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Official Website
History
Carbon County is a county located in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. Its county seat is Jim Thorpe,which was founded in 1818 as Mauch Chunk, a company town of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N) along a new wagon road the company was constructing nine miles long to their coal mine, in the area now known as Summit Hill. LC&N also constructed the Lehigh Canal navigations during this time in the area.
In 1827, that wagon road became the nation's second operating railroad, the Summit Hill & Mauch Chunk Railroad which is regarded as the world's first roller coaster, which became its main function between 1873–1931. The area around Mauch Chunk was known as the "Switzerland of America", the long wide slack water pool above the Lehigh's upper dam being surrounded by Mauch Chunk Ridge, Bear Mountain, Pisgah Ridge, Mount Pisgah, Nesquehoning Ridge, Broad Mountain and their various prominences and summits. Another railroad first, the first railway to operate steam locomotives as traction engines and prime movers in the United States was the Beaver Meadows Railroad, which connected from mines west of Beaver Meadows and Weatherly on the opposite side of Broad Mountain along a water path through the Lehigh Gorge at Penn Haven Junction (once supporting five railroads) to the Lehigh Canal opposite Lehighton.
In the 1830s, the first blast furnaces in Northampton County were built by the LC&N in an attempt to make anthracite iron, the foundation of the early industrial revolution in America. The LC&N also built the first wire rope factory in the U.S. in Mauch Chunk.
Adjacent Counties
Boroughs, Townships & Communities
Albrightsville | Banks | Beaver Meadows | Big Creek Valley | Bowmanstown | East Mauch Chunk | East Penn | East Side | Franklin | Holiday Pocono | Indian Mountain Lake | Jim Thorpe (County Seat) | Kidder | Lansford | Lausanne | Lausanne Landing | Lehigh | Lehighton | Lower Towamensing | Mahoning | Mauch Chunk | Nesquehoning | Packer | Palmerton | Parryville | Penn Forest | Summit Hill | Towamensing | Towamensing Trails | Weatherly | Weissport | Weissport East
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National Register of Historic Places
