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    Catasauqua and North Catasauqua
    Catasauqua and North Catasauqua
    Catasauqua and North Catasauqua
    Ebook190 pages50 minutes

    Catasauqua and North Catasauqua

    By Martha Capwell Fox

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    Once among the wealthiest communities in the country, Catasauqua was the birthplace of the modern American iron and steel industry. The energy and inventiveness of industrialists such as David Thomas, J.W. Fuller, and Leonard Peckitt spurred the growth and spread the fame of the Iron Borough far beyond the Lehigh Valley. Entrepreneurs and workers flocked to Catasauqua and North Catasauqua. They filled its mansions and row houses, churches and schools, silk mills, saloons, and playing fields with families who were proud to call the "Million Dollar Town" home.

    Their pride is evident in the images in Catasauqua and North Catasauqua. Bustling businesses, spacious schools, cherished churches, opulent houses, big parades and public celebrations, and strong, confident faces abound in these photographs. The culmination of that pride and prosperity came in 1914, when Catasauqua welcomed the world to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Crane Iron Works with Old Home Week. Less than ten years later, the iron business was gone, its last years recorded in extraordinary photographs. Life in Catasauqua, though harder, went on and today, the heritage of the Iron Borough days is visible everywhere in both towns-the streets, houses, and churches still loved and lived in as they were a century or more ago.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcadia Publishing
    Release dateOct 1, 2002
    ISBN9781439611722
    Catasauqua and North Catasauqua
    Author

    Martha Capwell Fox

    Martha Capwell Fox, a fifth-generation Catasauquan, has been fascinated by Catasauqua's history since her childhood in what is now known as the mansion district. A freelance writer, editor, and researcher, she coproduced the video Catasauqua, A History in Pictures.

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      Book preview

      Catasauqua and North Catasauqua - Martha Capwell Fox

      town."

      INTRODUCTION

      When the 20th century opened, Catasauqua was one of the most prosperous towns in the United States. The anthracite iron industry, born here in 1840, had triggered a wave of industrial innovation that made Catasauqua famous and many Catasauquans rich. Along the banks of the Lehigh River and the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Canal stood the Crane Iron Works, which spawned dozens of similar mills up and down the river, and far beyond the confines of the Lehigh Valley. Around the Crane clustered dozens of other businesses, including foundries, rolling mills, and fabricators of boilerplates, railroad-car wheels, and tunnel tubes, which came into being because David Thomas, or one of his Welsh friends and business partners, saw a way to make something new, useful, and profitable from iron. Newer industries, like silk weaving, rubber fittings, gas and electricity generating, were growing in importance as Catasauqua moved into the 1900s. The Iron Borough was a microcosm of American industry, a textbook example of how success breeds success.

      David Thomas and his son Samuel walked into Biery’s Port on the Lehigh Coal and Navigation towpath on July 9, 1839. Less than a year later, on July 4, 1840, Thomas put into blast the first commercially successful anthracite iron furnace. When he arrived here, Thomas found a tiny handful of houses, a few farms, and a gristmill. When he died here, beloved and wealthy, almost 43 years later, Thomas left two industry-leading iron mills, several companies that made products from his iron, and a bustling, prosperous town. Even more, he left a transformed United States, which he had played a large part in making the industrial leader of the world.

      Thomas came to Catasauqua armed with the knowledge of how to use anthracite coal, which was coming down the canal from the mines of Carbon County, to make large quantities of excellent-quality iron. Before Thomas, iron in this country was produced only in small lots, using charcoal to fuel the furnaces. This was slow and inefficient, and charcoal-making was using up America’s timber faster than it could be replenished. Josiah White and Erskine Hazzard, who had built the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Canal to bring the anthracite coal from the mountains to Philadelphia, brought Thomas from Wales to make iron with their coal. They sent him to this rural part of the Lehigh Valley because it was one of the few places on the canal where there was enough waterpower to drive a turbine. In one remarkable year of hard work, vision, and persistence, Thomas almost single-handedly created an iron furnace, a town, and the industrial age in America.

      What happened next was repeated in towns and rural areas all over the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania, and much of the Northeast. Farmland, rural hamlets, and small towns suddenly mushroomed into smoky, noisy industrial centers, which quickly attracted new people—American and immigrant alike. Suddenly, everything was different and new—new houses, new businesses, new churches, new languages, and new ways of life.

      Catasauqua quickly spread out along the canal and river, and up the hills that rose gently from their banks. Where only several dozen people had lived in 1840, there were over 3,000 in 1860. By 1900, Catasauqua had more than 5,000 inhabitants, and a higher percentage of them were millionaires—self-made millionaires—than anywhere else in the nation.

      They were proud, self-confident, hardworking, and energetic men, devoted to building their businesses and their community. When these men or their wives saw something that needed doing, or that they thought would improve the lives of Catasauquans, they did it. Though nearly every one of those businesses are now gone, and most of those families died out or moved on, 100 years later we still live with the signs and symbols of their achievements. Schools and churches, playgrounds and fire companies, mansions and row houses, and a strong sense of identity as Catasauquans are with us still.

      This is by no means a comprehensive pictorial history of Catasauqua and North Catasauqua. Readers will notice the absence of some well-known landmarks, such as the tunnel; a few industries, most notably brewing; and some famous faces, such as World War II ace Tommy Lynch. In some cases, this is because pictures that met the quality requirements of the publisher did not turn up. Also, so many pictures that had not been published before were offered by residents of both boroughs that the author decided to give space to these, rather than other, more familiar photographs. In this sense, this book is a community photograph album. The author has tried to include as many historical facts and analyses as possible without making the text unwieldy. Many more pictures came to light than could have been included in this volume. The author hopes that this book will send the people of Catasauqua and North Catasauqua searching through their albums, attics, and drawers to bring to light more photographs that will help show and tell the story of what it has been like to live here.

      One

      THE IRON AGE

      Iron made Catasauqua. For 80 years, virtually all

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