Mark's), and the church benefited greatly from his generosity he also served there as a vestry man. A religious man, he was a member of what is today St. He was also a Carbon County judge, and lost his bid for governor of Pennsylvania by one of the narrowest margins in history. In addition to his business ventures, Packer was involved in politics, serving in both the Pennsylvania House of Representatives and the United States House of Representatives. Needless to say, he became very wealthy and also very influential. As soon as he could, he began doing what he couldn't convince the LC&N to do, and began establishing railway lines throughout the Lehigh Valley. Packer continued making his boats and locks, but he also continued to investigate the railroad option, and in 1851 he became the major stockholder in what would eventually be renamed the Lehigh Valley Railroad Company.
He tried to persuade the LC&N to invest in their own steam railway, but for whatever reason, they deemed it to not be feasible. Packer, which received a lucrative contract from the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company to make canal boats and locks for them.Ĭonvenient as the water transport was, Packer was convinced that the railroad was where they needed to put their focus. He owned a canal boat, which he used to ferry coal to Philadelphia, and soon created his own boatmaking firm called A. He had considerable carpentry skills, enabling him to find steady work pretty much anywhere he went, and in 1833 he and his wife Sarah (Blakslee) settled in what was then called Mauch Chunk. Well, his name was Asa Packer, and the house was built for him.Īsa Packer was born in Mystic, Connecticut in 1805, and as a young man lived in New York and Pennsylvania. In front of the Jim Thorpe train station, opposite The marker is not located at the mansion itself,īut instead is actually situated in the small park What was this fairy tale come to life? Who lived there? Of particular interest to my childhood fancies was the enormous green house with the red roofs, nestled into the distant hills.
We used to drive through it periodically when I was a child, on the way to visit relatives in the nearby town of Nesquehoning, and the view of Jim Thorpe as we would enter it from its southern end has always been arresting to me.
Jim Thorpe is not too far from me, and I'm rather fond of the quaint little community. I live very close to the point where the borders of Lehigh, Northampton, and Carbon Counties all meet.
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