Coal Transport in Mauch Chunk

Coal Transport in Mauch Chunk. "The problem of getting coal from wagon to ark was solved by constructing an inclined loading chute at Mauch Chunk that extended downward from Mount Pisgah to a coal-loading house along the Lehigh River. The coal house projected over the river's edge to facilitate loading the boats." , John Hoffman, Anthracite in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania, Anthracite coal was discovered in 1792 at Summit Hill, nine miles west of here. But the chief market for it was a hundred miles away in Philadelphia, and getting the coal there was a challenge. The only profitable way to move coal was by boat, and the only water was the wild and rocky Lehigh River. Josiah White and Erskine Hazard, who bought the mine and took control of the river in 1818, had a solution., They built first a road, then a gravity railroad, to bring the coal down from Summit Hill to their new village of Mauch Chunk. Here shallow boats were loaded with 8 to 10 tons of coal. The boats went down the Lehigh through a series of low dams with gates that could be opened to let them float over the rocks down to Easton, then ride the Delaware River to Philadelphia. Soon their Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company was sending thousands of tons of anthracite south, then millions of tons after a river and canal system was constructed that let mule-drawn, 100 ton canal boats travel both ways., Inclined planes funneled even more coal from more distant mines into the river system, and in later decades the Lehigh Valley and Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroads were built along its banks. By the middle of the 19th century, anthracite powered the nation, particularly the iron industry. Mauch Chunk became the center for coal transportation for much of the great northeastern Pennsylvania anthracite fields, and one of the wealthiest communities in America. But demand for anthracite declined steadily after World War I, and Mauch Chunk , now Jim Thorpe , declined with it until the resurgence of tourism in the 1980s.