Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 15:46, 4 May 2016

This article is actively undergoing a major edit for to incorporate many cites and have a better narrative consistency per {{ refimprove|date=April 2016}} Underconstruction.... To help avoid edit conflicts, please do not edit this page while this message is displayed. This page was last edited at 15:46, 4 May 2016 (UTC) (8 years ago) – this estimate is cached, update. Please remove this template if this page hasn't been edited for a significant time. If you are the editor who added this template, please be sure to remove it or replace it with {{Under construction}} between editing sessions.

The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company was a mining and transportation company in Pennsylvania that operated from 1822 through 1964. It pioneered the mining of anthracite coal in the United States; established the Lehigh Canal; built the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad and its many northeastern Pennsylvania shortline railroads, spurs, and subsidiaries; created the Ashley Planes and other novel means of transport; and created transport corridors still important today.

In its first 50 years, the company spearheaded industrial development in the United States by taking on civil engineering challenges thought impossible and creating important transport infrastructure. It would acquire more than 8,000 acres in the 14 miles (23 km) from Jim Thorpe to Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, yielding ownership of virtually the entire eastern lobe of the of the Southern Pennsylvania Coal Region.

Formed in 1822 by combining the Lehigh Coal Mining Company (1893) and the Lehigh Navigation Company, it represented the first merger of interlocking companies in the United States. Five years later, the company built the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway: the first coal railroad and just the second railroad company in the country after the B&O.

The company was founded by industrialists Josiah White (1780-1850) and Erskine Hazard (1790-1865), who sought to improve delivery of coal to markets. and a thick accented German immigrant named Hauto with mining experience.

The company is known in the Lehigh Valley as the "Old Company", as distinct from the later 1988–2010 company: the nearly same named Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company— the 'New Company', to the people of the region.

Development

The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company was an outgrowth of an aggressive competent management team absorbing the earlier less well managed Lehigh Coal Mine Company—which was founded in 1893 the year after coal was discovered by a hunter, Philip Ginter on Sharpe Mountain—one peak of a succession of peaks along the biblically named Pisgah Ridge as Pisgah Mountain was then known near the border between Schuylkill and (today's) Carbon Counties. Pisgah Mountain is situated as the center ridge of three nearly parallel ridges merging on the east extension with Nesquehoning Mountain in a saddle and terminal peak above the gap where the Lehigh River punches through their joint at the bend occupied by Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. Jim Thorpe, named in honor of the Olympic champion, is the renamed historic town of Mauch Chunk, and the Headquarters of the LC&N company, as well as the terminus ends of the companies Lehigh Canal and Summit Hill & Mauch Chunk Railroad.

Lehigh Coal Mine Company

Founded in 1793 with capitalization sufficient to purchase 10,000 acres of lands in and around the Panther Creek Valley, the Lehigh Coal Mine Company (LCMC) had unsuccessfully attempted to transport and reliably market anthracite from the large deposits on Pisgah Mountain near what is now Summit Hill, Pennsylvania, to Philadelphia via the Lehigh and Delaware Rivers. The fuel was much needed as the East both had increased demand from early industrial seed industries and denuded local woods driving up the price of charcoal and firewood for heating and cooking. Sporadically active between the years of 1792 and 1814, the Lehigh Coal Mine Company was able to sell all of the coal it could get to market, but lost many a boat load on the rough waters of the unimproved Lehigh River.

Eventually the owners sold some of its coal to Josiah White and Erskine Hazard, who operated a wire mill foundry at the Falls of the Schuylkill near Philadelphia; they were in fact delighted with the quality of the goods, and bought the last two (and only two of five) barges surviving the trip down the Lehigh under the LCMC. Unhappy with the unreliable and unpredictable deliveries from the manager's of the Lehigh Coal Mine Company, the two innovative entrepreneurs began inquiring after the rights to mine the LCMC's coal and hatched a plan to improve the navigation on the Lehigh as a key step. leased the Lehigh Coal Mine company's properties in 1817 and took over operations.

The Lehigh's Coal Companys

One of the LC&N's predecessors was the short lived (October 21 1818—April 21, 1820) Lehigh Coal Company formed by the same principals as organized the Navigation Company, Erskine Hazard and Joshua White, who began by negotiating the option in 1815 for leasing the rights held by the Lehigh Coal Mining Company for 20 years, before soliciting investors, or the legislature for improving the navigation.

