Research Notes

Mauch Chunk, the town that sold the slope three times

A town in a gorge learned to sell the slope it was stuck on: first as a coal road, then as a ride, then as a name.

Switchback Railroad, Mauch Chunk, Pa. STA-1088, 1859–1885. Source unrecorded. Rectified left-eye image, via the Internet Archive.

The car with no engine

A car rolls down a mountain with no locomotive in front of it and no engine under it. The only sound is the wheels. That was the whole attraction, and it was enough to fill a town.

The track ran about nine miles from the mines at Summit Hill down to Mauch Chunk, on the Lehigh River. Loaded cars went down by gravity. Empty cars had to come back up, and at first that was mule work. A team hauled the empties up the grade, a trip that took four or five hours, and when the cars were all down, the mules themselves rode down in special cars.

Later the company replaced the mules with steam. Two inclined planes lifted the empties, up Mount Pisgah and Mount Jefferson. A steam engine dragged a small Barney car out of a pit below ground to push the coal car up, and a ratchet kept a loose car from running away downhill, and later turned up in roller coasters as the anti-rollback device.

Passengers paid 75 cents to ride the same system. In 1873 the line carried 30,478 passengers. The ride had become the town's second business, after coal, and then its first, as coal left the line.

Coal shutes, Mauch Chunk. STA-1082, 1859–1885 (catalog spelling preserved). Source unrecorded. Rectified left-eye image, via the Internet Archive.

Six nights in the woods

The road existed because two Philadelphia wire makers needed coal and could not get it to market. Josiah White and Erskine Hazard had been using anthracite in their wire works, and the coal was up in the mountains above the Lehigh River. Boats could be floated down, but they could not be brought back up, so each load cost a boat as well as the coal. White and Hazard bought into the mining company and the navigation company, merged them, and set out to fix both ends: the river below and the mountain above.

"In 4th month of 1818 Erskine and I surveyed the levels of the River from Stoddartsville to Easton. The ice had not yet disappeared. We found no houses between Stoddartsville and Lausanne and laid in the woods for six nights."

They built dams with flash gates, White's "bear trap" gates, that let a boat ride down a flume into a slackwater pool below. It worked, crudely, and only one way. Later work turned it into a two-way canal with locks, so boats could come back upstream.

The mountain end was the gravity road: rails laid on the old wagon road, nine miles of steady descent from Summit Hill to the river. On the first day of regular running, seven cars of coal made the trip, dropping 936 feet on the way down. At the bottom, men separated the coal into sizes, nut, stove, egg, and broken, and loaded it into cars or boats.

Packer is the second generation of the same business. He came to Mauch Chunk a few years after the road opened, started with canal boats, and ended up controlling the railroad that replaced the canal. That railroad reached Easton from Mauch Chunk in the mid-1850s. Packer built his mansion on the hillside above the town, a house that still stands, and his money later founded Lehigh University.

Canal lock, East Mauch Chunk in the distance. STA-1098, 1859–1885. Source unrecorded. Rectified left-eye image, via the Internet Archive.

The afternoon trade

Visitors had been asking to ride the coal road almost from the start. The company resisted, then gave in, then scheduled it. A travel report from 1877 put it plainly:

"The urgent demand of visitors to be permitted to travel on this road, even in the dirty coal cars, finally led to an arrangement by which excursion trains for passengers were run twice a day."

Coal went down in the morning and passengers took the afternoon. Then passengers took the whole line, and the coal went somewhere else, through a tunnel the company dug under Nesquehoning in the early 1870s.

O. S. Senter, writing in 1873, described what a visitor saw arriving from the narrows:

"Here we have at a single glance a view of the town, the coal shoots, the 'Switchback,' the winding bounding river, with its locks, falls and rapids, and above all the grand old mountain summits, which rise up skyward, and towering towards the vast blue vault of the heavens, seem to rest against and support its mighty dome like the pillars of time."

The town was selling the gorge the coal road had been built to cross. A car climbed the Pisgah plane and then rolled down through woods and over trestles with nothing but gravity to answer for it. The round trip, once four and a half hours, took eighty minutes after the planes were built. People paid for a coal car that did not need an engine, and the company, which had built the line to move coal, discovered it had also built the first American thrill ride.

