When the Lehigh River’s annual spring freshet subsides, returning the flow to a more normal level, Jim Thorpe area historian Jack Sterling expects the receding waters to expose an iron ring attached to a boulder about a mile north of Glen Onoko.
This is a respite, or eddy, in this whitewater river. The local outfitters call it Iron Ring Eddy because of this obvious feature. It is the last gathering spot before the final rapid on the Lehigh Gorge—Snaggletooth. An unfortunate swim in this section of the Lehigh River smashes swimmers against a riverbed filled with sharply pointed rocks.
On a 1792 map of Pennsylvania, Reading Howell explored the Lehigh River to this point and is referenced as calling it Hetcheltooth Falls. A hetchel is a small bed of nails used to separate flax fibers.
When he was ten years old, Sterling a Jim Thorpe native who was born just before the town changed its name from Mauch Chunk, hiked the area with his father. His dad told him that the village of Hetcheltooth was abandoned after the flood of June 5, 1862. The iron ring is the first hint that something once existed there.
“I never came across a mention of Hetcheltooth in the stories about the flood,” said Sterling. “There's the tale about Penn Haven and how the people ran up the mountainside to escape the rising waters. I remember there was something about the iron railroad bridge at the Turnhole, what Glen Onoko, was called before becoming a railroad-era tourist attraction, being lifted off its foundations. Lots about Mauch Chunk, Weissport and other places, but no mention of the village being washed away in the flood. I'd think that if a village was washed away, there'd be some mention of it in the accounts.”
What remains of the hamlet of Hetcheltooth are located about a mile and a half north of the main parking lot at the Glen Onoko Access to Lehigh Gorge State Park. The Lehigh Navigation system of canals and slack water pools, once defined the river corridor with two divisions: the Lower Grand—completed in 1829—from Mauch Chunk to Easton, and the Upper Grand—completed in 1838—from White Haven to Mauch Chunk.
The Upper Division, a construction of 20.5 miles of slackwater pools, 4.7 miles of canals, and 29 locks with up to 30 feet of lift, among the tallest ever constructed. The Upper Division was damaged in the flood of 1841 and rebuilt, and destroyed in the flood of 1862, never to be rebuilt as the railroad era had dawned and the canal era this was an early indication that the canal era was about to set.
Hetcheltooth was located at Bridge #1, between Locks #5/Dam #3 and Lock #6 on the Upper Division. At this location, canal boats descended through Lock #6 on the west bank of the Lehigh River, then entered the river in a slackwater pool formed by Dan #3 where it crossed to the east side of the river with the mules using Bridge #1 where it entered a canal section at Lock #5. Dam #3, attached to Lock #5, was called the Hetcheltooth Dam. The lock had a lift of ten feet and the stone-filled lumber cribbed dam was 14-feet high and 262-foot long.
Change Bridges allowed mules and mule drivers to cross the river. The bridge was possibly of a suspension design. Josiah White and Erskine Hazard, proprietors of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, had built the first suspension bridge in America. That was 20 years earlier at their wireworks at a similar rapid on the Schuylkill River near what is now Fairmont Park in Philadelphia. Sterling believes the iron ring may have been an attachment for a guy-wire to keep the bridge from swaying. He is somewhat uncomfortable with that conclusion since the rock would have been underwater once the dam was in operation.
Sterling guesstimates that the village of Hetcheltooth possibly had a few dozen people, “certainly less than one hundred.” He believes the town did not exist before construction began on the Upper Division, around 1835 and its Lockhouse staffed when the Upper Division commenced operation in 1838. Soon, the Beaver Meadow Railroad passed through Hetcheltooth, paralleling the Lehigh Canal.
The Beaver Meadow demonstrated a railroad could compete with the Lehigh Canal during the spring, summer and autumn, and during the winter, continue to ship when the canals had frozen. After the Upper Division was destroyed in 1862, the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, the first to construct a railroad in Pennsylvania with the Mauch Chunk & Summit Hill Switchback Gravity Railroad, created its own competing railroad, the Lehigh & Susquehanna. Some lock walls became L&S rail bed foundations.
The canal was only rebuilt to Lock #2 at Coalport, just north of Jim Thorpe, thus ending the need for locktenders, mule stables and supply stores at Hetcheltooth. Soon the hamlet was abandoned.
The Beaver Meadows was acquired by the Lehigh Valley Railroad and the Lehigh & Susquehanna was leased to the Central Railroad of New Jersey. Although the town of Hetcheltooth was gone, the name was applied as Hetchel Tooth Curve to describe the bend in the rail line at the Hetcheltooth Falls rapid. An 1883 tax assessment lists payment by the Jersey Central for houses at: Turn Hole, Penn Haven, Oxbow, North Penn Haven, Stony Creek, Rockport, Cains, Mud Run, Osterman Run, Hetchel Tooth, and Drake's Run. On the Broad Mountain above Hetcheltooth, a rock outcropping is called Hetcheltooth Point.
Hetcheltooth is a site for exploring industrial age archeology. With each visit, there are new discoveries. On a recent visit, Sterling found foundations for a building, a spring, a road and a flat area that may have been a mule corral. Historian, Vince Hydro, believes their houses spread out in three clusters: two on the west bank and one on the east bank. Historian David Barber wrote that a bridge foundation and a lockhouse foundation are still visible near the entrance to Lock #5.
During the Canal era, besides Hetcheltooth, Lehigh Gorge villages existed at White Haven, Rockport, Penn Haven, Penn Haven Junction, and Lausanne—each having a story to tell.
