Gnadenhütten, Lehighton, Carbon County

As promised, after last week's unusual post, it's back to business as usual. I had hoped to finish my Carbon County book last October, but life has a tendency to get in the way. Between work, health, weather, and the holidays, I haven't gotten it done. But it's almost done. I have two chapters and an afterword left to finish, plus some tweaks I want to make to the finished chapters, and I'm hoping to get it wrapped up in the next few weeks.

So when I was trying to decide what to write about this week, I took a poll on the blog's Facebook account asking if people would rather have a new quest or another sneak peek at the book. It was a close call (things were in a dead heat even when I woke up this morning), but the tie finally broke with one last vote to do a sneak peek. 

The original post about Gnadenhütten remains one of the most popular I've ever done, and I'm extremely proud of how I've fleshed it out in the book. I won't share the entire chapter, but here's a look at some of the detailing, including an image I've never before shared on this blog.

Philip Ginter, Summit Hill, Carbon County

Happy October!

I'm still working on the Carbon County marker book - I expect to be finished before too much longer. So it takes up a lot of my mental energy because I'm honestly quite excited for it. (To quote from the recently released trailer for the back half of the Wicked movie, "I'm obsessulated.")

That being the case, here's another preview for my faithful blog readers, revisiting an earlier post. As with the previous post I've done of this sort, this is not the entire chapter, just a truncated version. I have to save some of the good stuff so people will buy the book, after all!

Fort Allen and Fort Allen Well, Weissport, Carbon County

Some of my older readers might be looking at that subject line and thinking this looks familiar. They might even be thinking Laura, are you feeling all right? You wrote this post seven years ago.

I'm fine, thank you. Actually, I'm a little giddy, because I have been making excellent progress on the first book version of this blog! I'm really happy with what I've got so far, I'm about halfway through at this point. The book will contain all of the blog posts about Carbon County, which is thus far the only county in which I've completed posts about all of the markers. (Well, all of them except for the ones related to the Walking Purchase. That's a big hornet's nest that needs special consideration.) The original posts are being expanded, with more information, more images, and - my apologies - more humor.

I recently finished the chapter about Fort Allen and its well, and I thought that as a sneak preview, I'd redo the blog post and put in some of that new stuff. I won't put in all of it, of course, because I have to save some goodies for the finished project. But if you like what you see here, then you have an idea of what I'll be releasing fairly soon!

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.

Philip Ginter, Summit Hill, Carbon County

Update 10/1/2025: This post has been freshly updated and re-released! Find it here.

For today's adventure, we'll head back to Carbon County - haven't been there in a while - and read about a man whose name is spelled two ways. I first talked about Philip Ginter, or Ginder, in my post about the Carbon County marker, and at the time I promised I'd tell you more about him later. Well, it's later.

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.)

Fort Allen and Fort Allen Well, Weissport, Carbon County

Edit 8/20/2025: This post has been updated! For the more recent version, click here.

I mostly know Weissport as the little town under the route 209 bridge, which every August hangs up signs advertising their "Redneck Festival" over Labor Day weekend. I also know it from my article about Gnadenhütten, where I mentioned that Weissport was eventually formed from two of the three Moravian settlements by that name. 

In the Gnadenhütten article, I mentioned that Fort Allen was built as a direct result of the attack on the Moravians, and that I'd be getting to that in a later post - and here we are. This is another two-fer, because there are two markers connected to the fort; the well, which is the only part of the fort still existing today, has a marker all its own.

Gnadenhütten, Lehighton, Carbon County

As promised on Facebook, I'm making my first foray into Carbon County with this article, but also keeping with the Moravian theme of the last one. Gnadenhütten (or Gnadenhuetten if you write it without the umlaut) is a German word literally meaning "huts of grace," and this was the name given to many settlements established by the German Moravian church. 

Two such settlements by this name were formed in North America, both of which came to unfortunate ends. "The Gnadenhütten Massacre" specifically refers to the incident in Ohio, in 1782. But a few decades earlier, here in Pennsylvania, there was a similar but smaller massacre in what today is known as Lehighton.

Edited 2/23/2024: This blog post is now available as a podcast episode! Learn even more facts about Gnadenhütten by downloading the episode today at Audio.com, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

Edited 2/4/2026: In preparation for my upcoming book about Carbon County's markers, this blog post is now available in an updated form, which you can find here.