Our first Prototype Place: Coatesville, PA
Situated in Pennslvania’s highest income county, Chester County, along a portion of US Route 30, thirteen thousand residents make up the community of Coatesville. First settled as a fur trading outpost between local First Nations tribes and colonial settlers, and later developed as a steel town in the early 1900s, Coatesville was once called the “Pittsburgh of the East”. Today, Coatesville is a study in contrast, and an all-too-familiar American story.
While Chester County is the state’s wealthiest, the median income in Coatesville is three times lower than the rest of the county, with over 20 percent of the population living below the poverty line.
While Chester County is predominantly white (82%), Coatesville is decidedly less so, with 38 percent of the population white and 45 percent African American.
While Chester County is the fastest growing county in the Delaware Valley, and indeed the entire American Northeast, Coatesville’s population peaked at 14,582 — in 1930.
In 2016 we were bussed to Coatesville as volunteers, and what became readily apparent was that, lost in these stories of facts and place, were the stories of people who lived there. And the more we learned about Coatesville, the more we saw how it was a living model of how America is moving and changing, a model of the stories America has ignored or misrepresented, a model for what a political discourse dominated by demographics and data is consistently missing.
As home to what was once the third largest steel producer in America, Coatesville contains the story of former mill towns and lost manufacturing jobs.
As home to the last recorded lynching in Pennsylvania, Coatesville contains the story of deep and unresolved histories of segregation and race.
As home to one of the most egregious cases of modern gerrymandering, Coatesville contains the story of the political battle to reconstitute American democracy through demarcation and delineation.
We’re going back to Coatesville to learn more about these stories — and undoubtedly to uncover new stories — as part of our effort to better understand the whole context of participation in civic life, what drives that participation, and what prevents or undermines it.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing with you our research. We’ll dive more deeply into its parallel histories as a company town, as a town dealing with the legacy of segregation, and as a political battleground. We’ll begin to surface the stories of its people and their experiences, and start to make sense of civic participation and community membership within the warp and weft of people and place.
Welcome to Coatesville, First Persons Project’s first Prototype Place.
