| Mauch Chunk, now Jim
Thorpe, was established on the Lehigh River as a shipping depot for
anthracite coal in 1818 by Josiah White, a Philadelphia Quaker and
brilliant engineer, and his trusted business partner, Erskine Hazard. By
1829, White and Hazard had founded the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company
and built an efficient transportation system that moved coal nine miles
over the mountains to Mauch Chunk by Switchback Gravity Railroad, and
forty-six miles along the Lehigh Canal to Easton.
With the arrival of the railroads,
the Switchback became a major tourist attraction. As rail excursionists
descended on Mauch Chunk to experience a hair-raising ride on America’s
first roller coaster and enjoy the magnificent scenery, the coal
shipping town, billed by the railroads as “the Switzerland of America,”
became a tourist destination second in popularity to Niagara Falls.
In a story stranger than fiction, the
town exchanged its name for the name of Jim Thorpe when the 1912 Olympic
hero was laid to rest there in 1954.
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