The subtle crunch of the gravel under your feet, the background gush of the river always just a few yards away, the steeply etched sides of the gorge smothered with trees offering a palette of greens in summer, oranges in autumn and shifting shades of brown, white and crystal ice in winter …

And the air. That clean, sweet, ubiquitous scent you sense for miles.

A walk along the Lehigh Gorge trail offers ample distraction, making it easy to miss the history buried in the beauty. But the stretch of former railway from White Haven to Jim Thorpe bursts with old guts and glory. It erupts from the ground around every turn. The remnants are often shaded by those ample trees and blended into the landscape, but that doesn’t diminish what happened here.

The Industrial Revolution happened here. Feats of engineering unrivaled in their time happened here. Opportunity happened. Dreams were shattered, rebuilt, and washed away. The foundations of empires still sit in the brush, just out of view to the inattentive.

The Lehigh River Canal happened here, and there is irony in knowing it shaped our area’s past and present, yet gets scant attention (if any) in schools shaping our area’s future.

Until now. As I wrote in a story Thursday, the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor – a partnership set up to preserve and promote just this sort of thing – has launched a pilot program geared to fourth- and fifth-graders, designed to convey the power and place the canal and subsequent railroads in the gorge had on America.

The centerpiece is a trunk full of hands-on goodies, an engaging amalgam of period items ranging from toys to clothes to books to tools. If the response to this idea by Hanover Memorial Elementary students is any gauge, the trunk will be a big hit.

Stuff of legend

I’ve walked and bicycled the gorge from my early teens, before it became a park, much less a popular one. I proposed to my wife in the shadows of its hills, during a two-day walk to Jim Thorpe and back – 40 miles to celebrate her 40th birthday. It’s a walk we’ve redone every year since (in fact, it’s time to don the boots again).

You can still explore remains of the old canal locks, the constructions that made this impassable river navigable, allowing barges to haul coal that fired industrial growth and transformed a nation. Multiple attempts to harness the Lehigh failed between the discovery of coal in 1791 at Summit Hill and the success of Josiah White in the 1830s and ’40s. White built 20 dams and 29 locks over 26 miles from Jim Thorpe (Mauch Chunk back then) to White Haven.

He succeeded, but only briefly, as floods in the mid 1800s washed much of his ingenuity and grit away. Just as well. There was this newfangled thing coming into play called steam locomotives. Trains replaced barges and tracks were laid along the banks of the Lehigh, creating that same subtle grade that is now the Gorge trail.

It’s the stuff of legend, material suitable for an inspirational movie. And unlike so much of the history our students do study, this happened in the back yard. A class could take a cheap field trip and see the locks, listen to the river, walk the rail line. The mansions of industry giants still grace the hills of Jim Thorpe, where you can board a train for a brief ride up a bit of the gorge, or hike Glen Onoko falls near the site of the long-gone Hotel Wahnetah, a veritable vacation palace in the region’s heyday.

Kudos to the Corridor people and their sponsors for shipping a crate of river history into the school docks.

About the Author

Mark Guydish covers education for the Times Leader. Reach him at (570) 970-7161 or mguydish@timesleader.com.

A West Hazleton native, I worked as a service technician repairing electronic mailing and shipping systems, a bike shop owner and an Emergency Medical Technician (among other jobs) before landing a reporter job at the Times Leader Hazleton Bureau in 1995. I started by covering primarily politics in Hazleton City and outlying municipalities, eventually became "social issues" team leader in the Wilkes-Barre office with the accent on education, and headed the Hazleton Bureau for a spell before returning to full-time reporting, my preferred position. I'm an avid cyclist and rode across the country in 1990, a trip of more than 5,000 miles from New Jersey to Seattle and down the coast to San Francisco. Years in the Boy Scouts made me a life long backpacker and camper, and I've yet to find a better way to enjoy the quiet lure of winter snow than cross country skiing.

Mark also writes a regular blog for timesleader.com.

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