Pennsylvania had intermittent contacts with the whaling industry throughout its history.

The Philadelphia & Reading Coal & Iron Company operated its largest out-of-state branch -- a coal scuttle and transport terminus -- on the New Bedford waterfront, and did a large business with the whaling - related companies of New England.

Its managing director from 1882 to his death in 1913, Charles W. Agard, was an avocational whaling historian, oral history collector, and member of New Bedford's so-called "Spun Yarn Club," an ad hoc gathering of active and retired sea captains, artisans, tradesmen, merchant purveyors to the whaling trade, and amateur enthusiasts.

Conversely, Pennsylvania cities were important distribution centers for whaling products. Philadelphia merchants Mitchell & Croasdale even adopted as their logo and featured on their company poster an American whaling scene after New London whaleman Cornelius B. Hulsart (see the office vignette in "Whaling in the South Seas").

The Quaker community of Philadelphia was linked economically with the Quaker establishments of Nantucket and New Bedford, and furnished many investors and participants in the whaling trades. The best known was capitalist Charles W. Morgan, namesake of the famous last - surviving American whaleship.

The urban centers, farms, and industrial and mining towns of Pennsylvania furnished a constant supply of men for the ships of Massachusetts, New York, and, in the 1840s, nearby Delaware -- including John F. Martin of Philadelphia, who as a seaman in the Lucy Ann of Wilmington in the 1840s produced the finest illustrated journal of a voyage ever known in the whaling annals. A few of his watercolors are reproduced in the Tryworks segment of "Whaling in the South Seas".

After petroleum oil was discovered at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859, it was specialists from New Bedford's whaling industry who were brought to Pittsburgh to develop the means to refine and process it, ironically eventually putting the whaling industry out of business.

Since 1939 all of the nation's output of traditional whaling guns and bomb lances has been by the Naval Company of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, who provide efficient whalecraft to Native (Eskimo) hunters in Alaska and to subsistence whalers in the West Indies.