USA > Pennsylvania > Carbon County > History, government and geography of Carbon County, Pennsylvania > Part 4
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Towards night, of the day after the massacre, eight of the white people and about thirty of the Indians who had been at Gnadenhutten arrived in Bethlehem. For several days after this all the settlers of the Lehigh Valley were moving southward toward Bethlehem. The French had induced the Iroquois Indians to remove the Indian settlements from Gnadenhutten to Wyoming. Since the savages were secretly determined to join the French, they wished first to furnish a safe retreat for
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OF CARBON COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA.
their Indian brothers, so that they might more easily fall on the whites. Among those willing to move were Teedyuscung and sixty-five others.
A STOCKADE IS BUILT.
The soldiers above referred to were several days later joined by others who were to guard the Brethren's mills, which were filled with grain, and the property of the Christian Indians. These soldiers built a stockade and made an attempt to protect the entire frontier, but they were no match for the cunning Indians and they soon fell victims to their wily tricks.
On January 1, 1756, a number of these soldiers were skating on the ice of the Lehigh River near the stockade. They were much surprised to see two Indians on the ice farther up the river, and thinking it would be an easy matter to capture and kill them, they started after them in a headlong chase. The Indians wanted to lead the soldiers into an ambush and allowed them to gain rapidly. Before they had proceeded very far beyond the fort, a number of Indians rushed out from the bushes behind the soldiers, and killed all who had entered the chase. Some of the soldiers who had remained in the fort, alarmed at the murder of their companions in arms, left the fort, and the few remaining ones, thinking themselves unable to hold the fort against the Indians, withdrew. The Indians returned and seized such things as they were able to use, and then for a second time reddened the sky, giving the Brethren beyond the Blue Mountains a token that their grain, their mills, and their dwellings were being destroyed by savage demons.
OTHER ATTACKS.
Nor was the murder of the soldiers the only ones that the Indians committed. Frederick Hoeth lived about twelve miles east of Gnadenhutten. His house was suddenly attacked in Decem- ber of the same winter by a group of five or six Indians. The family was at supper when several shots were fired. Hoeth himself was killed and a woman was wounded. After several more shots
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HISTORY, GOVERNMENT AND GEOGRAPHY
were fired, all who could, ran out of the house. The mother went to the bake house, but being driven from it by flames, she ran to the creek where she died in horrible agony. The Indians set fire to the house, stable, and mill. They burned three of the smaller children, while one of the larger daughters was killed and scalped, and several others were carried off into captivity among the Indians.
FRANKLIN BUILDS FORTS.
The condition of affairs thoroughly aroused the people of the lower settlements. Letters were written to Governor Morris to make provision to protect the settlers against the merciless savages. He responded by sending Benjamin Franklin to take charge of building a series of forts along the Blue Mountains. Work on these frontier defenses was started in 1756, Franklin having arrived in Bethlehem for this purpose on December 10th. He made ready for his journey into the wilderness by sending in advance arms, ammunition, and blankets. It was on January 15th that the little band left Bethlehem for Gnadenhutten, where, on January 25, 1756, he wrote the following letter to the Governor:
FRANKLIN'S LETTER TO THE GOVERNOR.
"Dear Sir,-We got to Hays' the same evening we left you, and received Craig's company by the way. Much of the next morning was spent in changing bad arms for the good, Wayne's company having joined us. We marched, however, that night to Uplinger's where we got into good quarters. Saturday morn- ing we began to march towards Gnadenhutten and proceeded nearly two miles; but it seeming to set in for a rainy day, the men unprovided with great coats and many unable to secure effectively their arms from the wet, we thought it advisable to face about and return to our former quarters, where the men might dry themselves and lie warm; whereas, had they proceeded, they would have come in wet to Gnadenhutten, where shelter and opportunity of drying themselves that night was uncertain. In fact, it rained all day, and we were all pleased that we had not
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OF CARBON COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA.
