civil disobedience, litigation, and publicity.

First, in pioneering methods evocative later of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Hapgood depended heavily on peaceful, civil disobedience.

Coal towns were the wholly-owned, private property of corporations at the time, and so, in the eyes of these companies, simply walking the street uninvited was deemed to be trespassing.

Hapgood in Somerset County was arrested more than a dozen times on the picket line and at the head of marches, as the strike unfolded.

[47] (Hapgood, Gregory, and others also took picketing directly to various corporate headquarters on Wall Street, where they did not invite arrest but achieved considerable positive publicity and access.)

[48] Hapgood, as the strike continued, then made sure that the plight of Somerset County miners remained front-page news across the United States.

In New York City, the program sparked sympathetic press coverage, generally effective public affairs, the intervention by the mayor of New York on the miners' side, direct public appeals in the subways, and even the support of mine owners, such as John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose family owned strike-bound Somerset County coal mines in Gray, Jenners, Acosta, Ralphton and Randolph.

The men marched through Jerome, with an accordion player in the lead, to a mass rally that was still going strong when union organizers arrived around noontime.

A commission appointed by the mayor of New York City, which got its coal to run subways from various Somerset County coal mines, found "hundreds of strikers evicted and suffering from the cold", "saw in tents, hen-houses, stables and other improvised homes women and children whose feet were bare and bleeding" and declared that living and working conditions "were worse than the conditions of slaves prior to the Civil War.

"[59] John D. Rockefeller Jr., whose family owned several Somerset County coal mines, but not Jerome's, wrote, "I believe that the underlying grievances of the miners in this district are well founded, and I have urged with all the sincerity and vigor at my command that the present labor policy of the operators, which seems to me to be both unwise and unjust, be radically altered.

Blankenhorn, who was a writer for the magazine "The Nation", relayed the adventure of one young student and union organizer from Pittsburgh, named Viscosky, who convinced Hillman to hire him as a guard just prior to the strike.

Later, when Viscosky thought it prudent to disappear from Jerome before Hillman caught on, he convinced police officials to give him free conduct pass through checkpoints, "so he could visit his sister in Jenners.

[55][67] The miners at Jerome and other Somerset County mines, left out of the contract, continued on for another twelve months, agreeing on August 14, 1923, to return to work[55] finally having been exhausted by a process that, for them, produced little economic benefit immediately.

At Jerome, Hillman Coal offered a general amnesty to most miners, if each returned to work as an individual and not as part of a local union.

[68] "[C]oal mining families....[lived] within a social, economic and political system of profound autocracy thinly veiled by shallow, pragmatic paternalism.

"[69] After the strike, Jerome emerged with the beginnings of an increasingly strong, tolerant social fabric, which remained tight-knit for several generations and still provides important unifying elements today.

The semi-bituminous coal bed at Jerome, part of the Upper Kittanning formation, was approximately six feet thick, capped by shale and limestone, with a smooth, hard sandstone floor.

Mine effluent contained high concentrations of iron, which rendered downstream sections of Bens Creek effectively sterile[73] from about 1900 to 1994.

Supplemental to the efforts of SCRIP, the Mountain Laurel Chapter of Trout Unlimited, a non-governmental organization, completed a substantial habitat improvement project [10] aimed at increasing the number of fish that Bens Creek can hold.