Mansion house, Mauch Chunk. STA-1102, 1859–1885. Source unrecorded. Rectified left-eye image, via the Internet Archive.

The same streets

The same streets that sold the ride also held a jail, and the jail held a different story about coal. Irish miners had been fighting mine owners over wages and working conditions. Mine owners hired the Pinkerton agency, whose agent James McParland worked undercover for more than two years and accused twenty men of murder, arson, and kidnapping. Whether a formal organisation called the Molly Maguires ever existed is still debated; the case rested largely on McParland's testimony, and the prosecution was run by men tied to those companies.

In June 1877, four men were hanged at the Carbon County Prison in Mauch Chunk on a single day: Michael Doyle, Edward Kelly, Alexander Campbell, and John Donahue. The scaffold was built below the cells. Campbell, according to the story told at the jail, proclaimed his innocence and left a handprint on his cell wall. The words attached to the print are: "That mark of mine will never be wiped out. It will remain forever to shame the County for hanging an innocent man." The print is a legend, not a document. The hangings are not. Ten men were hanged that day across the coal region, four of them in Mauch Chunk, and more followed in the next two years. The National Canal Museum notes that many historians and law experts now believe the trials were unfair, and Pennsylvania later pardoned John Kehoe, called the king of the Mollies, after his death.

Tourism collapsed while the trials were in the papers, then came back almost as soon as the gallows came down. Then the Great Railroad Strike of that same summer cut the trains that brought the tourists, and the town learned, twice in one summer, that a town built on other people's travel is at the mercy of other people's disputes.

View from East Mauch Chunk, by M. A. Kleckner. STA-1107, 1868. Source unrecorded. Rectified left-eye image, via the Internet Archive.

A name for sale

Coal did not come back. The Switchback kept running as a ride into the twentieth century, carried only 139 riders on one Independence Day in 1932, ran its last cars in October 1933, and was sold for scrap in 1937. The canal was gone. By the 1950s, Mauch Chunk and neighbouring East Mauch Chunk were shrinking towns with no industry to fill them.

The towns decided to merge and change their name, to bring visitors back. Jim Thorpe, the Olympic athlete, had died the year before, and his home state of Oklahoma had not funded a memorial. His widow Patricia, hearing in Philadelphia about the planned name change, made them a proposal: organise a burial place and a memorial for her husband, and the new town could carry his name. The towns agreed. In 1954, Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk became Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, and a 20-ton granite memorial was set up over his grave. Thorpe had never lived there. The point was a name that travellers already knew, attached to a town they did not.

The name stuck. The town still sells the gorge: the old Switchback right-of-way is a trail, the old station sends trains into the Lehigh Gorge, the Packer mansion gives tours, and the jail shows the cell with the handprint. The coal chutes are gone. The cars are gone. The name is gone, too, except on the station, the opera house, and the cards in the archive, where the town is still Mauch Chunk.

View at Mauch Chunk, Pa. STA-1080, 1859–1885. Source unrecorded. Rectified left-eye image, via the Internet Archive.

See the photographs in the archive: STA-1088 STA-1082 STA-1098 STA-1102 STA-1107 STA-1080. Each record links back to its source.