Under the conditions of the lease, it was stipulated that, after a given time for preparation, they should deliver for their own benefit at least forty thousand bushels of coal annually in Philadelphia and the surrounding districts, and should pay, if demanded, one ear of corn as a yearly rental.

Lehigh Coal Mining Company

The Lehigh Coal Mining Company (LCMC) had acquired lands and land rights around Summit Hill in 1792, a year after coal was discovered on the mountain. Transportation of bulk goods was a difficult problem as the United States did not have many developed roadways or waterways. Despite it's jump on the market, the LCMC had only sporadic success getting coal to industrialists in the Allentown-Philadelphia market because of the difficulties experienced using mule trains conveying the coal down to the Lehigh at several points where they could beach and load a boat. These sites varied along the Lehigh valley to shores near the outlet of the Mauch Chunk Creek (Now passing under a main street in Jim Thorpe, PA) or crossing over the next ridge south, the Mauch Chunk Ridge to the Lehigh River at the Mahoning Hills near Lehighton. Regardless of where they stockpiled coal or built skiffs to haul it on the rapids strewn waters, the problem was always that many loads ran afoul of the river's rapids and sank. The ineptitude of the LCMC to keep reliable regular deliveries would prove to be a historic turning point.

Lehigh Coal Company

Services being unreliable, in 1815 inspired by the media coverage about the Erie Canal (begun 1817) and fed up with LCMC's delivery reliability, industrialists interested in securing a reliable coal supply began exploring whether they could buy the rights to the LCMC properties. Once White and Hazard had bought the operating rights (leased) the company, they immediately moved to petition the legislature and propose acquiring rights to make improvements of the river, for which there was a string of supportive legislation going back decades.

They very shortly found themselves advised repeatedly that both the improvements, and the mining operation at Summit Hill, having each repeatedly failed miserably time after time, were both considered crackpot schemes, usually by differing groups of potential investors; the majority opinion being the improvements were more possible, and the coal mining was less likely to be a success. Accordingly, they secured other investors by forming two companies: The Lehigh Coal Company (LCC) and the Lehigh Navigation Company, and began seeking legislative approval for improving the Lehigh River with a navigation.

The desired opportunity "to ruin themselves," as one member of the Legislature put it, was granted by an act passed March 20, 1818. The various powers applied for, and granted, embraced the whole range of tried and untried methods for securing "a navigation downward once in three days for boats loaded with one hundred barrels, or ten tons." The State kept its weather eye open in this matter, however, for a small minority felt that these men would not ruin themselves. Accordingly, the act of grant reserved to the commonwealth the right to compel the adoption of a complete system of slack-water navigation from Easton to Stoddartsville if the service given by the company did not meet "the wants of the country."

The next hurdle surprised White and Hazard—there were in general, as was witnessed by the legislator's comments, a wide divergence of opinion as to whether the Lehigh could be tamed, and perhaps more surprising, there were less backers of any scheme to continue mining coal from the lands held by LCMC—there were simply too many failures over the 24 years of it's operations for the peace of mind of many investors. Accordingly three times the funds were raised to improve the river as were raised to put the mining U delivery of coal onto a regular paying basis.

Given permission, the two companies went to work, and overstocked the market demand in 1820, having opened practical, though not ideal navigability of the Lehigh over four years ahead of their targeted 1824. Coal mining and delivery by grading a near constant descent mule track from Summit Hill to feed a loading chute at the huge slack water pool created at Mauch Chunk, went well as well; the coal deposits were essentially outcrops needing little effort to extract.

Riding this success, the two companies were merged into the Lehigh Navigation Company, resolved to apply the high tech of the Canal Era (canals, locks, rails) to bringing coal to their foundries and the stoves and furnaces of Philadelphia and beyond.

This section needs expansion with: To be fleshed out and integrated with the full tale. You can help by adding to it. (April 2016)

Lehigh Navigation Company

Having displayed great technological skills by creating the world's first iron wire suspension bridge, which spanned the Schuylkill River at their wire works, White and Hazard schemed with other industrialists to secure a reliable source of anthracite. In 1814, they gained a contingency lease of the production rights to Lehigh Coal Companies' mineral wealth from its absentee management and secured other anthracite investors.

