Lausanne Landing, Pennsylvania

Lausanne Township was originally organized out of dense wilderness along an ancient Amerindian Trail, the Warriors' Path, an important regional route as it connected the Susquehanna River settlements of the lower Wyoming Valley to those around Philadelphia.

The Nesquehoning Creek mouth issues behind a small river island and sits above the long curved lake-like upper pool of the Lehigh below the outlet of the gorge, and its delta's smoothly sloped sides made an attractive landing beach, giving name to the Inn.

With the popularity of the route and the roughness of the country, often called "The Switzerland of America" the location was a natural rest stop for the next leg to the north involved a steep climb and was over nine miles to the area of Beaver Meadows.

It was used initially by transient work crews timbering and building temporary river boats to haul cargo known as arks, a common solution to ship upstream resources out of the frontier.

The first step toward developing a town came in 1804 when a private company built the Berwick Turnpike along the old Indian trail in an effort to open a way to the lumber lands along the upper reaches of the Susquehanna.

With little flat terrain, the soil was essentially unfarmable, so the only obvious industry before people learned the tricks of burning hard to sustain and ignite anthracite was timber, which Brenckman claims drove the company that formed the turnpike – and the Lehigh is a shallow river, making harvest of big logs and especially their transport, very difficult.

These buildings and others such as storehouses, a saw mill and the turnpike toll house were all located near the 'Delta' of the Nesquehoning, the wide shallow slopes in the flood prone mouth terrain[d] at the confluence of the Lehigh River coming westwards out of the Lehigh Gorge and the east flowing Nesquehoning Creek flowing down its steep sided deep ravine into the head end of the calm slack water lake running southwards at right angles to both from their merge.

Either of which were often followed by lumbermen harvesting the riches of the forest, the structural material which Lewis Mumford in his seminal study of the interrelationships between technology and societal development, "Technics and Civilization" noted: The rational conquest of the environment by means of machines is fundamentally the work of the woodsman.

A map of the northwestern region of Carbon County in Northeastern Pennsylvania
From Karl Bodmer 's 1832 ' Travels in America' collection of engravings —a view from Bear Mountain at the outlet of the Lehigh Gorge opposite the Nesquehoning Creek and lost town of Lausanne Landing ; the first coal chute and coal loading docks at the terminus of the Summit Hill and Mauch Chunk Railroad viewed diagonally across the lakelike slack water pool above the Lehigh's Mauch Chunk Dam from the lightly settled shores of East Mauch Chunk [ a ] In the foreground, is the long slack water pool above the Lower Lehigh Canal enhanced by the LC&N Co.'s upper lock and first dam at the turn below Mauch Chunk.
Painting is fourteen years after the LCC and LNC were formally incorporated, probably while the Beaver Meadow Railroad was under construction.
This painting shows the view [ b ] from East Mauch Chunk near the foot of the Lehigh Gorge , across the mile-plus-long slack water pool to the loading docks below Mount Pisgah. Its primitive company town, Mauch Chunk, now Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania , sits in the shelf-land and gap under Mount Pisgah . By the time of the painting, Landing Tavern and the Lausanne toll house would have been part of Mauch Chunk Township, and Lausanne Township would have continued, but its center would have been displaced northwards to retain other lightly populated wards and precincts outside the new towns.