Since the 1960s, the Lehigh River has been cleaning itself of over a century of pollution caused by mine drainage, raw sewage discharge and restrictive dams. It wasn’t until the mid-1980s that any fish were seen in the Lehigh River.

Charlie Wildoner grew up in East Jim Thorpe during the Depression. “How my mother and father were able to raise five children boggles my mind,” he said. After the boroughs of East Mauch Chunk and Mauch Chunk united, Wildoner became the first Borough Secretary.

In 1885, wealthy Mauch Chunk built this three-towered Public School Building. After the towns of East Mauch Chunk and Mauch Chunk merged into Jim Thorpe the school was closed. During the 1950s, the Nickel-A-Week program attracted needle-trades businesses that were looking to outsource to rural areas with lower labor rates. The building was purchased and operated as the Berkeley Bags pocketbook factory. After the factory closed in 1974, it was renovated as apartments. Agnes McCartney, a major force in the resurrection of Jim Thorpe, lived here.

A Lehigh Valley Railroad train waits at the East Mauch Chunk station. Soot, acidic ash and hot embers spewed from the LVRR and the Jersey Central trains on the other side of the river, causing dirty laundry, deforestation and forest fires.

Reporter Joe Boyle led a Nickel-A-Week program to improve the economy of Mauch Chunk. One result was the merging of East Mauch Chunk and Mauch Chunk into Jim Thorpe. A second result was to bring several needle trades factories to the area.

Part 2 – The Hurting Year

Today, Jim Thorpe, the county seat of Carbon County, is a tourist destination. Nestled in a valley flanked by mountains on three sides, a pristine river dividing its major communities and a sparkling creek bubbling through a stone archway, this Victorian town, among the largest listed on the National Historic Register is—frankly, romantic.

But in the Hurting Years, the period from 1930 to 1950, the town was anything but romantic. With an economy based upon the transport of coal, the combined failings of the coal, canal and railroad industries coupled with the national Depression, left the town in dire straits.

During the Depression, young people left the area searching for work—what little work was available. Even the economic boom that helped to put the rest of America back on its feet after WWII, failed to spread to Mauch Chunk.

“The 1930s was a very difficult time,” said former Jim Thorpe Borough Secretary and Carbon County Commissioner, Charlie Wildoner. “How my mother and father were able to raise five children boggles my mind. My father lost his job at Railway Express when the company practically went out of business. He went on welfare. He’d pick up a day job here and there for menial wages. We remortgaged our home. People all over were losing their homes due to foreclosures.”

“We all had to pitch in,” Wildoner continued. “I raised rabbits. I had 150 rabbits. That was our principal meat supply. The streets were not paved curbed to curb. I would cut the grass in the street, turn it as it dried, and then bag it for rabbit food.”

During those Depression years, boys would hop onto moving coal cars as they passed through town and throw chunks off the cars. Then, they would jump from the cars and run up the tracks collecting the coal. Frank Sebelin remembers one boy losing two legs in the process.

Nickel-A-Week

After World War II, with the economy booming in the larger cities, returning GI’s found work outside the area and never returned. By the 1950s, local townspeople, led by newspaper reporter Joe Boyle, began a Nickel-A-Week program to attract industry to Mauch Chunk. Every family in the boroughs of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk was asked to contribute a nickel a week to create a fund that would be used to attract industry to the area.

The Nickel-A-Week program led to the boroughs of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk uniting to become the Borough of Jim Thorpe in 1954. Although it united the boroughs on the two sides of the Lehigh River—which helped reduce the duplication of municipal services, the name change per se, did little to improve the economy—except for the occasional curiosity seeker who visited the town to investigate why its name had changed.

The Nickel-A-Week program did draw one industry to Jim Thorpe and Carbon County—garment factories relocated to the area.

Mauch Chunk historian and retired teacher, John Gunnser’s father came to Jim Thorpe in 1955 just after the name change, to operate a garment factory. Others came around the same time and the town had Cali’s Sportswear, Samuelson’s Silk Mill, Kids Klothes, and the Berkeley Bags pocketbook factory.

Part of the promotion of the Nickel-A-Week program stressed Jim Thorpe as a town with a non-unionized labor force skilled in the needle trades. Following the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the labor movement grew rapidly and laws were passed to forbid child labor sweatshops and require overtime above a 40-hour workweek.

Garment manufactures turned to outsourcing, moving their operations from the cities to lower paying rural areas. Jim Thorpe was happy to get those jobs.

Environment Crisis

While Jim Thorpe was focused on improving its economy, it ignored what had become a noisy, filthy, polluted environment. “They ran the steam engines 24 hours a day,“ said Frank Sebelin whose family lived near the tracks when he was a child. “The noise was so consistent that after a while, we didn’t hear the whistles. When we moved to Germantown, it was so quiet, I couldn’t sleep.”

From the time of the earliest dams on the Lehigh River, the water became stagnant at low flows. Shad, which had been harvested by the thousands in the late 1700s, disappeared. Coal silt accumulated on the upstream side of the dams. Acidic mine waste drained into the river.

Homes discharged their wastewater to local streams, which in turn, emptied into and polluted the Lehigh River. “In the mid 1950s, when I went out to Glen Onoko for a swim, often I couldn’t swim,” said Gunnser. “The area was full of black flies,”

The bituminous coal-fired steam engines blanketed the town with soot and turned the mountains and streams acidic. Frank Sebelin, a lifelong fisherman, noted,” At that time, you couldn’t fish in the Lehigh. It was so acidic that it was dead.”

During the coal-fired steam locomotive era, which was replaced with diesel engines in the 1950s, not only did the forests suffer from acidic soils but also the constant barrage of hot embers in the exhaust was the cause of frequent forest fires.

The soot settled on windowsills and coated the town with a layer of grime. At the time, the Mauch Chunkers were used to it. “My mother would check the direction of the wind before she hung the clothes to dry,” said Sebelin. “Even then, she expected to have some black spots on the laundry.”