To move the coal to market, they entered political negotiations to acquire rights to tame the turbulent and rapids-ridden Lehigh River for navigation. By 1817–18, they had organized the separate Lehigh Navigation Company and had written stock flyers announcing plans to deliver barge loads of coal regularly to Philadelphia by 1824.

The company began to prepare plans and surveyed sites, and when the state legislature approved the river work in 1818, hired men and began to install locks, dams, and weirs, including water management gates of their own novel design.

The desired opportunity "to ruin themselves," as one member of the Legislature put it, was granted by an act passed March 20, 1818.

Crews were sent up Mount Pisgah to improve the mule trails down from the coal deposits at Summit Hill, Pennsylvania, and others to build docks, boat building facilities, and the canal systems head end pool and locks.

The canal head end needed a location where barges could be built and timber and coal could be brought into slack water. The challenge was to do it above the gap made by the east end of Mount Pisgah, a hard rock knob that towers 700 to 900 feet above the Lehigh River towns Jim Thorpe (formerly Mauch Chunk) to the towns west, and Nesquehoning to its north. Both towns are built into the flanks, the traverses, of the mountain, with flats along the river banks. (A few decades later, railroads would follow the canals.)

Within the next two years, White and Hazard constructed a descending navigation system that used their unique "bear trap" or hydrostatic locks, which allowed the passage of coal boats by means of artificial floods. The coal arrived at the head end from the mines at Summit Hill or down along the steep mule trail from near the headwaters of Panther Creek. It floated down the navigation; at journey's end, the barges were sold as fuel or for Delaware basin transports.

The navigation company began shipping significant quantities of coal by early 1819, ahead of expectations, and attained their goal of regular shipments in 1820.

In 1822, the company was combined with the Lehigh Coal Company.

Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company

By late 1821, the Lehigh Coal & Lehigh Navigation companies were merged. Formally incorporated in 1822, the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company was soon reliably transporting large amounts of coal not only to White's mills, but also to Philadelphia by 1824.

In order to bring more coal from the mines to their navigation system, the Company constructed America's second railroad in 1827-28, the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway, running along the south side of Pisgah Ridge from Summit Hill to the canal, ending at the Mauch Chunk (now Jim Thorpe). During these same years, it also began the conversion of its descending navigation system into a two-way system. With rights of eminent domain, the Lehigh Navigation was extended upriver through the Lehigh Gorge from Jim Thorpe and completed in 1829; this improved Lehigh Navigation system had the largest carrying capacity of any canal in the United States. Stretching from Mauch Chunk past Allentown down to the Delaware River at Easton, this waterway was soon connected to both New York and Philadelphia by the completion of the Morris and Delaware Canals in 1832 and 1833 respectively.

To take advantage of this new and improved access to America's largest metropolitan markets, the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company leveraged its founder's knowledge and experience on the Little Schuylkill and made a concerted effort to develop the water power sites along its waterways into early industrial parks. For example, the Abbott Street area, near Lock 47, which is now part of Easton's Hugh Moore Park, employed over 1,000 men in almost a dozen manufacturing establishments by 1840. The impact on the development, whether direct or indirect, of the industries of Allentown, Bethlehem, and greater Philadelphia is immense and incalculable.

Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad

With a unified legislative and executive push, LC&N was able to spin-off a subsidiary to build a railroad connection to the Susquehanna at Pittston just north of Wilkes-Barre over very rough terrain. The multi-modal project utilized a cable railroad called the Ashley Planes, and double-tracked connecting trackage from its foot at Ashley to the barge docks of Pittston and eventually interfacing with the seven first class railroads which drove spurs into the valley for its valuable anthracite production. The Ashley Planes summit end connected to an assembly yard at Mountain Top, Pennsylvania and sourced a steep double-tracked rail branch to White Haven where it had loading docks with a meeting of transport technologies feeding an newly built extension of its Lehigh Canal through the difficult but scenic terrain of the Lehigh Gorge. With the political push to connect Philadelphia and the Delaware to the Northern Coal Fields in the Wyoming Valley and to the Susquehanna River, LC&N formed the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad empowered with rights of eminent domain, eventually both the LC&N Company's Lehigh Navigation and the L&SRR were extended upriver through the Lehigh Gorge from Jim Thorpe to White Haven.

