Jim Thorpe in the 20th Century (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781531622947)

Jim Thorpe in the 20th Century examines the causes and effects of a community's decision to relinquish its Native American name Mauch Chunk ("Bear Mountain") to become the town of Jim Thorpe. In the 19th century, Mauch Chunk rode a wave of prosperity, as coal shipping and tourism turned ordinary men into millionaires. In the 20th century, the mainstays of the town's economy began to tumble like dominoes: mule-drawn coal boats could not compete with the iron horse, ending Mauch Chunk's days as a canal town by 1922; the touristattracting Switchback Gravity Railroad,
unable to afford parts, closed in 1932; the coal mines and working railroads collapsed, as industry, home heating, and trucking turned to petroleum. Downand-out by the mid-1900s, Mauch Chunk was looking for a means of saving itself when the widow of 1912 Olympian Jim Thorpe proposed a stranger-than-fiction solution.

Author: Joan Sewell Gilbert, John H. Drury
ISBN-10: 1531622941
ISBN-13: 9781531622947
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Library Editions
Language: English
Published: 10/19/2005
Pages: 130
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.91lbs
Size: 9.61h x 6.69w x 0.38d