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Panther Creek (Little Schuylkill River)
Panther Creek is a west-draining left-bank tributary of the Little Schuylkill River's drainage basin and rises in the vicinity of the east side of Lansford in the plateau-like nearly flat terrain of the complex three-way saddle between Mount Pisgah to its east, Nesquehoning Ridge to the north and Pisgah Ridge to the south, both ridgelines flanking its entire course as it makes its way ENE-to-WSW. The creek's valley is historically and industrially important having been mostly owned by the historically significant Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company which eventually built the Panther Creek Railroad from Lansford to Tamaqua and the Hauto Tunnel to haul coal from the copious anthracite deposits, collieries, and coal breakers along an easier route than up and over the mountains to Mauch Chunk and the Lehigh Canal via Summit Hill, PA and the Mauch Chunk & Summit Hill Railway, North America's second oldest operational railroad and both its first Gravity & Switchback railroads. The coa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Drainage Divide
A drainage divide, water divide, ridgeline, watershed, water parting or height of land is elevated terrain that separates neighboring drainage basins. On rugged land, the divide lies along topographical ridges, and may be in the form of a single range of hills or mountains, known as a dividing range. On flat terrain, especially where the ground is marshy, the divide may be difficult to discern. A triple divide is a point, often a summit, where three drainage basins meet. A ''valley floor divide'' is a low drainage divide that runs across a valley, sometimes created by deposition or stream capture. Major divides separating rivers that drain to different seas or oceans are continental divides. The term ''height of land'' is used in Canada and the United States to refer to a drainage divide. It is frequently used in border descriptions, which are set according to the "doctrine of natural boundaries". In glaciated areas it often refers to a low point on a divide where it is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Drainage Basin
A drainage basin is an area of land where all flowing surface water converges to a single point, such as a river mouth, or flows into another body of water, such as a lake or ocean. A basin is separated from adjacent basins by a perimeter, the '' drainage divide'', made up of a succession of elevated features, such as ridges and hills. A basin may consist of smaller basins that merge at river confluences, forming a hierarchical pattern. Other terms for a drainage basin are catchment area, catchment basin, drainage area, river basin, water basin, and impluvium. In North America, they are commonly called a watershed, though in other English-speaking places, "watershed" is used only in its original sense, that of a drainage divide. In a closed drainage basin, or endorheic basin, the water converges to a single point inside the basin, known as a sink, which may be a permanent lake, a dry lake, or a point where surface water is lost underground. Drainage basins are similar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carbon County, Pennsylvania
Carbon County is a county in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. It is located in Northeastern Pennsylvania. As of the 2020 census, the population was 64,749. The county is also part of Pennsylvania's Coal Region and Northeastern Pennsylvania. 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. The Lehigh River, a tributary of the Delaware River, flows through Carbon County. History Moravian settlement In 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 com ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gravity Railroad
A gravity railroad (American English) or gravity railway (British English) is a railroad on a slope that allows cars carrying minerals or passengers to coast down the slope by the force of gravity alone. The speed of the cars is controlled by a braking mechanism on one or more cars on the train. The cars are then hauled back up the slope using animal power, a locomotive or a stationary engine and a cable, a chain or one or more wide, flat iron bands. A much later example in California used steam engines to pull gravity cars back to the summit of Mt. Tamalpais. The typical amusement park roller coaster is designed from gravity railroad technology based on the looping track incorporated into the second railroad of the United States, the Mauch Chunk & Summit Hill Railroad, which remained in operation for decades as a tourist ride after it was withdrawn from freight service hauling coal. Types of gravity railroad Some gravity railroads were designed to allow the weight of the desc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mauch Chunk & Summit Hill Railway
The Mauch Chunk and Summit Railroad was a coal-hauling railroad in the mountains of Pennsylvania that operated between 1828 and 1932. It was the first operational railway, in the United States, of any substantial length to carry paying passengers. A private line which moved coal for the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company on gauge track, it was not a common carrier which linked with other railroads. The rail line was laid on top of the company's earlier -constant-descent-graded wagon road. The railroad operated for over a hundred years until the middle of the Great Depression. History The Mauch Chunk was the second permanent United States railroad and the first over five miles long. Early days: 1828-1845 Like its rival the B&O Railroad, the Mauch Chunk at first used animal power. Mules hauled the empty coal tubs to the summit and were sent down in the last batch of cars; the return trip required 4–5 hours. The road would send down groups of 6–8 coal cars under control o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Summit Hill, PA