Other Historic LC&N Railroads

This section needs expansion with: To be returned to and finished someday soon later. You can help by adding to it. (March 2016)

By the later 1820s through the mid-1830s the civic and business leaders of Pennsylvania, Delaware and Southern New Jersey were anxious to connect their young manufactories with the markets of the burgeoning trans-Appalachian territories being rapidly settled by the tens of thousands of settlers undertaking westward migration. Faced with the daring founding of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad to cross the Appalachian chain via the Cumberland Narrows pass and the Erie Canal spanning the great plain of the Mohawk Valley with plans to connect New York City to the lake steamers on the Great Lakes, in Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and Delaware there developed a great political push unified by the Delaware Valley geography to find a way to connect Western Pennsylvania via the various projects that became known as the Main Line of Public Works to the manufacturers of the Delaware region. The pioneering spirit and innovative mindset of LC&N's founders, founders of the nations second railroad lent themselves over the years to tackle and successively solve a variety of thorny transport issues—ending in the construction of a succession of small but influential shortline railways as joint ventures with other investors, each of which concurrently solved an earlier irrealizable and intractable civil construction project. In the end, ownership and operations of all these, as well as their initial railway, the Mauch Chunk & Summit Hill Railway were combined under the umbrella of their second, the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad, now a holding company which still owns and leases out the trackage rights to more visible operating road companies for many important rail corridors in Northeast Pennsylvania.

Subsidiary shortlines

• Nesquehoning & Mahanoy Railroad - Having gained a great deal of civil engineering experience running a freight line through most of the descending length of the Lehigh River and across the Delaware, the LC&N chaffed at the bottleneck its coal production suffered from the transport difficulties of getting the coal out of the Panther Creek Valley. With the increasing power of locomotives, the company surveyed and pushed a seven-mile grade up through the winding slopes north of the Nesquehoning Ridge, with several descents, connecting near Hazelton, and the wider valleys of Mahanoy Creek, including that at Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, along the Little Schuylkill River near the outlet of Panther Creek. From Tamaqua, trackage also reached along the Schuylkill Valley to feed the industries of Reading, Pennsylvania and surrounds.
• Panther Creek Railroad - LC&N's main coal bearing lands were still 5–6 miles to the east up the Panther Creek Valley, so having reached Tamaqua, the company self-funded the Panther Creek Railroad.
• Hauto Tunnel - Shipping large heavy coal consists over the steep gradients of the Nesquehoning shortline was cost adverse, so eventually the decision was made to cut a mile long tunnel through Nesquehoning Ridge into downtown Lansford, Pennsylvania, which became for a time the seat of its corporate headquarters.This gave the company three means of egressing coal from its mines along Pisgah Ridge and Nesquehoning Mountain until it sold the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway, which was operating mostly as a prime tourist attraction, the world's first Roller Coaster.

Lehigh and New England Railroad

The LC&N's acquisition of the Lehigh and New England was a late breaking event in the railroads struggles to become established. With LC&N stabilizing it's finances and letting out several of its shortlines to the LNE to operate, LC&N sent a clear message to the CNJ management about rental rate demands by not renewing lease rights and instead transferring them to the new acquisition.

Surviving 143 years

By the middle of the 20th century, with the development of powerful diesel prime movers in the 1940s and 1950s, coal ceased powering railroad locomotives and coal also lost its hold on the energy market for heating. With the diminished canal revenue traffic, upkeep and maintenance drove balance sheets negative and the Lehigh Navigation unit was forced to close business activity in 1932. While once widely diversified, a large portion of LC&N's assets depended upon the coal markets, while subsidiaries owned those, like the rail system which were still profitable. Consequently, various boards oversaw gradual contraction of the company and gradual sales of bits and pieces. Eventually in 1966, Greenwood Stripping Co. bought the remaining coal properties, most located as originally exploited, along the Panther Creek Valley before selling them to Bethlehem Mines Corp. in 1974.

