History can often be lost on people when it happened in their own backyard.

Ava Bretzik, director of the Asa Packer Mansion Museum, is hoping a video produced by the Susquehanna Valley Center for Public Policy can better acquaint locals with one of Carbon County’s most notable residents.The half-hour program focused on the life of Packer, founder of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, debuted on the Pennsylvania Cable Network in October and will be shown during a special event Saturday night at 6 p.m. in the Jim Thorpe Area High School auditorium.Asa Packer is one in a series of “forgotten Pennsylvania history makers” featured by the Susquehanna Valley Center for Public Policy.“They got in touch with me about a year ago, and what I thought was unique is that everybody knows about the mansion, but they wanted to do a documentary on Asa Packer, the man,” Bretzik said. “It was kind of my job to make him human. I talked about what he did in his life and the legacy he left.”Saturday’s event is open and free to the public.Bretzik wants people take advantage of the opportunity to truly learn about Packer’s personality.“There are a lot of stories out there, mainly that he was a tyrant and was heavily involved in the Molly Maguires situation,” she added. “That’s really not true. In fact he was dying at the time. The most he did was call the judge and said, you better get to town, there is a witch hunt going on.”Packer died in 1879 as the richest man in the state at the time, but it wasn’t always that way.Bretzik described his story as “rags to riches.”“He wasn’t your Rockefeller or Vanderbilt,” she said. “He was a dirt farmer who made a lot of money and gave it back to his community. In fact, when he made his first million dollars, he told his best friend he knew it was going to ruin his family. Nobody else thought like that.”He founded Lehigh University with an endowment of $500,000, was the driving force behind what eventually became Bethlehem Steel, left a large sum of money to Bethlehem’s St. Luke’s Hospital and financially supported St. Mark’s Episcopal Church.“I hope this documentary spurs an interest in Asa Packer again,” Jim Thorpe Borough Council President Greg Strubinger said. “Sometimes we take for granted the treasures in our backyard. He is more than the mansion and maybe the event on Saturday can help people rediscover that.”