Nesquehoning Wildlands
Chris Kocher and Tom Kerr of the Wildlands Conservancy open pipeline from the Lausanne Mine Tunnel into treatment pond. For the last century, mine drainage has polluted the Lehigh River, reducing its fish population.

Trail Tenders Tannery
Trail Tenders clear dead timbers around the Lehigh Tannery. In 1875, a forest fire climbed the mountain and spread from Penn Forest to Stoddartsville.

Frank Sebelin
“You couldn’t fish in the Lehigh River,” Sebelin, a life-long angler, explained. “It was dead—full of acid from the coal mine drainage. You could see the river stones were brown from acid. It had a strong sulfur smell.”

Part 3 – The Transition Years

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 cascading through a stone archway beneath the downtown, this Victorian town, among the largest listed on the National Historic Register is—well, frankly, romantic.

But in the period roughly from 1920 to 1960, the town, then called Mauch Chunk, was anything but romantic. As a hub connecting the declining anthracite mines with the freight canals and railroads, Mauch Chunk was early entering the Depression and late recovering from it.

The Lehigh Canal closed and the Lehigh Valley and Central of New Jersey Railroads switched from steam to diesel and reduced service. These once-bright industries were turning out their lights—and hidden in their shadows was an environmental nightmare.

For a century, steam engines, idling on both sides of the Lehigh River, had spewed their exhaust of hot embers, acidic ash and soot which coated the mountains on the three sides of the town, and the houses in the valleys. The hot embers were a cause of forest fires and the acidic ash stunted the trees and polluted the streams.

Residents on both sides of the Lehigh River routinely breathed this air. The soot had to be constantly removed from windowsills. “We had to check the direction of the wind before we would hang clothing to dry on the wash line,” said Edith Lukasavitch. “My parents had a great deal on a house on a hill above the railroad. They turned it down because they didn’t want to paint the house every other year.”

For the price of “one ear of corn payable upon demand,” the state of Pennsylvania had leased the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company exclusive rights to the Lehigh River along its entire length. Until it abandoned its rights in the 1950s, LC&N had operated a series of dams between White Haven and Easton.

The immediate result of the initial dam system was to stop the migration of the shad to their spawning grounds in the feeder streams of the Lehigh River. Prior to the building of the dams, the Moravians at Bethlehem had caught as many as 8,000 shad in a single day. Soon, there were no shad in the Lehigh.

The initial phase of the Lehigh Navigation System, completed in 1829, ran from Mauch Chunk to Easton. A second phase, the Upper Grand Division, completed about ten years later, extended the canal and slack water navigation system to White Haven.

This remote area, initially rich in white pine and hemlock, was clear-cut. In particular, hemlocks were cut for the tannin in their bark. The Lehigh Tannery used the tannin to tan hides. The denuded forests eroded and the tannin from the discharge of the tanning tanks as well as the fallen hemlocks turned the Lehigh River black.

In the summers, when the Lehigh River flow tended to be low and did not overflow the dams, the river became stagnant, black and a queuing place for timber. In most years, when the spring freshets came, the dams would again overflow and cleanse the river.

But in 1841 and again in 1862, the freshets not only released a wall of water but took the floating logs with them causing destruction of the dams on the Upper Division and major downstream flooding. After the devastating 1862 flood, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania forbade LC&N from rebuilding the Upper Division.

By the 1870s the dried out clear-cut former forest along the slopes of the Lehigh Gorge was just waiting for a summer dry spell and a hot ember from a passing locomotive to start a massive forest fire. When it came, it burned along the Lehigh River from Penn Forest to Stoddardsville.

As coal mining expanded to Nesquehoning and Lehigh Township, the mine operators discharged their heavy metal-rich, often acidic waters to the Lehigh River. As towns grew up around the coal and railroad industries, it was common for households to discharge their wastewater to a neighboring steam that would eventually find its way to the Lehigh River.

Over the years, tons of coal silt were deposited in the Lehigh River from washing operations at the coal breakers. So much coal accumulated in the river between Mauch Chunk and Palmerton that after the canal was closed for canal boat traffic, it was dredged for several years and the coal collected was used to fire the boilers at the New Jersey Zinc plant in Palmerton.

Frank Sebelin, a lifelong fisherman, grew up in Mauch Chunk. In the early 1940s, when Sebelin was five years old, he caught catfish at the Coalport Lock—part of the Lehigh Navigation System, about a mile north of then, Mauch Chunk. He even swam in the Lehigh River when he was eight. “We had to go in clean water afterward to remove the slime and coal dust,” Sebelin said.

“You couldn’t fish in the Lehigh River,” Sebelin explained. “It was dead—full of acid from the coal mine drainage. You could see the river stones were brown from acid. It had a strong sulfur smell.”

In 1954, the boroughs of East Mauch Chunk and Mauch Chunk merged into the borough of Jim Thorpe. The name change was intended to revitalize the economy of the borough. It didn’t. Beyond attracting publicity and occasionally a curious visitor, the name change did little to attract either industry or tourism to the town. As much as Jim Thorpe prides itself today as a tourist Mecca—then, investors and tourists were not attracted to a dirty, rundown and polluted town.

So how did Jim Thorpe clean up its act and develop its infrastructure?