Nicholas Selgrath Died in a Town that Disappeared

When Nicholas Edward Selgrath was registered for the draft in late 1917, he was living on a farm in Scott Township, Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, working for a man named John McLaughlin. Nicholas was 25 years old and single, medium height and weight, dark hair and gray eyes, in good shape, a prime subject for the draft board. Before he was drafted, however, he enlisted as a private and joined Pennsylvania Company 24, 2nd Battalion.

I cannot find a thing about this company online. The only 24th Company online is an all-Black company, which Nicholas wouldn’t have been able to join, being white.

At any rate, Nicholas was in New Jersey in the fall of 1918, stationed in barracks just to the side of the planned town of Amatol, which had been built that very year, from the ground up, for the purpose of supporting the plant two miles away that was processing heavy metals and manufacturing weapons for the War effort. The soldiers and locals called the barracks area “Fort Pershing.” In a newspaper article published in 2013, Mark Maxwell, an historian from neighboring Egg Harbor City, was quoted as saying that a report from the time of World War I told how the cavalry stationed at Amatol would come into Egg Harbor City, “raising a ruckus” and then being put in jail by the sheriff. The next morning, the sheriff discovered the jail empty, its doors still locked, but the roof with an opening in it.
(See here for the newspaper article.)

So it looks as if it might have been a cavalry company that Nicholas was attached to. Whatever it was, and however much “ruckus” he and his buddies participated in, they could not withstand the enemy that crept in among them that summer, the enemy that exploded with deadly force come fall: influenza. Most likely it was the fatal pandemic that took Nicholas’s life on October 23, 1918.

Nicholas was the eldest of seven children of William Francis Selgrath and Carolina Krauter. Nicholas’s father was born to German immigrant parents in Schuykill County, Pennsylvania. His mother was an immigrant from Germany herself. His younger sisters were Agnes, Susanna, and Barbara. His younger brothers were Joseph and William. The baby sister, Caroline, had died the day of her birth. Their mother had died the same day she gave birth to Caroline, and their father had married the family housekeeper about eight years later. Her name was Bessie Entwistle, from England. The family lived in Mahanoy City, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania.

Amatol has an interesting history. You can read about it here. 

Briefly, the town was planned and begun in March 1918, with its buildings being thrown up at the rate of four a day through the spring and summer of that year. There were a movie house, a steam generating plant, a steam heating plant, dormitories and houses, churches, a bank, a municipal building, and a railroad station. But with the signing of the Armistice in November 1918, the town was doomed. No more of its planned buildings would be constructed, and workers would be moved out soon. In only ten years the site was being reclaimed by the forest, and very little trace of it remains today.

The book contains interesting pictures, some of which might even have shown Nicholas among the military men. We’ll never know.