The boats went down the Lehigh through a series of low dams with gates that could be opened to let them float over the rocks down to Easton, then ride the Delaware River to Philadelphia. Here shallow boats were loaded with 8 to 10 tons of coal. Josiah White and Erskine Hazard, who bought the mine and took control of the river in 1818, had a solution., They built first a road, then a gravity railroad, to bring the coal down from Summit Hill to their new village of Mauch Chunk. The only profitable way to move coal was by boat, and the only water was the wild and rocky Lehigh River. But the chief market for it was a hundred miles away in Philadelphia, and getting the coal there was a challenge. The coal house projected over the river's edge to facilitate loading the boats.', John Hoffman, Anthracite in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania, Anthracite coal was discovered in 1792 at Summit Hill, nine miles west of here.

'The problem of getting coal from wagon to ark was solved by constructing an inclined loading chute at Mauch Chunk that extended downward from Mount Pisgah to a coal-loading house along the Lehigh River.

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