As the environment surrounding Jim Thorpe improved and park systems developed, people who enjoyed the outdoors began coming to Jim Thorpe. 

In 1979, Pocono Whitewater began offering rafting trips on the Lehigh River. Only twenty years earlier, the river was too polluted and the flow rates too unpredictable to support commercial outfitters. 

Glen Onoko Falls was a major tourist draw to the Jim Thorpe, then, Mauch Chunk area during the turn of the last century. A fire during WWI destroyed the park and the Lehigh Gorge was not redeveloped for tourism until the 1970s with the opening of the Lehigh Gorge State Park. The Falls did not become part of the park and is part of the Pennsylvania Game Lands. 

The Grand Upper Division of the Lehigh Navigation System, the site of the highest canal locks ever built is accessible only by hiking or biking in the Lehigh Gorge State Park. This is typical of the many places where heritage tourism meets eco-tourism in the Jim Thorpe area.

Part 7– The Plan

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. 

On November 17, 1977, with 350 properties, the Jim Thorpe downtown became the largest district ever listed on the National Register. 

While the application for the National Register was being processed, Conrad was pursuing a grant to come up with a master plan for developing downtown Jim Thorpe. A competition was held for the study and the Venturi and Rauch Architectural and Planning Firm received the award. Denise Scott Brown, one of the best-known planners in the US and wife of principal architect, Bob Venturi, headed the project. 

V&R identified that the community could have a strong economic base by concentrating on certain types of commercial activity. Certain key buildings, which included the New American Hotel, the Navigation Building and the Hooven Building needed to be brought back and made economically viable, or the community wouldn’t work. 

The Corridor

Denise Scott Brown thought that the Lehigh Canal was such an important part of Jim Thorpe, that the town should work with all the communities along the Lehigh River to develop this heritage resource. 

Brown invited representatives from the towns along the Lehigh River to a meeting at the Carbon County Courthouse Annex. “Half way through the meeting, as we were all discussing what was going on, State Representative Kurt Zwikl said. “This ought to be a National Park,” 

“That’s when the idea for a National Heritage Corridor started,” said Conrad. 

Over the next three years. Allan Sachse, Bill Humphreys, Bill Mineo and Bruce Conrad met and pressed for funding to develop the Heritage Corridor. The Carter administration favored the project but it was dropped by the Reagan administration. 

Nearly ten years later, during the last days of the Reagan administration Rep. Peter Kostmayer of Bucks and Montgomery Counties and Rep. Don Ritter of the Lehigh Valley helped create the Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor. It was passed by Congress on Oct. 14, 1988. 

Lehigh Gorge State Park

The Lehigh River Gorge between Jim Thorpe and White Haven contains some of the most spectacular scenery, historic treasures and recreation opportunities in the state. It was once the location of the tallest canal locks ever built—part of the Upper Grand Division of the Lehigh Navigation System. 

By the time the flood of 1862 destroyed the Upper Grand Division, railroads had come to the Lehigh Gorge. So had logging of the white pine for lumber and harvesting of the hemlocks for the tannin in its bark. In the 1860s, the second largest tannery in the United States sat on the banks of the Lehigh River at the small town of Lehigh Tannery. 

After the area was timbered, the protective forest canopy had been removed and felled trees littered the hillsides. A decade later, in 1875, possibly during a hot dry period, an ember from a passing locomotive sparked a forest fire that rapidly climbed the sides of the Lehigh Gorge, spreading for miles and destroying the tannery and saw mills. 

In the late 1900s, the railroads, in order to create business on the weekends, began offering excursion trips to outlying parklands in the Jim Thorpe area, they purchased the waterfall and glen known as Moore’s Ravine. Concocting a myth about an Indian princess that had taken her life jumping off the falls, Railroad Public Relations renamed it Glen Onoko. 

At Glen Onoko, the railroads built a park resort that soon hosted a first class hotel—the Hotel Wahnetah. A fire in 1911 closed the hotel and a fire in 1917 destroyed the park. 

In the 1970s, with the help of Agnes McCartney of the Carbon County Planning Commission, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania began purchasing the Lehigh Gorge Corridor and in 1980, the strip along the Lehigh River became Lehigh Gorge State Park. Much of the area west of the Central of New Jersey Railroad tracks became State Game lands, including the most distinguishing feature of the former Glen Onoko resort, the three-tier Glen Onoko Falls waterfall. 

The story continues in Part 8 - New Shop in Town—Tom and Betty Lou McBride visit Jim Thorpe and decide the town is ready to grow and want to be a part of it.