06/06/2026
J. Clifford Forrest III built his coal name outside the usual Appalachian headlines.
He built in empire in western Pennsylvania, where bituminous coal still fed power plants, mills, rail lines and working families.
Forrest started young. A North Hills native, he first worked as a coal broker, then took the chance to start a mine while still in his early 20s.
That mine became the base of Rosebud Mining Company, founded in 1979 and headquartered in Kittanning.
It didn’t stay small.
By 2015, Forrest told Pennsylvania lawmakers that Rosebud had grown from a handful of employees into more than 1,000 workers, with 23 underground mines, seven surface mines and seven preparation plants across Elk, Clearfield, Indiana, Somerset, Cambria, Beaver and Armstrong counties.
In a coal industry often dominated by public giants and bankrupt operators, Rosebud became something different: a private Pennsylvania coal machine, built mine by mine, county by county.
Forrest also moved beyond coal. His business interests expanded into water treatment, natural gas, precision manufacturing, hospitality and even Pittsburgh Brewing Company, where he tried to revive Iron City B**r, one of western Pennsylvania’s most recognizable names.
But coal remained the foundation.
His career also carried a touch of controversy, including regulatory fights and the shadow of Freedom Industries, the company tied to the 2014 Elk River chemical spill in West Virginia after Forrest-linked ownership entered the picture.
That makes the story less clean, but much more real.
Cliff Forrest’s legacy is not a simple coal-baron fairy tale.
It’s the story of a private operator who built one of Pennsylvania’s most important coal businesses, then carried that money into other pieces of the region’s industrial identity.
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