Originally in the former Township of Mauch Chunk, the Court of Quarter Sessions of the Peace of Carbon County, Pennsylvania, incorporated land on both sides of the Lehigh River into a borough by the name of The Borough of Mauch Chunk by decree of January 26, 1850, which became effective January 31, 1850.
Situated on a gently rising slope of Bear Mountain, and its street grid is arrayed along either side of PA 903 which proceeds almost due northeast roughly parallel to the south-facing escarpment of Bear Mountain to connect with Albrightsville and originates across the bridge joining the neighborhood with Jim Thorpe's business district and Tees into US 209.
By the 1790s, the area above the Lehigh Gap was being regularly penetrated by pioneers, and logging companies, in the face of the developing energy crisis, began small scale operations.
Sitting to south of the dominant height of Broad Mountain across the Lehigh from where the Nesquehoning Creek crashes into the Lehigh in direct opposition, their confluence skews off at right angles to both in a wide mile long 'slack water pool' that sits between railyards on both banks and was the historic divide between the Mauch Chunk sides.
East Mauch Chunk was occupied first by European pioneering employees of the Lehigh Coal Mine Company in the early 1790s as a logging camp supporting the building of coal arks on the bank below and after Lausanne was settled, such crews timbering and boat building stayed at the Landing Tavern (and Inn) across the river along the Lausanne-Nescopeck Turnpike toll house at Lausanne Landing, then in 1818 became suburb of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company's fast growing activities, then found active growth as a railroad company town servicing the left bank rail yards of the Beaver Creek Railroad and Mining Company, then the successor Lehigh Valley Railroad founded in the 1870s.