Last updated A USGS topographical map showing the Poconos' Broad Mountain, Nesquehoning Creek's valley and Nesquehoning Ridge, Panther Creek, Panther Creek Valley, Pisgah Ridge, Mauch Chunk Creek Valley, and Mauch Chunk Ridge
In eastern Pennsylvania, the Little Schuylkill River, a tributary of Panther Creek, was historically important due to its stranglehold on energy transportation in a key region central to the American Industrial Revolution from the 1820s through the 1870s, and remained important as an energy producing region until the American steel industry began its rapid decline in the 1980s.
Panther Creek Valley lies between and over the Anthracite ladened folds of the two long near parallel ridgelines, Nesquehoning and Pisgah Ridges forming the side walls and supplying the wealth which shipped from the Panther Creek Valley making the region historically important, as for several decades its land owners, Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company(LC&N) held a virtual monopoly on Anthracite produced and shipped not only to eastern U.S. Cities via the Lehigh Canal, but to transoceanic markets.
For perspective, LC&N must be viewed as a high-tech company of its day, as well as an early American conglomerate with efforts in many fields; a company which, from its start shortly after people learned to get Anthracite to burn, moved aggressively intelligently using emerging technologies to exploit the marked fuel shortage developing in post-revolutionary era cities and towns; wherein local wood bearing lands had gradually become scarce driving up the price of firewood, including charcoal needed for the fledgling North American iron foundries and dependent manufacturing industries from Boston to Richmond.
The twin needs of heating buildings and heat for industrial processes began reshaping the world using technology by the middle of the eighteenth century in Europe—eventually giving rise to public and privately funded canal projects, the use of coal, pumps so coal could be mined, steam engines, and finally rail roads—all initially coming about, so people and industries could have and use heat, overcoming the energy crises of their respective areas & eras. While somewhat delayed in time from the older fuel crises plaguing Great Britain, and continental Europe, the growing fuel shortages in Eastern U.S. cities and young industrial systems from 1800 onwards applied the same pressures; causing the same solutions to be considered locally as well, and were widely debated as public policies as the American System and implemented in part by both local business interests, and the various state governments. Business interests and local governments in the young United States, were highly intertwined and there was much regional competitiveness. So there is little surprise to find such as the Pennsylvania, New York, and Maryland legislatures all put into place proactive programs to enhance transportation penetration to the new frontiers, the Ohio Country and Northwest Territories as American's looked west and plotted settlements, manufactories, and the mindset in business was still much influenced by Mercantilism and its beliefs of a static limited market, so were focused on growing industries using the internal markets of newly settled western lands.
Well before the presidential election of 1824 gave a renewed impetus to economic philosophies now called the American School, Philadelphia region private interests armed by newly publicized know-how of how to successfully ignite and sustain a clean burning fire using Anthracite, took notice of the fuel, its availability (it was discovered locally in the 1790s)...
Schuylkill County is a county in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It is located in the heart of Pennsylvania's Coal Region and is part of Northeastern Pennsylvania. As of the 2020 census, the population was 143,049. The county seat is Pottsville.
Anthracite iron or anthracite pig iron is iron extracted by the smelting together of anthracite coal and iron ore, that is using anthracite coal instead of charcoal in iron smelting. This was an important technical advance in the late-1830s, enabling a great acceleration of the Industrial Revolution in the United States and in Europe.
The Delaware and Hudson Railway (D&H) is a railroad that operates in the Northeastern United States. In 1991, after more than 150 years as an independent railroad, the D&H was purchased by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CP). CP operated D&H under its subsidiary Soo Line Corporation which also operates Soo Line Railroad.
The Schuylkill Canal, or Schuylkill Navigation, was a system of interconnected canals and slack-water pools along the Schuylkill River in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, built as a commercial waterway in the early 19th-century. Chartered in 1815, the navigation opened in 1825, to provide transportation and water power.
The Lehigh Crane Iron Company, later renamed Crane Iron Company, was a major ironmaking firm in the Lehigh Valley from its founding in 1839 until its sale in 1899. It was based in Catasauqua, Pennsylvania, and was founded by Josiah White and Erskine Hazard, who financed its development through their Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, which promoted the then-novel technique of smelting iron ore with anthracite coal. This was an important cost and energy savings technique, credited with eliminating the need for either expensive charcoal or coke producing processes and transport costs that proved central to the acceleration of the American industrial revolution.
The Lehigh Canal is a navigable canal that begins at the mouth of Nesquehoning Creek on the Lehigh River in the Lehigh Valley and Northeastern regions of Pennsylvania. It was built in two sections over a span of 20 years beginning in 1818. The lower section spanned the distance between Easton and present-day Jim Thorpe. In Easton, the canal met the Pennylvania Canal's Delaware Division and Morris Canals, which allowed anthracite coal and other goods to be transported further up the U.S. East Coast. At its height, the Lehigh Canal was 72 miles (116 km) long.
The Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company (LCAN) (1988–2010) was a modern-day anthracite coal mining company headquartered in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. It acquired many properties and relaunched the Lehigh Coal Companies brand in 1988. The LCAN ran strip mining operations in the Panther Creek Valley east of Lansford, Pennsylvania along U.S. Route 209 with vast properties dominating the coal areas of Tamaqua, Coaldale, and Lansford.
Duryea Yard is a railroad yard in the Wyoming Valley region of Northeastern Pennsylvania currently operated by the Reading Blue Mountain and Northern Railroad. Originally constructed in 1870 by Lehigh Valley Railroad as a turn-around and staging hub for coal transport from the Coal Region to Eastern big-city markets, the yard remains a hub for the energy extraction industry today.
Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company was a mining and transportation company headquartered in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, in present-day Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, in Northeastern Pennsylvania. The company operated from 1818 until its dissolution in 1964 and played an early and influential role in the American Industrial Revolution.
Ashley Planes was a historic freight cable railroad situated along three separately powered inclined plane sections located between Ashley, Pennsylvania at the foot, and via the Solomon cutting the yard in Mountain Top over 1,000 feet (300 m) above and initially built between 1837 and 1838 by Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company's subsidiary Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad (L&S).
Nesquehoning Mountain or Nesquehoning Ridge is a 15–17-mile-long (24–27 km) coal bearing ridge dividing the waters of Lehigh Valley to the north from the Schuylkill River valley and the several near parallel ridgelines of the Ridge-and-valley Appalachians barrier range all local members of which run generally WSW-ENE in the greater overall area.
The Nesquehoning Valley Railroad Company, herein called the Nesquehoning Valley Railroad (NVRR), is now a fallen flag standard-gauge, steam era shortline railroad built as a coal road to ship the Anthracite mined in the Southeastern Coal Region on either side of the Little Schuylkill River tributary Panther Creek and the history making coal towns of the Panther Creek Valley down the Lehigh River transportation corridor to the Eastern seaboard.
There are two types of coal found in Pennsylvania: anthracite, the hard coal found in Northeastern Pennsylvania below the Allegheny Ridge southwest to Harrisburg, and bituminous, the soft coal found west of the Allegheny Front escarpment). Anthracite coal is a natural mineral with a high carbon and energy content that gives off light and heat produced energy when burned, making it useful as a fuel. It was possibly first used in Pennsylvania as a fuel in 1769, but its history begins with a documented discovery near Summit Hill and the founding of the Lehigh Coal Mine Company in 1792 to periodically send expeditions to the wilderness atop Pisgah Ridge to mine the deposits, mostly with notable lack of great success, over the next 22 years.
Mauch Chunk Ridge or Mauch Chunk Mountain is a historically important barrier ridgeline north of the Blue Mountain escarpment and 3rd parallel ridgeline south of the Nesquehoning Creek after Nesquehoning Mountain and Pisgah Ridge in the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians of Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Catasauqua Creek is an ENE–SSW oriented creek draining 6.6 miles (10.6 km) from springs of the Blue Mountain barrier ridge several miles below the Lehigh Gap in the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians located upriver and opposite from Allentown in Lehigh and Northampton counties in the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania.
Haystack Mountain (Pennsylvania), is an otherwise non-descript 1871 ft peak forming the steep southwestern faces of the Solomon Gap mountain pass's saddle connecting and dividing the Wyoming Valley from the Lehigh Valley.
Erskine Hazard (1790-1865) and his partner Josiah White were industrialists who developed infrastructure projects in Pennsylvania and throughout the Northeastern United States, which proved influential in ushering in the industrial revolution in the United States, which served as a foundation for the rise of the United States as the world's foremost economic power.
The Canal Age is a term of art used by science, technology, and industry historians. Various parts of the world have had various canal ages; the main ones belong to Egypt, Ancient Babylon, and the historical empires of India, China, Southeast Asia, and mercantile Europe. Cultures make canals as they make other engineering works, and canals make cultures. They make industry, and until the era when steam locomotives attained high speeds and power, the canal was by far the fastest way to travel long distances quickly. Commercial canals generally had boatmen shifts that kept the barges moving behind mule teams 24 hours a day. Like many North American canals of the 1820s-1840s, the canal operating companies partnered with or founded short feeder railroads to connect to their sources or markets. Two good examples of this were funded by private enterprise:
The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company used vertically integrated mining raw materials, transporting them, manufacturing with them, and merchandising by building coal mines, the instrumental Lehigh Canal, and feeding their own iron goods manufacturing industries and assuaging the American Republic's first energy crisis by increasing coal production from 1820 onwards using the nation's second constructed railway, the Summit Hill and Mauch Chunk Railroad.
The second coal road and canal system was inspired by LC&N's success. The Delaware and Hudson Canal and Delaware and Hudson Gravity Railroad. The LC&N operation was aimed at supplying the country's premier city, Philadelphia with much needed fuel. The D&H companies were founded purposefully to supply the explosively growing city of New York's energy needs.
The Hauto Tunnel, dug in 1871–72, was a 1.1-mile-long (1.8 km) single-track railway tunnel crossing under the barrier ridge of Nesquehoning Mountain between Lansford, Pennsylvania, in the Panther Creek Valley and the Central Railroad of New Jersey trackage near the dam of the Hauto Reservoir impoundment about 1.3 miles (2.1 km) above Nesquehoning, Pennsylvania. The tunnel was significant for cutting nearly 15 difficult mountainous miles (24 km) off the trip to the Lehigh Canal terminal or, by rail, to other eastern coal companies, in the era when anthracite was the king of energy fuels.
The Panther Creek Railroad had its origins in 1849. The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N) constructed it between Lansford, PA and the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad operating as the Little Schuylkill Railroad in Tamaqua, PA. LC&N believed a direct route to take Panther Valley coal to eastern markets and a tunnel connecting Lansford to Hauto would open up possibilities with the Nesquehoning Valley Railroad. It also allowed the LC&N to cease coal shipments to the Lehigh Canal on the Summit Hill & Mauch Chunk Railroad, operating since 1827.
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