Gerlach

Gerlach was essentially founded around the entrepreneuring of John W. Gerlach, who first sold goods in the Gerlach area, briefly in 1831. Although he would later relocate to the Colony Bay area, he returned and opened a general store in Gerlach in 1837. He would later build a small horse mill as well as a tannery. The village itself was officially chartered and named in June 1850. In the late 19th century, small underground coal mines began to appear near the village and the population expanded rapidly. At the turn of the 20th century, the population was much larger than it is today. Gerlach became an Oranjestad colony in 1910 at their request to counter what they perceived as aggression from their neighbors Phasma to the west and Darktown to the north.

Signs of the underground mines remain to this day, including the collapsed bridge to Colony Bay and the sunken road north and east of the village. By the 1940s, the underground mines were gone and the small surface mines had moved on. Today, the village is substantially smaller than it was in its heyday. The main industry today is cheese production, produced exclusively by the descendants of John W. Gerlach.