Download or read book Jim Thorpe in the 20th Century written by John H. Drury and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2005 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jim Thorpe in the 20th Century examines the causes and effects of a community's decision to relinquish its Native American name Mauch Chunk (“Bear Mountain”) to become the town of Jim Thorpe. In the 19th century, Mauch Chunk rode a wave of prosperity, as coal shipping and tourism turned ordinary men into millionaires. In the 20th century, the mainstays of the town's economy began to tumble like dominoes: mule-drawn coal boats could not compete with the iron horse, ending Mauch Chunk's days as a canal town by 1922; the touristattracting Switchback Gravity Railroad, unable to afford parts, closed in 1932; the coal mines and working railroads collapsed, as industry, home heating, and trucking turned to petroleum. Downand-out by the mid-1900s, Mauch Chunk was looking for a means of saving itself when the widow of 1912 Olympian Jim Thorpe proposed a stranger-than-fiction solution.