Lausanne Landing, Pennsylvania


Historic Lausanne, also often called Lausanne Landing of the 1790s–1820s was a small settlement at the mouth of Nesquehoning Creek on the Lehigh River in marshy delta-like flood plain. Some historic references will instead mention the 'Landing Tavern', and the reader must understand that Lausanne was a township organized in the wilderness with an almost unyielding terrain hostile to man, but along an ancient Amerindian Trail, the "Warriors' Path" the white man could not resist traveling since it connected the Susquehanna River settlements of the lower Wyoming Valley to those around Philadelphia. During the American Revolution, this route would become the rough 'Lausanne-Nescopeck Road', and after the turn of the century with a charter, be improved into the wagon road toll road the Lehigh and Susquehanna Turnpike. The fan-shaped plain provided some of the flattest landscape terrain in the entire area, so could also support a few small farm plots, boat building, and a lumbermill. With the widespread deforestation creating the nation's first energy crises, what it also did was attract attention of timber and lumber companies, for the Lehigh could support river arks. 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. Hence early on it added 'Landing Tavern' to its nicknames.
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. As such early on it anchored a sawmill, tavern, crude housing, tool and work sheds, and in 1804–05, a toll house built for the Lehigh and Susquehanna turnpike, climbing the nearby ravine of Jean's Run as it began the sharp ascent up Broad Mountain to pass in succession along the banks of the Black Creek, Quakake Creek, Beaver Creek valleys in Carbon County, Pennsylvania then climb Hazel Creek into Luzerne County up to the flat area of the Mountain pass, a marshy saddle which would become Hazelton, PA near the 1780s settlement of St John's along the descent to Nescopeck on the Susquehanna – PA 93 follows much of the same road bed, save for starting at an elevated altitude from the nearby town of Nesquehoning, PA via a high level bridge.

Old Lausanne Township

At the close of the American war of independence, into the early United States constitutional era, the rough steep banks of the Lehigh Valley area above the Lehigh Gap in the Blue Mountain Ridge was virtually unoccupied, the Amerindians even called the area "Towamensing", literally meaning "The Wilderness", though their summer foraging parties regularly traveled its trails. Even today's nearest largest city to the north, Hazelton, PA was a swampy saddle that wouldn't be occupied until anthracite drew in settlers, save for a few reclusive hunters. The Amerindian Trail over the barrier ridge of Broad Mountain known as the "Warriors Trail" was known, and re-branded the Lausanne-Nescopeck Road when settlers did enter the area. 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. Having a wagon road with sledges in winter lands covered in snow make the impossible merely difficult. Once on the river, such logs can be rafted on the spring freshets, as floods were called in the day.
The historic name Lausanne Township applied for all the territory north of the Lehigh Gap to the Luzerne County line in the Federalist-era's much larger Northampton County – the whole frontier region above the Lehigh Gap from around 1790 to 1808, and to 1827, when Mauch Chunk was split off. It is removed in time and repeated reorganizations of local government entities from the rump bit of land that is today's Lausanne, Pennsylvania, which is still along the County Line, and but the remains of the old township's size-wise, located along the extreme northern border of Carbon County, Pennsylvania.
'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
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 from the 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.
Today there are only a few stone ruins at the site of the ephemeral community mentioned by nineteenth century historians as 'Lausanne', 'Lausanne Landing', and 'Lausanne Township', each signifying a frontier settlement which was a community occupied for most of three decades by a few permanent pioneers, but mainly by transient work crews, either building one way cargo boats, cutting down trees, or mining coal.
The Lehigh & Susquehanna Turnpike's buildings were erected alongside 'Landing Tavern' which had been erected along the Amerindian trail head of the mostly unimproved footpath between Lausanne and Nescopeck, before it ascended Broad Mountain and before it was acquired by investors and chartered as a toll road. 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 at the confluence of the Lehigh 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.
Pioneering penetrations of mountainous terrain were spearheaded by traders and subsistence hunters gradually exploring the frontier with or without an Amerindian guide. 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:
Because of the valley's collision between warring ridgelines above the Lehigh's water gap where Broad Mountain, Nesquehoning Mountain, Pisgah Ridge, and Mauch Chunk Ridge all funnel waters into the long slack water pool where the Lehigh is slow and broad and lakelike under the shadow of the west face of Bear Mountain