proceeded. The next day being Sunday, we marched hither, where we arrived about two in the afternoon, and before five had inclosed our camp with a strong breastwork, musket proof, and with boards brought here before, by my order from Dunker's mill, got ourselves under some shelter from the weather. Monday was so dark, with a thick fog all day, that we could neither look out for a place to build nor see where materials were to be had. Tuesday we looked round us, pitched on a place, marked out our fort on the ground, and by ten o'clock began to cut timber for stockades and to dig the ground. By three o'clock in the afternoon the logs were all cut and many of them hauled to the spot, the ditch dug to set them in three feet deep, and many were pointed and set up. The next day we were hindered by rain most of the day. Thursday we resumed our work, and before night we were perfectly well inclosed, and on Friday morning the stockade was finished, and part of the platform within erected, which was com- pleted next morning, when we dismissed Foulk's and Wetter- holt's companies, and sent Hay's down for a convey of provisions. The next day we hoisted the flag, made a general discharge of our pieces, which had been long loaded, and of our two swivels, and named the place Fort Allen, in honor of our old friend. It is one hundred and twenty-five feet long, fifty feet wide, the stockades most of them a foot thick. They are three feet in the ground and twelve feet out; pointed at the top. This is an account of our week's work, which I thought might give you some satisfaction. Foulk is gone to build another between this and the Schuylkill fort, which I hope will be finished (as Trexler is to join him) in a week or ten days. As soon as Hay's men return I shall despatch another party to erect another at Surfas's, which I hope to be finished the same time, and then I purpose to end my campaign, God willing, and do myself the pleasure of seeing you on my return. I can now add no more than that I am with great esteem and affection, your friend, B. FRANKLIN."
In his autobiography Franklin thus describes Fort Allen: "The next morning our fort was planned and marked out, the circumference measuring four hundred and fifty-five feet,
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HISTORY, GOVERNMENT AND GEOGRAPHY
which would require as many palisades to be made, one with another, of a foot diameter each. Our axes of which we had seventy, were immediately set to work to cut down trees, and our men being dexterous in the use of them, great dispatch was made. Each pine made three palisades of eighteen feet long, pointed at one end. While these were preparing our other men dug a trench all around of three feet deep, in which the palisades were to be planted, and, the bodies being taken off our wagons, and the fore and hind wheels separated by taking out the pin which united the two parts of the perch, we had ten carriages, with two horses each, to bring the palisades from the woods to the spot. When they were set up, our carpenter built a platform of boards around within, about six feet high, for the men to stand on when to fire through the loop-holes. We had one swivel-gun which we mounted on one of the angles, and fired it as soon as fixed, to let the Indians know, if any were within hearing, that we had such pieces; and thus our fort, if that name may be given to so miserable a stockade, was finished in a week, though it rained so hard every other day that the men could not work."
FRANKLIN LEAVES FORT ALLEN.
Thus was completed the stockade, whose erection was appropriately celebrated on Saturday, May 28, 1910, by one of the finest parades of civic and political bodies that the county has ever witnessed, and ceremonies rarely surpassed in solemnity and appropriateness. The fort had not yet been quite completed, when Franklin received letters from the Governor and others to return to attend the meeting of the Assembly. He returned, therefore, to Bethlehem after an absence of nineteen days. He states that he was unable to rest well on the first night of his return, since he had become accustomed to sleeping on the floor at Gnadenhutten.
Franklin's plan of defending the frontier was so successful that the Indians stopped making attacks upon the whites. The settlers soon returned to their homes and began their former occupations. Though the forts made the farmers feel safer, they
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OF CARBON COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA.
did not live in perfect security. Peace and quiet, however, were maintained until the Revolutionary War, when the murder of citizens on the border was begun anew.
After the Gnadenhutten massacre the few people who had been living in what is now Carbon County returned and were joined by those who made their homes in the river valleys. Among these was Benjamin Gilbert. In 1775, he cleared a farm and built a mill a few miles from where Fort Allen stood.
On April 25, 1780, the Gilberts were attacked by eleven Indians, and twelve prisoners were carried into captivity. Many deeds of cruelty were practiced upon the prisoners in their journey to the St. Lawrence. There they were kept in slavery for a number of years. The old people of the party were threatened with death when they moved too slowly and the elder Gilbert had his face blackened to indicate his fate. For food, they killed deer, of which each one roasted a piece on a sharpened stick.
