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Carbon County is a county located in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, in the United States. As of the 2020 census, the population was 64,749. The county is also part of Pennsylvania's Coal Region. The county seat of Carbon County is Jim Thorpe, which was founded in 1818 as Mauch Chunk and served as a company town of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company.
[edit] History
[edit] Moravian settlementIn 1745, the first settlement in Carbon County was established by a Moravian mission in Gnadenhutten, which is present day Lehighton. Deeply moved by the deplorable state of the Leni Lenape Indians in America, twelve Moravian missionaries left their home in Herrnhut, Germany and traveled by sea to the wilderness of Pennsylvania, a place known for religious tolerance under the auspices of Count Zinzendorf. Located where Lehighton now stands, Gnadenhutten exemplified communal simplicity. Home to hundreds of Lenape and Mohican Indians displaced by colonial settlements, predation, bigotry and subjugation to the Iroquois, the Delaware peoples were being squeezed out of the southern counties and New Jersey westwards and against the Blue Ridge escarpment. The mission was a scene of quiet, humble and unobtrusive heroism and the Indians' shelter. Although the wilderness of Carbon County was quite treacherous, the Moravians traveled in the wilds of Carbon County undaunted. By 1752, increased hostility put Gnadenhutten at risk for attack, but the missionaries' pious good works did not go unnoticed. The frankness and earnestness of the simple Moravians had won respect with the many tribes of Pennsylvania Indians, and they lived without incident until 1755. At that point an Amerindian uprising drove settlements away from the Lehigh Gap, and whites didn't reenter the area before the late 1780. In 1791, a homesteader, Phillip Ginter hunting on Sharp Mountain along Pisgah Ridge found a black tone coal outcropping, and conveyed a chunk of it to Weissport. [edit] IndustrializationLehigh Coal Mine Company (LCMC) operations had managed to open up the mouth area of the Nesquehoning Creek by 1800. This area became known as Lausanne, or Lausanne Landing, after the Inn & Tavern built there called Landing Tavern. An Amerindian trail crossed the stream near the confluence with Jean's Run and the camp grounds of their boat builders, climbing northwestwards along a traverse to the next water gap west, eroded into the southern flank of Broad Mountain in the Lehigh Valley. It connected across a barrier ridge whose waters originated in the saddle-pass in which Hazleton, Pennsylvania was built. The trail would become the Lehigh & Susquehanna Turnpike in 1804. Today, Pennsylvania Route 93 follows this route with the exception of where modern road building capabilities allowed improved positioning. This road cut off from a trip from Philadelphia to the Wyoming Valley and the northern sections of the Coal Region. [edit] Lehigh Coal & Navigation CompanyIn 1827, Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, based in present-day Jim Thorpe, launched the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway, the nation's second operating railroad.[1] The Beaver Meadow Railroad and Coal Company, also located in Carbon County, was the first railway to operate steam locomotives as traction engines and prime movers in the United States. The Mauch Chunck Switchback Railway connected mines west of Beaver Meadows and Weatherly to the Lehigh Canal opposite Lehighton. [edit] County's foundingCarbon County was created on March 13, 1843 from parts of Northampton and Monroe counties and was named for the extensive deposits of anthracite coal in the region, where it was first discovered in 1791. Early attempts were made to exploit the deposits by the Lehigh Coal Mine Company (1792), whose expeditions broke trail and pioneered river bank sites using mule powered technology to log, saw, and build arks to carry bags of coal to Philadelphia with only scant success. [edit] Molly MaguiresIn the 19th century, Carbon County was the location of trials and executions of the Molly Maguires, an Irish secret society that had been accused of terrorizing the region. [edit] Timeline
[edit] Population History
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