COVALESKI, JOSEPH ( ? -- Oct. 27, 1893)Edison's assistant. Once upon a time, the Covaleski families were the most numerous Polish families in the mining town of Mount Carmel, Pennsylvania. In that time, too, no man did more to manufacture electricity and other products in the nineteenth century than Thomas Edison. Not until he invented an electric lamp did Mount Carmel come into the picture.
On November 7, 1883, four years after a lamp glowed for hours in his New Jersey laboratory, Edison made Mount Carmel the first town in the world to illuminate its streets in the evening with electric lamps. The lamps were kept alive whatever hours were chosen from a generator the Edison Electric Illuminating Company built in Mount Carmel. One of the first persons to go to work for Edison in Mount Carmel was a toung Polish immigrant named Joseph Covaleski. As a result of the street lamps the population of Mount Carmel rose almost 65 percent in the first ten years, and from 6,345 to 13,719 persons in 1900. It enabled a company in 1894 to build a trolley line eight miles from Mount Carmel to Shamokin and smothered the coal patches off the beaten path and created new villages.
Unfortunately, Joseph Covaleski suffered a heart attack at work on October 27, 1893, and never saw his nephews, Stanley and Harry Covaleski, who were born and raised in Shamokin, pitching in the major leagues. Gone, too, were the records of Richard B. Irvin, the Irish-born undertaker, who in the 1860s settled to Mount Carmel, where he learned cabinet making, Then, in 1870, while he had a furniture store on Oak Street, near Borough Hall, he made a small hearse and mounted it on a set of wagon wheels. It was the laughing stock of Mount Carmel. He discarded it, and by the time of Covaleski's death in 1893 crowds of sightseers admired the second hearse he built. Horses pulled the hearse to St. Joseph's cemetery in Beaverdale. Even his son, William R. Irvin, who took over the undertaking business in 1906, could not find a better hearse and used it for years to come.
Mount Carmel has yet to glorify itself and put up a historical marker and spread the word that it was the first town in the country with electric street lights.
Author: Edward Pinkowski (2011) --- EdPink @AOL.com