Appendix

Timeline

1791 — Coal found on Sharp Mountain, near Summit Hill, in the account most local histories repeat.
1818 — Mauch Chunk established as a town. Josiah White and Erskine Hazard survey the Lehigh River and begin the navigation works.
1822 — Lehigh Coal Company and Lehigh Navigation Company consolidated as the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company.
1827 — Gravity railroad opens between Summit Hill and Mauch Chunk. Seven cars of coal make the first run, dropping 936 feet over nine miles.
1829 — Full canal and slackwater navigation completed, replacing the one-way descending navigation.
1833 — Asa Packer arrives in Mauch Chunk.
1843 — Mauch Chunk named county seat of Carbon County. Barney car in use on the planes.
1846–1850 — Gravity line rebuilt into loops worked only by stationary engines and gravity.
1855 — Lehigh Valley Railroad extended to Easton from Mauch Chunk.
1861 — Asa Packer Mansion completed. HistoryNet gives 1860.
1872 — Switchback ceases day-to-day freight work, in the Wikipedia summary.
1873 — Switchback solely a tourist railroad, in the Switchback Gravity Railroad history; a conventional railroad replaces the gravity line for coal. 30,478 passengers ride the Switchback this year, at 75 cents a ride.
1877, June 21 — Four men hanged at Carbon County Prison in Mauch Chunk (Michael Doyle, Edward Kelly, Alexander Campbell, John Donahue); ten hanged across the coal region that day. Great Railroad Strike follows in July.
1878–1879 — Three more men hanged at the Mauch Chunk jail.
1879 — Asa Packer dies.
1888 — Central Railroad of New Jersey station built in Mauch Chunk.
1889, August 10 — Nellie White and John Longley marry aboard a Switchback car.
1929 — Central Railroad of New Jersey sells the line to the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway Company.
1932 — Line operated until this year, in the Wikipedia summary; 139 riders on Independence Day. Last cars October 1933 and sale for scrap 1937, in the Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway history.
1954 — Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk merge and take the name Jim Thorpe. A 20-ton granite memorial marks Jim Thorpe's grave.
1956 — Asa Packer Mansion opens for tours.
1976 — Switchback right-of-way listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
1979 — John Kehoe pardoned posthumously by Pennsylvania.

Note on the handprint: most accounts name Alexander Campbell as the man who left the print. A 1981 retelling names Thomas Fisher. The print itself is a legend; the hangings are documented.

Note on the planes: the Barney track was 35 inches between the rails and the coal car track was 42; the Barney car's wheels spread as it rose, so it could climb onto the wider track.

Note on the town name: Mauch Chunk is a Lenape name. Accounts differ on its English gloss: Bear Mountain, Sleeping Bear, and Bear Place.

Photographs

STA-1088 — "Switchback Railroad, Mauch Chunk, Pa", 1859–1885. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/1087.jpg
STA-1082 — "Coal shutes, Mauch Chunk", 1859–1885. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/1081.jpg
STA-1098 — "Canal lock, East Mauch Chunk in the distance", 1859–1885. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/1097.jpg
STA-1102 — "Mansion house, Mauch Chunk", 1859–1885. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/1101.jpg
STA-1107 — "View from East Mauch Chunk, by M. A. Kleckner", 1868. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/1106.jpg
STA-1080 — "View at Mauch Chunk, Pa", 1859–1885. Rectified left-eye image: https://archive.org/download/stereogram-archive-images/rect/1079.jpg

Titles, places, and years follow catalog-v2.json. Source unrecorded means the catalog gives no named collection. All photographs are public domain via the Robert N. Dennis collection / Wikimedia Commons source pages linked from the catalog.

Sources

Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway, Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauch_Chunk_Switchback_Railway
Jim Thorpe History, Lehigh Gorge Scenic Railway — https://www.lgsry.com/history
A Ride on the Switchback, Switchback Gravity Railroad — https://switchbackgravityrr.org/sbridest.htm
Josiah White, 1832, quoted on Historical Marker Database — https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=157327
Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company letterbooks, Hagley Museum finding aid — https://findingaids.hagley.org/repositories/3/resources/2040
The Tragedy of the Molly Maguires, National Canal Museum — https://canals.org/2023/03/08/the-tragedy-of-the-molly-maguires/
Jim Thorpe and the old jail museum, HistoryNet — https://www.historynet.com/jim-thorpe-and-the-old-jail-museum-sidebar-april-00-american-history/?f
Jim Thorpe town page, Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor — https://delawareandlehigh.org/map/town/jim-thorpe/
Asa Packer Mansion, Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asa_Packer_Mansion
Among the coal mines, 1877 travel report reprinted on Wynning History — http://wynninghistory.com/2020/12/08/among-the-coal-mines-story/
Switchback Gravity Railroad history — https://switchbackgravityrr.org/ArtTreasure.html

← The Stereograph Archive