Railroad growth and coal shipping Īfter the Pennsylvania Canal Commission smoothed the way, Lehigh Coal & Navigation built the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad (L&S) from Pittston to Ashley, building the Ashley Planes inclined railway and linked that by rail from Mountain Top to White Haven at the head of the canal's upper works-referred to as the "Grand Lehigh Canal"-which navigations shortened the Lehigh Gorge (now located in the Lehigh Gorge State Park) route, cutting the distance from Philadelphia to Wilkes-Barre and the Wyoming Valley coal deposits by over 100 miles (160 km). (See Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad, a subsidiary of LC&N.) It came into greater growth when the Lehigh Valley Railroad in 1885 pushed up the valley on the river's east bank to oppose LC&N's effective transportation monopoly over the region, which extended across to northwest Wilkes-Barre at Pittston on the Susquehanna River/ Pennsylvania Canal.
The river's left bank community of East Mauch Chunk, which has more of the houses of modern Jim Thorpe, was settled later to support the short-lived Beaver Creek Railroad, the mines which spawned it, and the logging industry. (The other large city with growing coal mining in the region was Scranton, with a population of over 140,000.) Mauch Chunk is on a Lehigh River west side (right bank) flat where Mahoning Creek enters and is a tributary of the Lehigh River. The town grew slowly in its first decade, then rapidly around 1818 grew larger as it became an anthracite coal-shipping center. Canal shipping was eventually replaced by railroad shipping. It would thereby ship LC&N's coal to Philadelphia, Trenton, New York City, and other large cities in New Jersey and Delaware, and by ocean to the whole East Coast. The town would be the lower terminus of a gravity railroad, the Summit Hill & Mauch Chunk Railroad, which would bring coal to the head of the LC&N Lehigh Canal for transshipment to the confluence of the Delaware River, 43 kilometres (26.7 mi) downstream at Easton. The company town was founded by Josiah White and his two partners, founders of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N). Jim Thorpe was founded in 1818 as Mauch Chunk / ˌ m ɔː k ˈ tʃ ʌ ŋ k/, a name derived from the term Mawsch Unk (Bear Place) in the language of the native Munsee-Lenape Delaware peoples: possibly a reference to Bear Mountain, an extension of Mauch Chunk Ridge that resembled a sleeping bear, or perhaps the original profile of the ridge, which has since been changed heavily by 220 years of mining. Central Railroad of New Jersey Station, now a visitors center