A PLACE TO FALL APART

We traveled the back roads of southern New York and northern Pennsylvania to our next stop in Lehighton. Leighton is a small town in eastern Pennsylvania. This area of the country is called the Black Dirt Region. It is beautiful. The Black Dirt Region takes its name from the dark, extremely fertile sapric soil left over from an ancient glacial lake bottom augmented by decades of past flooding of the Wallkill River. The 26,000 acres of muck left over is the largest concentration of such soil in the United States outside the Florida Everglades. The results of all of that nature at work are large deposits of anthracite and coal. So, beautiful, fragrant, fertile, black soil. All of this area is part of the Pocono Mountains. It is dramatic and enchanting.

We went into the Jim Thorpe. Jim Thorpe was founded in 1818 as Mauch Chunk. Mauch Chunk is a name derived from the term Mawsch Unk, meaning Bear Place in Unami, the language of the native Lenape people. This “company town” was founded by Josiah White and his two partners, who were the founders of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company. The town grew larger as it became an anthracite coal-shipping center.

Speaking of coal mining, if you’ve ever heard of the Molly Maguires, Mauch Chunk may be of interest because it was the location of one of the trials of the Molly Maguires in 1876. The Wiki says that the Molly Maguires was an Irish 19th-century secret society active in Ireland, Liverpool, and parts of the Eastern United States, best known for their activism among Irish-American and Irish immigrant coal miners in Pennsylvania. Molly Maguire history is sometimes presented as the prosecution of an underground movement that was motivated by personal vendettas, and sometimes as a struggle between organized labor and powerful industrial forces. Whether membership in the Mollies' society overlapped with union membership to any appreciable extent remains open to conjecture. After a series of often violent conflicts, twenty suspected members of the Molly Maguires were convicted of murder and other crimes and were executed by hanging in 1877 and 1878. One of these trials took place in Mauch Chunk. The trial resulted in four guilty verdicts of murder and the consequence was the hanging of four men.

Nor for some info about how Jim Thorpe came to be. JT is a borough and the county seat of Carbon County. Surprisingly, Jim Thorpe never visited this town. The story goes that following the 1953 death of Olympic medal winner Jim Thorpe, Thorpe's widow grew impatient when the city officials of Shawnee, Oklahoma dilly-dallied in their promise to honor JT with a memorial. Ms. Thorpe heard that the boroughs of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk were desperately seeking to attract business, so she made a deal with civic officials. Essentially, they could bury him in Mauch Chunk if they erected a memorial (and we assume pay her some dollars). The boroughs merged in 1954 and renamed the new municipality Jim Thorpe. The municipality then obtained the athlete's remains and erected a monument to the Oklahoma native, who attended and played sports as a student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Jim Thorpe’s grave rests on mounds of soil from Thorpe's native Oklahoma and from the Stockholm Olympic Stadium where he won his Olympic medals.

We saw the Jim Thorpe Memorial and burial site in the upper part of town. The lower part of town is across the river and has the historic buildings that are on the National Register of Historic Places: e.g., the Asa Packer Mansion (Asa was founder of Lehigh Valley Railroad and Lehigh University), the Harry Packer Mansion, the courthouse, the Opera House, Broadway homes, the sixteen stone row houses that Packer had built, and St. Mark’s church. Fun fact: the Harry Packer Mansion served as the model for the Haunted Mansion ride at Walt Disney World in Florida. In a poll conducted in 2009 by Budget Travel magazine, Jim Thorpe was voted as number seven on its list of “America's Coolest Small Towns.” In 2012, Jim Thorpe was voted the fourth most beautiful small town in America in the Rand McNally/USA Today Road Rally series. Jim Thorpe is a resort town with lots of tourist attractions nearby like white water rafting, mountain biking, paintball, and hiking.

We’re not saying that we fell apart in eastern Pennsylvania, but it is beautiful and stirs the cockles of our hearts. Speaking of hearts, we love Merle Haggard’s music. He’s such an incredible songwriter. A Place to Fall Apart is one of those songs that evokes the emotions of heartache to an extent that sometimes it makes Buster cry. What about this? Send me word and tell me why it ended /I need some final proof to show my heart / I'll be somewhere between I love you / And what you're feelin' now / Lookin' for a place to fall apart

All of us have had our heart broken in some way. Pour your favorite beverage, sit down, relax, and listen to Merle break your heart.

Betty and Buster

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