To secure the prisoners overnight, they cut down saplings about six inches in diameter and into it cut notches. Into these notches the legs of the prisoners were placed at about the ankle. Over this they placed a pole, and fastened each end securely with stakes driven across the poles into the ground to form an X. Into the crotchet or cross of these stakes were placed a piece of wood to keep all firmly in place. They put a strap around the necks of the prisoners, fastening them in the order in which they were fastened by their legs, and then fastened the end to a tree. For a mattress they had hemlock branches and they were allowed blankets for covering.
This occurrence is known among the people as the "Gilbert Family Captivity." Besides Benjamin, who was sixty-nine years of age, there were Eliza, his wife; Joseph Gilbert, his son; Jessie Gilbert, Rebecca Gilbert, Abner Gilbert, Eliza Gilbert, Thomas Peart, Benjamin Gilbert, Jr., Andrew Harrigar, Abigail Dobson, twelve years of age, who lived on a farm one mile from Gilbert's; Benjamin Peart, his wife, Elizabeth, and their nine-months-old child.
No time was lost by the Indians in hurrying the captives over the Nescopeck trail, which led from Mahoning Valley to Lausanne,
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HISTORY, GOVERNMENT AND GEOGRAPHY
at the junction of the Nesquehoning Creek and the Lehigh River, over the Broad Mountain to Beaver Meadow, to Nescopeck, Columbia County, on the banks of the Susquehanna, and then to Canada.
On the fifty-fourth day of their captivity the captives found themselves on the banks of the St. Lawrence River. They were soon separated from each other. Some were given over to Indians, others sold into slavery, some hired out to white families and sent to Montreal. Among the latter was Benjamin Gilbert, who died of a broken heart and whose remains were laid at rest on the banks of the St. Lawrence below Ogdensburg.
After two years and three months of their captivity, the Gilberts and the Pearts were redeemed, and gathered at Montreal August 22, 1782, where they decided "no more Mahoning or Gnadenhutten for us; we want to go back to the City of Brotherly Love, where we belong," though their descendants are known in many quarters of this country to-day.
PART II.
CHAPTER I.
INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS.
The proprietors of Pennsylvania called the vast mountain region north of the Blue Ridge "Towamensing." This is an Indian term which means vast wilderness. The first settlements which the Moravians made in 1746 in the mountain wilds were wiped out by the Indians as if they had been letters on the sand. Colonel Burd, in 1756, said of the whole region in the vicinity of Fort Allen, now Weissport, "The country is an entire barren wilderness, incapable of improvement." In 1762 the whole dis- trict of Towamensing contained but thirty-three persons who were subject to taxation. After the massacre at Gnadenhutten, the whole region was practically deserted.
Penn Township was cut out of the Towamensing region in 1768, and soon after this there came families who cleared its farms, opened its mines, and started its workshops. Among these were the Solts, the Haydts, the Beltzes, the Arners, and the Boyers. After the captivity of the Gilbert family the settlers in the locality again sought safety in flight and the only white men who remained in the region were those whose cabins and clearings were quite a distance from the streams along which the Indians usually traveled.
Penn Township then stretched westward to include much of what is now Schuylkill County. No settlement of importance was recorded until about 1803, when Hillegas, Miner, and Cist, as well as other people living in Easton and Philadelphia, took up vast tracts on the supposition that it contained coal, which was discovered at Summit Hill in 1791.
In 1768 all that portion of the Towamensing district west of the Lehigh was set apart as Penn Township. The assessment
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HISTORY, GOVERNMENT AND GEOGRAPHY
list of the township in 1781 shows the names of quite a large number of inhabitants. The real work of making homes in the forest began in 1804, when the settlers spread themselves through the valleys, and agricultural pursuits were started. The oper- ations of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company were started in 1818. The vast tracts of pine and hemlock timber were then called Pine Swamp, because the swamps and marshes were num- erous. It was not until 1838 that the timber companies began removing the lumber from the Shades of Death, Penn Forest, Kidder and Lausanne Townships, and that mills and houses for the lumbermen began to dot the surface.
INCORPORATION OF THE LEHIGH COAL AND NAVIGATION CO.
