Ashland Coal & Coke Company was organized by men from the Pennsylvania anthracite region, with several original stockholders from Ashland, Pennsylvania, giving their name to the company, mine, settlement, and post office. Most of Ashland’s leading stockholders and officers kept their interests and residences in Pennsylvania and operated the mines at Ashland as absentees. The leading stockholder and first president, W.J. Richards, remained in Schuylkill County while serving as president of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company. Ashland Coal & Coke was incorporated in 1892, obtained a lease from the Flat Top Land Association on March 18, 1893, and opened the mine with a wooden gravity-feed tipple that loaded coal into Norfolk & Western Railway hopper cars. The mine was a simple drift because the Pocahontas No. 3 coal seam outcropped along the hillside at five feet, ten inches thick. In 1894, its first full year of production, the mine produced more than 30,000 tons of semi bituminous smokeless coal. By 1935, total tonnage reached four million tons, all of it hand loaded. The coal seam was exhausted by the late 1970s, and the company ceased operations in 1980. Coal companies developed mines in the most practical way to extract coal, and when a seam was exposed along a hillside, they created a drift mine with a horizontal entry into the seam. As coal came out of the mine, each car was weighed and dumped, then usually moved by conveyor belt to a preparation plant for sorting and sizing before being taken to the tipple and loaded into railroad cars.