Summit Hill is a borough in Carbon County, Pennsylvania. It is part of Northeastern Pennsylvania. The population was 3,034 at the 2010 census. Summit Hill has a storied history as the western terminus of the United States' second operational railway, the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway, and some of the earliest coal mines developed in North America, where the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company began mining in 1792, establishing the town initially as little more than a mining camp with stables and paddocks. History Anthracite coal was discovered on the ridgeline of Sharpe Mountain (now known as Pisgah Mountain) in 1791 by a hunter. News of the find led to the founding of the Lehigh Coal Mining Company, which in 1792 began exploring the area in earnest and buying up promising land. Coal was found in 1794 by Phillip GinterThe Ear ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lehigh Canal
The Lehigh Canal, or the Lehigh Navigation Canal, is a navigable canal that begins at the mouth of Nesquehoning Creek on the Lehigh River in eastern Pennsylvania. It was built in two sections over a span of twenty years, beginning in 1818. The lower section spanned the distance between Easton and present-day Jim Thorpe. In Easton, the canal met the Delaware and Morris Canals, which allowed goods to be transported further up the U.S. East Coast. At its height, the Lehigh Canal was long. Although the canal was used to transport a variety of products, its most significant cargo was anthracite coal and pig iron, which proved cornerstones of the Lehigh Valley's ascent as a central hub for the American Industrial Revolution. Their mining and transport defined the character of the towns surrounding the canal. The route consisted initially of canals and dammed-off sections of the Lehigh River. Boatmen had to navigate barges periodically from the canal through a lock onto the river or v ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mauch Chunk
Jim Thorpe is a borough and the county seat of Carbon County in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. It is part of Northeastern Pennsylvania. It is historically known as the burial site of Native American sports legend Jim Thorpe. Jim Thorpe is located in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania approximately northwest of Allentown, northwest of Philadelphia, and west of New York City. History Founding Jim Thorpe was founded in 1818 as Mauch Chunk (), 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. The company town was founded by Josiah White and his two partners, founders of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N). The town would be the lower terminus of a gravity railroad, the Summ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coal Breaker
A coal breaker is a coal processing plant which breaks coal into various useful sizes. Coal breakers also remove impurities from the coal (typically slate) and deposit them into a culm dump. The coal breaker is a forerunner of the modern coal preparation plant.Carris, David M. "A Historic Perspective." In ''Designing the Coal Preparation Plant of the Future.'' Barbara J. Arnold, Mark S. Klima, and Peter J. Bethell, eds. Littleton, Colo.: Society for Mining, Metallurgy and Exploration, 2007. Coal tipples typically were used at bituminous coal mines, where removing impurities was important but sorting by size was only a secondary, minor concern. Coal breakers were always used (with or without a tipple) at anthracite mines. While tipples were used around the world, coal breakers were used primarily in the United States in the state of Pennsylvania (where, between 1800 and the mid-20th century, many of the world's known anthracite reserves were located). At least one source claims ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Colliery
Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from iron ore and for cement production. In the United Kingdom and South Africa, a coal mine and its structures are a colliery, a coal mine is called a 'pit', and the above-ground structures are a 'pit head'. In Australia, "colliery" generally refers to an underground coal mine. Coal mining has had many developments in recent years, from the early days of men tunneling, digging and manually extracting the coal on carts to large open-cut and longwall mines. Mining at this scale requires the use of draglines, trucks, conveyors, hydraulic jacks and shearers. The coal mining industry has a long history of significant negative environmental impacts on local ecosystems, health impacts on local communities and workers, and contributes heavily to th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hauto Tunnel
The Hauto Tunnel, dug in 1871–72, was a 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 above Nesquehoning, Pennsylvania. The tunnel was significant for cutting nearly 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. Built as a joint venture by the Central Railroad of New Jersey and landlords Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N Co.) shortly after the LC&N board of directors had decided to opt out of the rail transportation business and leased all the railroads it owned or controlled under subsidiary Lehigh & Susquehanna Railroad to the CNJ. The tunnel began as a notion when LC&N Co. miners needed to drain water from a higher mine gallery under the Panther Creek Valley and so dug a d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lansford, PA
Lansford is a county-border borough (town) in Carbon County, Pennsylvania. It is part of Northeastern Pennsylvania. It is located northwest of Allentown and 19 miles south of Hazleton in the Panther Creek Valley about from Philadelphia and abutting the cross-county sister-city of Coaldale in Schuylkill County. The whole valley was owned and subdivided into separate lots by the historically important Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, locally called the Old Company, which likely settled some structures on the lands by 1827. Lansford grew with the development of local anthracite coal mines and was named after Asa Lansford Foster, who was an advocate for merging the small patch towns that developed in the area surrounding the anthracite coal mines. The population was 3,941 at the 2010 census, a steep decline from a high of 9,632 at the 1930 census common to many mining towns in Northeastern Pennsylvania. History Lansford's first school was opened in 1847 on Abbott Street. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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