Switchback Railroad, Jim Thorpe, Carbon County

I love this time of year - mostly - but today is an especially gloomy and foggy day here in northeastern Pennsylvania. On the plus side, it's my day off, so at least I don't have to go anywhere.

Today we're going to make one final visit to Carbon County, as this is the last of their markers which currently exist. Perhaps in the future they'll get another and I'll be able to cover the dedication. In the meantime, though, I can mark Carbon County as completely finished on my personal marker list, after I finish telling you about today's subject. 

Pennsylvania is, of course, the site of many "firsts". Some of these are well known; we had the first hospital in the United States, the first theater, the first subscription library, the first zoo. Others are less famous, like the first completely air-conditioned building in the country and the first license plate to display a website address. And then there's today's subject, which was the world's first roller coaster.

Packer Mansion, Jim Thorpe, Carbon County

Before we get into the meat of today's post, I wanted to share a link that was sent to me by Karen Galle, from the PHMC office. She enjoyed my description of the Richard Moore marker dedication and wanted to make sure I knew (and could tell all of you) that there's a calendar on the PHMC website, detailing upcoming dedication ceremonies. If you'd be interested in attending the unveiling of a new marker near you, be sure to take a look and mark your own calendar! Thanks, Karen!

I live very close to the point where the borders of Lehigh, Northampton, and Carbon Counties all meet. Jim Thorpe is not too far from me, and I'm rather fond of the quaint little community. 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. Of particular interest to my childhood fancies was the enormous green house with the red roofs, nestled into the distant hills. What was this fairy tale come to life? Who lived there?

Molly Maguire Executions, Carbon and Schuylkill Counties

This is a new one for the blog - the first cross-county post. Throughout Pennsylvania there are a number of markers which are related - either they contain the same information in two different locations (which is the case today), or they're a series of markers which, when put together, more or less tell a story. It's not going to be easy for me to do some of these; for example, there are several markers related to the various canals that will take me a long time to collect. But this one, which has just two, I can do.

Odd as it probably sounds, given the subject matter, I've been looking forward to writing this post. It contains one of the most interesting and obscure pieces of local apocrypha that we have in the Lehigh Valley region. I only waited as long as I did to do this one because I needed a couple of photos from the other location in the story. Now that I have those, here's how we'll finish out the summer - with the deaths of ten men.

Carbon County

I'm not sure how commonly this is known, but did you realize that every one of the 67 counties in Pennsylvania, in addition to being home to many other markers, has a PHMC marker of its very own? I've been trying to figure out the best way to talk about these, but as is so often the case, I'm probably overthinking the matter and I'm just going to treat them like the other markers.

The marker for each county is found in the vicinity of the county courthouse, and the community where the county courthouse is located is known as the county seat. (The lone exception to this rule is Philadelphia County, which consists entirely of the city of Philadelphia - it is its own county seat.) So if you haven't had occasion to wander past the courthouse of a given county, odds are you've never seen one of these markers.

(Edit: Karen Galle, of the PHMC, tells me in a comment below that Montgomery County actually does not have its own marker.)