It was the endeavor to mine and place upon the market the coal, that marks the beginning of the industries of the county. The Lehigh Navigation Company was organized August 10, and the Lehigh Coal Company on October 10, 1818. In the spring of 1820 they were consolidated, and on February 13, 1822, they were incorporated under the title of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company. The task of making the Lehigh River a navigable stream was begun several times and given up as too costly and impractical. The act which incorporated the company gave this corporation the privilege of carrying out their object, and the leading characters, White and Hazard, began the workin earnest.
They began by building dams and gates in the neighborhood of Mauch Chunk so that the water could be held until required for use. When the dam became full and the water had run over long enough to have the river below contain its usual amount of water, the gates were left down and the loaded boats in the dam above were left down with the temporary flood. Enough of these dams were made to prove that in this way coal could be taken from Mauch Chunk to Easton.
FIRST SHIPMENT BY USE OF DAMS.
Some of the dams were injured by the ice during the spring freshets, but they were repaired and the first shipment of coal
-
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OF CARBON COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA.
that reached Philadelphia, amounting to three hundred and sixty-five tons, was made in 1820. This completely overstocked the market.
The boats used for this purpose were called "arks" and con- sisted of boxes from sixteen to eighteen feet wide and from twenty to twenty-two feet long. At first two of these were joined together to allow them to bend up and down in passing the dams. After the boatmen became accustomed to handling them the number of sections very much increased the whole "ark," sometimes measuring one hundred and eighty feet. It is said the machinery in making them was so well and perfectly adapted to its purpose that five men could put together one of these sections and launch it in forty-five minutes. None of the boats made more than one trip, for on arriving in Philadelphia they were broken up, the planks were sold, and the hinges and nails were returned to Mauch Chunk. For several years the boatmen walked back and later they were carried by the hotel- keepers in rude wagons at a low rate. The coal trade soon increased so rapidly that it could not possibly be continued with- out some means of getting the planks some sixteen miles above Mauch Chunk. Attempts were made to send planks down the river singly, but they became bruised and broken upon the rocks. The plan of sending down the logs was then tried, but the freshets swept them over the dam at Mauch Chunk and too many of them were lost.
THE BUILDING OF CANALS.
In 1825 the company sent down twenty-eight thousand, three hundred and ninety-three tons of anthracite coal. To continue to build a boat for each load that was shipped, thus became impossible, and as a result a canal from Mauch Chunk to Easton was begun. This canal was made sixty feet wide at the top and five feet deep, while the locks were one hundred feet long and twenty-two feet wide. The work was begun about midsummer and completed in two years at an expense of seven hundred and eighty thousand, three hundred and three dollars.
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HISTORY, GOVERNMENT AND GEOGRAPHY
The entire length was forty-four and three-fourth miles. The Delaware division was opened two years later. Making the canal required eight dams across the river from five to thirteen feet high. From the report made by the committee appointed by the Governor to see if the canal had been made according to law, we learn that the new canal was considered a great public improvement and the company was praised for the promptness and thoroughness with which the work was done.
The Beaver Meadow coal region, in the meantime, began to attract the men desirous of engaging in the coal business. It was soon learned that the Legislature would not consent to build dams to bring boats down by artificial freshets such as those that had first been used below Mauch Chunk. The fall of the water was so great that the locks of the canal would have to be built very close together and would require much time to pass through them. On the 13th of March, 1837, a law was therefore passed allowing the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company to build a railroad to connect the Lehigh Canal with the short canals that had been built in this region. A direct line for transporting coal was then completed from beyond White Haven to Easton on the Delaware, and from thence to Philadelphia, a distance of one hundred and forty-four miles.
In 1827 the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company sent over this canal 32,074 tons of coal; in 1837, 223,902 tons, and in 1847, 633,507 tons.
