How Pennsylvania's Only Town is an Important Small City in its Region

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For this month’s installment of Small City Stories, we spoke with Laurie McCants, co-founder and former ensemble member of the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble (BTE), about the role of the arts in shaping Bloomsburg’s local identity and regional influence. Laurie and a small group of artists founded BTE in 1978, establishing a permanent ensemble of actors, writers, and directors in the town. Over decades of theater and place-based storytelling, her work with BTE has both strengthened civic life and connected Bloomsburg to neighboring communities.

“We are ringed by coal country,” Laurie says. Bloomsburg, a town of about 12,000 people, sits along the Susquehanna River in northeastern Pennsylvania, surrounded by the remnants of older industrial landscapes. Upriver, coal-region communities like Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton dot the hills, and to the south, cities such as Shamokin and Pottsville mark another edge of that extractive past. To the southwest, near the confluence of the Susquehanna’s North and West Branches, Northumberland forms another point on this ring around the Bloomsburg–Berwick micropolitan area – a location that historically supported the movement and distribution of coal. The small places within this orbit were adjacent to coal production but remained removed from the core mining areas.

Most of Bloomsburg’s surrounding “coal towns” are actually cities or boroughs; Bloomsburg is the only place in Pennsylvania officially designated as a “town.” The label often carries connotations of “smallness” like remoteness, limited influence, or economic marginality. In reality, aside from its rural landscape, Bloomsburg defies those expectations, and Laurie is largely indifferent to the distinction. “Bloomsburg’s mighty proud of the fact that it’s the only town in Pennsylvania,” she says, “but I think that’s a kinda odd thing to be proud of. We got a lot of other things to be proud of–our university, our terrific Bloomsburg Fair, our vibrant public library, and the fact that this town and the surrounding region has supported BTE for almost 50 years now.” Laurie emphasizes how Bloomsburg functions beyond this label as a civic, cultural, and educational hub for surrounding former coal-region communities, often playing a stronger regional role than nearby “cities.”

As she mentions, much of this regional pull can be traced to decades of sustained arts and cultural activity, originating from institutions like BTE. Laurie and her fellow artists established BTE from the influence of a live-long mentor Alvina Krause. Krause was a renowned acting teacher who taught at Northwestern University before relocating from Chicago to Bloomsburg. Krause, then in her nineties, planned to offer private acting classes in her home. “It was because of her that we came, and stayed, and started the theatre company,” Laurie says, having visited Krause for her weekly lessons. Laurie’s artistic work is deeply intertwined with why she chose to come and make her life in Bloomsburg, and from the beginning, the arts played a central role in establishing and sustaining people in the town.

Building on Krause’s foundation, Laurie helped BTE quickly become a cornerstone of Bloomsburg’s cultural and economic life, serving as a form of social infrastructure for the town and broader region. She saw the Ensemble’s work – “the plays that we’ve created about the place where we live” – as a way to connect people and communities across the area. This is perhaps most notable in BTE’s production, Hard Coal: Life in the Region, a performance that situated Bloomsburg within the broader history of northeastern Pennsylvania, while also drawing audiences from across the region, and physically linking communities as people traveled to and from performances.

In the 20th century, coal was the primary industry in the region and played a dominant role in the lives of the communities around Bloomsburg. Its legacy remains visible, particularly in areas that have experienced decades of economic decline. While Bloomsburg is connected to this history, it lies just outside the industry’s core, allowing the town to maintain a distinct cultural and economic presence that engages with the broader region. To capture this history, Laurie and the Ensemble created Hard Coal “from oral histories and local stories” to demonstrate how the extractive coal industry continues to shape life across the region.

Laurie points out that many young people “had no knowledge of the industry that brought their great-grandparents to this country.” Schools traveled from across the region to see the show, and the Ensemble also took the performance on tour, bringing the stories back to the communities where they began. In doing so, the play not only deepened understanding of regional history but also physically connected Bloomsburg to its neighbors.

Photo Credit: Michael Williams, The Beauty of Bloomsburg

Bloomsburg’s own industrial past offers a parallel example of how regional histories persist in different forms and helps explain Bloomsburg’s outsized regional role. Unlike coal, the town’s textile industry receded but had not fully disappeared. “Bloomsburg was a textile town, with carpet mills,” Laurie recalls. The Magee Carpet Company, founded by a Scottish immigrant, was the town’s primary employer. Like many industries, the mills eventually moved south. But in Bloomsburg, people stayed, and the skills remained. Former employees went on to establish the Bloomsburg Carpet Company, which still operates today, producing bespoke carpets for ceremonial and cultural institutions, including presidential inaugurations and the Metropolitan Opera House. The company’s continued presence and the industry (or artistry) that has endured in Bloomsburg can be traced to its regional role today as an emerging center.

Laurie emphasized Hard Coal as an example of the Ensemble’s strength in place-based storytelling. Their productions often reflect local or regional experiences, strengthen physical connection, and paint a more composite picture of Bloomsburg and its region. Playwright and friend of Laurie’s ashley sparks reflected on the Ensemble’s approach; it “informed how I think about entering community. Story [and] the relationship between trauma and story, when you are working in community, when a community is not ready to start working through trauma, and how artists have to start navigating it.” Through productions like Hard Coal, BTE shows how the arts can serve as an entryway to working through a difficult industrial history, increasing engagement and dialogue around this legacy.

Like Hard Coal, this commitment is especially evident in Letters to the Editor: Two Hundred Years in the Life of an American Town. Laurie describes the project as emerging “out of a desire to listen to our community.” The Ensemble was drawn to “people’s voices–the voices of citizenship that come through every day in the Letters to the Editor column in our local newspapers.” In its title, the production emphasizes Bloomsburg’s identity as a “town,” where the local newspaper served as a central source of information and a consistent connection to residents, making it an ideal medium for listening to the community across centuries.

While Bloomsburg maintains a clear regional presence, it also retains a distinct local identity where its civic infrastructure and small size allows many voices to be heard in public dialogue. The local paper published two columns generated from resident comments: traditional letters to the editor and “30 Seconds,” a feature that allowed people to call in anonymously and share whatever was on their minds. After reviewing nearly 10,000 letters spanning two centuries, Laurie and the Ensemble transformed this material into two stage productions in the late 1990s, turning these oral and material histories into a portrait of local civic life. In this production, Laurie asks: “What motivates people to write? How do others respond? Do these exchanges make a difference?” By staging these questions, the play makes visible how citizenship is practiced through speaking, responding, and disagreeing in public. Performing these texts live slows the pace of civic listening and allows audiences to hear decades of resident commentary as part of a shared civic record.

Photo Credit: Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble

In this way, BTE and other arts and cultural organizations have become intertwined with local governance. The theater invites people into civic practice, and their presence is so central within the Bloomsburg community that many local officials were once part of the Ensemble themselves. As Laurie explains, “our mayor is somebody who grew up with the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble. He was a child actor when he was a kid.”

Laurie’s work with the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble shows just how powerful the arts can be in a small town. Through decades of place-based storytelling – from Hard Coal to Letters to the Editor – BTE has not only reflected Bloomsburg’s history and identity but also strengthened connections across the region. Although its designation as the only ‘town’ in the state can be overstated or carry misleading connotations, Bloomsburg plays an outsized role as a cultural and civic hub for surrounding communities. At the same time, it maintains civic infrastructure that allows many voices to be heard, with arts institutions serving as central actors in its social and political life. Its example reminds us that political boundaries and arbitrary labels often fail to capture the complexities of a place, and that, as Laurie says, creating based on “the places where we live” can reveal far more about local and regional identity and its interplay.