Following the end of the
American Revolutionary War, the rough steep banks of the
Lehigh Valley area above the
Lehigh Gap in the
Blue Mountain Ridge were virtually unoccupied, the Amerindians even called the area "Towamensing", literally meaning "The Wilderness", though their summer foraging parties regularly traveled its trails. Even the largest city to the north,
Hazleton, Pennsylvania, was then a
saddle that wouldn't be occupied until
anthracite drew in settlers, save for a few reclusive hunters. The Amerindian Trail over the
barrier ridge of
Broad Mountain known as the Warriors Trail, which is now roughly
PA Route 93, after becoming the
Lehigh and Susquehanna Turnpike in 1804.) was known, and re-branded the Lausanne-Nescopeck Road when settlers did enter the area. With little flat terrain, the soil was essentially unfarmable, so the only obvious industry before people learned the tricks of burning hard to sustain and ignite anthracite was timber, which Brenckman claims drove the company that formed the turnpike – and the Lehigh is a shallow river, making harvest of big logs and especially their transport, very difficult. Having a wagon road with sledges in winter lands covered in snow make the impossible merely difficult. Once on the river, such logs can be rafted on the spring freshets, as floods were called in the day. The historic name
Lausanne Township, prior to the 1808 reshuffling, based on
Pennsylvania's township rules of local government defined in the
Pennsylvania Constitution, applied for all the territory north of the
Lehigh Gap to the
Luzerne County line in the Federalist-era's much larger
Northampton County, the whole frontier region above the
Lehigh Gap from around 1790 to 1808, and to 1827, when present-day
Jim Thorpe was split off. It is removed in time and repeated reorganizations of local government entities from the rump bit of land that is today's Lausanne Township, which is still along the County Line, and but the remains of the old township's size-wise, located along the extreme northern border of
Carbon County, Pennsylvania. 's 1832
Travels in America collection of engravings—a view from
Bear Mountain at the outlet of the
Lehigh Gorge opposite the
Nesquehoning Creek and lost town of
Lausanne Landing; the first coal chute and coal loading docks at the terminus of the
Summit Hill and Mauch Chunk Railroad viewed diagonally across the lakelike slack water pool above the Lehigh's Mauch Chunk Dam from the lightly settled shores of
East Mauch Chunk In the foreground, is the long slack water pool above the
Lower Lehigh Canal enhanced by the LC&N Co.'s upper lock and first dam at the turn below Mauch Chunk.Painting is fourteen years after the LCC and LNC were formally incorporated, probably while the
Beaver Meadow Railroad was under construction.This painting shows the view from East Mauch Chunk near the foot of the
Lehigh Gorge, across the mile-plus-long slack water pool to the loading docks below Mount Pisgah. Its primitive company town, Mauch Chunk, now
Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, sits in the shelf-land and gap under
Mount Pisgah. By the time of the painting, Landing Tavern and the Lausanne toll house would have been part of Mauch Chunk Township, and Lausanne Township would have continued, but its center would have been displaced northwards to retain other lightly populated wards and precincts outside the new towns. Today there are only a few stone ruins at the site of the ephemeral community mentioned by 19th century historians as Lausanne Landing,
Lausanne, and
Lausanne Township, each signifying a frontier settlement which was a community occupied for most of three decades by a few permanent pioneers, but mainly by transient work crews, either building
one way cargo boats, cutting down trees, or mining coal. The Lehigh & Susquehanna Turnpike's buildings were erected alongside Landing Tavern, which was erected along the Amerindian trail head of the mostly unimproved footpath between Lausanne and Nescopeck, before it ascended Broad Mountain and before it was acquired by investors and chartered (1804) as a
toll road. These buildings and others such as storehouses, a saw mill and the turnpike toll house were all located near the "Delta" of the Nesquehoning, the wide shallow slopes in the flood-prone mouth terrain at the confluence of the
Lehigh River coming westwards out of the Lehigh Gorge and the east flowing Nesquehoning Creek flowing down its steep sided deep ravine into the head end of the calm slack water lake running southwards at right angles to both from their merge. Pioneering penetrations of mountainous terrain were spearheaded by traders and subsistence hunters gradually exploring the frontier with or without an Amerindian guide. Either of which were often followed by lumbermen harvesting the riches of the forest, the structural material which Lewis Mumford in his seminal study of the interrelationships between technology and societal development,
Technics and Civilization noted: Because of the valley's collision between warring ridgelines above the Lehigh's water gap where
Broad Mountain,
Nesquehoning Mountain,
Pisgah Ridge, and
Mauch Chunk Mountain all funnel waters into the long slack water pool where the Lehigh is slow and broad and lakelike under the shadow of the west face of
Bear Mountain. ==Notes==