The following is a description of the canal copied from a history published in 1845:
" The scenery immediately upon leaving White Haven is striking, but improves gradually, as you descend the Lehigh, until, some miles above Mauch Chunk, it becomes wild and pic- turesque to the highest degree. Dark waters of a river, dyed almost to a black, by the sap of the hemlock soaking in it, everywhere enclosed by mountains from three hundred to seven hundred feet high, and confined to a channel, scarcely three hundred feet wide, trace a circuitous course through, perhaps, the wildest and most rugged region of the state. Determined to enjoy it to the utmost, I furnished myself with a 'prime principe,'
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OF CARBON COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA.
and taking my seat upon the deck, fairly drank in the varied magnificence of the ever changing scene. Beneath me, the Lehigh either reposed in a black, glittering sheet, or bounded in its rocky channel in wreaths of snow-white foam; about me, on every side, for hundreds of feet, rose the pine-capped mountains, here, dark, jagged and precipitous, interspersed with occasional forest trees, growing in the ravines, or amongst the clefts and crevices of the rocks; now, covered with rolling stones near their summits, bald and desolate; and again, sloping to the river's bank, evenly clad with bright green foliage, and affording the eye a grateful relief from the almost painful grandeur of the ruder scenes; above me, was the deep blue sky of a summer's eve, enhancing the effect of every view, by the contrast of its serene expanse with the wild confusion of the mountain scenery around. Everywhere the mountain sides were spotted with tall, gaunt, leafless trunks of withered pines, blasted by lightning, or scorched by the hand of man, and requiring but slight aid from the excited imagination, to see the gigantic guards of these Satanic fortresses. Along the course of the river, not a single lot of arable land is to be perceived; the mountains sink sheer to the water's edge. In wild magnificence of scenery, I have seen nothing on the Hudson, the Susquehanna, or the Juniata, to compare with the banks of the Lehigh."
THE SWITCHBACK RAILROAD.
In order that the coal might be carried from the mines at Summit Hill to the canal at Mauch Chunk the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company built a gravity railroad between these two towns. The work was begun in 1827. It was the first railroad ever built to carry coal; and, if a wooden railroad at a stone quarry in Massachusetts is excepted, the first that was ever built for any purpose. It was placed mainly on an old wagon road and is about nine miles long. When the cars came to the river the coal was passed down long chutes into the boats. The idea of the road was first thought out by Joshua White and was finished in four months. The iron used for rails was three-eighths of an
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HISTORY, GOVERNMENT AND GEOGRAPHY
inch in thickness and one and one-half inches wide resting on a wooden rail. The sleepers were four feet apart. At first the cars carried about one and one-half tons of coal and a train of them numbered from six to fourteen cars. They were returned on the same track by mules that descended in cars made for this purpose with the train. The descent of the loaded cars was made in about thirty-five minutes, but the mules, each drawing about three or four cars, required about three hours to return.
The road which carried the coal by gravity from Nesquehon- ing, just as it was carried from Summit Hill, was begun in 1830. The bed of this old gravity road is now occupied in part of the distance by the trolley line. It was abandoned when the Nes- quehoning Valley Railroad was built. Some of the stones to which the wooden rails were fastened may still be seen.
When the demand for coal increased so rapidly that the cars could not be returned to the mines quickly enough with mules, Joshua White decided to carry out his idea of returning the cars to the mines by gravity. To carry out this plan, a plane was built from the chutes of Mt. Pisgah about nine hundred feet high. The length of the whole plane was two thousand, three hundred and twenty-two feet. The cars were drawn up this plane by a steam engine and from there they ran a distance of six miles where they again were raised a distance of four hundred and sixty-two feet to the top of Mt. Jefferson, from where they ran a mile to the mines at Summit Hill. This track was completed in 1845.
When the operations were begun in the Panther Creek Valley in the following year the cars descended on a track that has since been abandoned, and were drawn up a plane similar to that of Mt. Pisgah. In going down for its load the car went down the track for a short distance until it came to a place where the road formed into a Y, when it would go up the hill on the left-hand stem of the Y until it was stopped by the force of gravity. As soon as the car had come to a standstill it began to run down the left-hand stem and ascended on the road it came down until it was again stopped by the force of gravity. It would again start to descend, and crossing a switch which was closed by a
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OF CARBON COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA.
spring it descended on the right-hand stem until it reached another switch, where the same thing was repeated. It was the peculiar arrangement of the switches which allowed cars to descend from Summit Hill into what is now Lansford that gave the whole system the name that it now bears, "Switchback Railroad." It was one of the most wonderful feats of engineering work that had been accomplished anywhere. It remains to-day one of the proudest monuments to tell of the intelligence and skill and the courage of men who were the great leaders of industry in Carbon County a generation ago.
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