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The county courthouse at Jim Thorpe, PA. "Jim Thorpe",
county seat of Carbon County, is the current name of old Mauch Chunk,
a Delaware Indian name meaning Bear Mountain. Viewpoint is from the
vicinity of the old Jersey Central Railroad station. West Broadway
enters the square at left.
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Packer Avenue runs along the east side of the courthouse. This building,
like the Schuylkill County courthouse at Pottsville,
PA, was the scene of a rigged trial and subsequent hanging of
several members of the Molly
Maguires in the 1870s. This Irish derived group fought the oppression
of the coal mining interests and so was spuriously tagged as anarchist,
responsible for the coal operators' self inflicted troubles besetting
the hard coal industry in the mid to late nineteenth century.
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The corner of the old Jersey Central Railroad's train station in
Jim Thorpe. No commercial passenger trains stop here anymore. This
town began as a lumbering village and developed further as an anthracite
coal loading canal port. Not itself a coal town, it existed as a busy
center of the Lehigh Valley and Jersey Central's coalfield operations.
Asa Packer, founder of the Lehigh Valley Railroad and Lehigh University
in Bethlehem, PA made his residence here.
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Jim Thorpe is now a town capitalizing
on tourist attraction, having improbably, but succesfully transmogrified
and renamed itself for the American Indian Olympic athlete. Every
year nostalgic local train excursions run from this point out through
the scenic countryside. As Mauch Chunk, it called itself the "Switzerland
of America", located among the steep hills and gorges of the
eastern Pennsylvania Appalachians. Tourist excursions once regularly
ran to the Glen Onoko resort nearby from the major eastern seaboard
cities.
Glen
Onoko now. Click the camera icons near Jim Thorpe.
Glen
Onoko then. Felix Payer and orchestra.
The
Falls of Glen Onoko
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The Emerald Restaurant and Molly Maguires Pub on West Broadway.
In the day of The Mollies such a place would have been inconceivable.
The very existence of such a group made inhabitants of such larger
towns more than somewhat uncomfortable. Today some of the boutiquey,
new age curio shops along the main street do a good business selling
bizarre 'execution toys' like gallows and T-shirts imprinted with
The Handprint of Alexander Campbell. Campbell, one of the Mollies
who had been condemned to death, swore that he was innocent and
that the handprint he imprinted on the jail cell wall would never
disappear.
The Pub has a good menu for those whose sensitivity is not troubled
by the memory of the several Mollies hanged just a few doors down
the street on "The
Day of the Rope".
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