Once called Mauch Chunk (Pronounced Maw-k chunk) a name derived from the term "bear mountain" in the language of the native Delaware peoples (Lenape). This is referencing the mountains which resemble a sleeping bear. The town was founded by Josiah White and his two partners. Also founders of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, a coal mining and shipping company with operations in Summit Hill, Pennsylvania.

 

The Mauch Chunk Switchback Gravity Railroad. In 1827, the LC&N Company constructed an 8.7-mile downhill track, known as a gravity railroad, to deliver coal (and a miner to operate the mine train's brake) to the Lehigh Canal in Mauch Chunk. This helped open up the area to commerce, and helped to fuel the Industrial Revolution in the United States. By the 1850s, the "Gravity Road" (as it became known) was providing rides to thrill seekers for 50 cents a ride (equal to $12.53 today). It is often cited as the first roller coaster in the United States.

 

When floods wiped out many of the upper Lehigh Canal works in 1861, The LC&N headquarters was built across the street from the stylish passenger train station that was soon carrying passengers on from New York and Philadelphia to Buffalo.

 

Mauch Chunk was the location of one of the trials of the Molly Maguires in 1876, which resulted in the hanging of four men found guilty of murder.

 

Following the 1953 death of renowned athlete and Olympic medal winner Jim Thorpe, his widow and third wife, Patricia, was angry when the government of Oklahoma would not erect a memorial to honor him. When she heard that the boroughs of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk were desperately seeking to attract business, she made a deal with civic officials. The boroughs merged, renamed the new municipality in Jim Thorpe's honor. They obtained the athlete's remains from his wife and erected a monument to the Oklahoma native, who began his sports career 100 miles southwest, as a student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The monument site contains his tomb, two statues of him in athletic poses, and historical markers describing his life story. The grave rests on mounds of soil from Thorpe's native Oklahoma and from the Stockholm Olympic Stadium in which he won his Olympic medals.