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Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania By Bruce Heydt Folks in Carbon County, Pennsylvania, don't lightly throw anything away, it seems. It may just be obsessiveness, but I think there's more to it—it's a recognition that even dusty old objects have value if you know where to look. And that is why few if any of the local residents refer to the old historic town on the Lehigh River as Jim Thorpe. Here, the place is still Mauch (rhymes with "talk") Chunk, an old Indian name meaning "sleeping bear." It's a dusty old name, but one with a lot of history clinging to it. The new name the town adopted in 1954 first belonged to one of America's greatest athletes, himself a Native American. At the Stockholm Olympics in 1912, Jim Thorpe was a one-man Dream Team, winning gold medals in both the decathlon and pentathlon and so impressing Sweden's King Gustav that the head of state told him, "Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world." Thorpe reportedly replied, "Thanks, King." Thorpe had absolutely no connection to Mauch Chunk. But after he died in 1953, the athlete and the town were teamed up. By then, Mauch Chunk—once a thriving coalmining center, shipping port, and tourist destination second only to Niagara Falls—had slipped into obscurity and needed something to draw new attention to itself. Local newspaperman Joseph Boyle launched a plan to attract business, funded by asking every local household to contribute a nickel a week. Meanwhile, Thorpe's body lay in a mausoleum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. His widow, Patricia, hoped his native state would erect a monument to him near his boyhood hometown, Yale. The Oklahoma legislature voted to set aside $25,000 for the purpose, but the governor vetoed the bill. In 1954, Patricia traveled to Philadelphia to visit Bert Bell, commissioner of the National Football League, once headed by her husband. While there, she saw a television newscast about Boyle's nickel-a-week revitalization fund. Patricia worked out a deal with Bell and Boyle; if Mauch Chunk agreed to change its name to Jim Thorpe and erect a suitable memorial to her husband, she and Bell would build the Pro Football Hall of Fame there, as well as a $10 million Jim Thorpe Memorial Heart and Cancer Hospital.
A little farther along Route 903, the road crosses the Lehigh River and squeezes into the historic part of town between the rocky mountainside and decaying railroad cars. Here, if you know where to look, you'll find evidence of rebirth in this town that knows there's always one more use for things. The town is a time capsule, filled, it seems, by a giant, impartial hand that didn't bother to distinguish between attractive and dingy aspects. Decaying reminders of the blight of the mid-1900s stand shoulder to shoulder with picturesque relics of Mauch Chunk's heyday such as St. Mark's Episcopal Church on Race Street. Like many of the town's buildings, the nineteenth-century church is built right into the mountainside and features Minton-tiled floors and Tiffany windows. The 5,000 or so inhabitants no longer live to the beat of the industrial revolution or dig the coal that powered it. These days, they live to welcome visitors. There's a visitor center in the old Jersey Central Railroad station, and St. Paul's Methodist Church now houses the Mauch Chunk Museum. One of the fine residences on "Millionaires Row"—once populated by those who made their fortunes from the mines—is now a comfortable inn. Local entrepreneurs have transformed many front sitting rooms into shops so packed with antiques it hardly seems possible to browse without knocking some rare knick-knack onto the floor. Jim Thorpe has discovered that its future depends on its past—a time when the likes of Presidents Ulysses Grant and Teddy Roosevelt vacationed here, when the name of Mauch Chunk was famous in its own right, and the only other designation it went by, inspired by its mountainside setting, was "The Switzerland of America." The Mauch Chunk Museum does have displays documenting Thorpe's life, but the museum's centerpiece—a handmade working scale model of the Switchback Railroad that made Mauch Chunk a tourist mecca—reflects the delight the townsfolk take in telling the story of their town's own place in history. In 1827, to get coal from the hills down to the river, tracks were laid for what was then only the second operational railroad in the United States. The short line was powered by gravity for the downhill run. For the return trip, mules, then steam engines, hauled the empty coal cars back up for the next load. When fully powered steam railways took over the work of hauling coal in 1872, the Switchback began operating as a scenic excursion line. The unpowered cars reached speeds of close to 60 miles per hour—then unmatched by any other form of transportation. One rider, T.L. Mumford, wrote: "Faster and faster, down through long stretches of shady roadway, around wondrous curves, along giddy cliffs, under shadows of great ivy-grown crags, and still down, down, down at a dizzy speed, as if borne on the wings of the wind." Soon the town's hotels were booked with guests who came to try it for themselves.
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