Finally, in 1986 shareholders dissolved the company, after having sold its last business, Cella's Chocolate Covered Cherries, to Tootsie Roll.

The new company

The company name remained associated with anthracite mining through the independently founded and otherwise unrelated Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, incorporated in 1988. While unrelated legally, the 'New Company' as it's known in the area was spearheaded by a previous officer and stockholder: James J. Curran Jr. took over Lehigh Coal from Bethlehem Mines Corp. in 1989, and through the 1990s it remained the largest producer of U.S. anthracite, which is now a specialty product. In 2000, Lehigh Coal shut down and laid-off 163 employees, saying plunging coal prices made it impossible to make a profit. The company reopened in 2001 with help of a last-resort $9 million loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 2010, in bankruptcy proceedings once again, the company was purchased by one of its bigger creditors at auction, BET Associates, who were affiliated with Toll Brothers. The company properties in between Lansford and Nesquehoning, boasting an EPA permit sign in the same Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company name at the company gates along Rt-209 were observed in operation during mid-July 2013.

See also

• Lehigh Canal
• Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad
• Panther Creek Valley

Notes

1. According to TBrecalled's History of Carbon County, the last LCMC operation, launched in the shortages worsened by the War of 1812, built five boats and filled them, spending over a year overall. Three of the five sank before reaching safe waters, the two remnants were purchased by Joshua White and Erskine Hazard.

References

• Archer B. Hulbert. "CHAPTER III. The Mastery Of The Rivers". In Editor= Allen Johnson, Release Date: February 28, 2009 , Last Updated: February 4, 2013 (ed.). The Paths of Inland Commerce, A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The Chronicles of America Series, June, 1919. Project Gutenberg (reprints). {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: editors list (link)
• Clint Chamberlin. "LEHIGH AND SUSQUEHANNA DIVISION". North East Rails. Retrieved 14 September 2013.

Footnotes

1. FRANK WHELAN (1986-06-08). "Ex-executive Recalls Decline And Fall Of Lehigh Coal And Navigation Co". The Morning Call, June 08, 1986. Lehigh Coal and Navigation controlled 8,000 acres of coal lands running from Jim Thorpe to Tamaqua, 14 miles away. This comprised the entire eastern end of the southern anthracite field.
2. Archer B. Hulbert, The Paths of Inland Commerce, A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Vol. 21, The Chronicles of America Series. Editor: Allen Johnson (1921)
3. National Canal Museum – The Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company Accessed 2008-09-18.
4. http://siris-archives.si.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?uri=full=3100001~!140147!0&term=#focus
5. Hurlbert, Chapter III, quote: Believing that coal could be obtained more cheaply from Mauch Chunk than from the mines along the Schuylkill, White, Hauto, and Hazard formed a company, entered into negotiation with the owners of the Lehigh mines, and obtained the lease of their properties for a period of twenty years at an annual rental of one ear of corn.
6. Per paid guide presentation in July 2013 at the Lansford-Coaldale 'Number Nine Museum' in the Panther Creek Valley.
7. Sevon, W. D., compiler, 2000, "Physiographic provinces of Pennsylvania", Pennsylvania Geological Survey of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Pennsylvania Geological Survey, 4th ser., Map 13, scale 1:2,000,000.
8. ^ Hurlbert, June, 1919, CHAPTER III. The Mastery Of The Rivers
9. The Early Days of Summit Hill, updated September 24th, 2009, www.summithill.com, LeeMantz@summit-hill.com, (accessed: 9 September 2013)
10. Ancestry.com, p593: "We will remark here that the Lehigh Coal Company was incorporated by act of Oct. 21, 1818; that its leading characters were the same as those of the Navigation, White, Hazard, and Hauto; that the last named was bought out by his partners in March, 1820, and that on April 21, 1820, the two companies were consolidated under the title of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company."
11. Brenkman, p77
12. Cite error: The named reference HoCC-077 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
13. ^ http://articles.mcall.com/1986-06-08/news/2521866_1_parton-coal-industry-lehigh-coal
14. ^ LC&N sold at auction

External links

• Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company Records in Beyond Steel: An Archive of Lehigh Valley Industry and Culture.

• Coal companies of the United States
• Companies established in 1822
• Companies based in Pennsylvania
• Companies disestablished in 1986