Work on sprucing up Jim Thorpe’s Kemmerer Memorial Park continues with assistance from the Office of Vocational Rehabilitation, a state agency.

Arranged by borough officials, workers cleared weeds, bushes, saplings and small trees in preparation for new park benches.

The park provided a pizza lunch for the crew recently.

The program concludes this week and the borough will have lunch for the crew.

In the earliest years of the village of Mauch Chunk, the future site of Kemmerer Park belonged to the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Co., as did most of the property in the village.

Coal was transported by the Mauch Chunk Gravity Railroad (aka the Switchback) to where the anthracite was sorted and transferred into the Lehigh Canal boats that brought the coal to market.

John Leisenring became superintendent of the LC & N in the Lehigh region in 1860, moving into the Front Hill home originally built by Josiah White, which later served as the home of the LC & N superintendents.

The coal chutes and planes at the north end of his property continued to operate until 1872, when other means of getting the coal to market were completed. About that time, Leisenring, who had been a tenant on LC & N land, purchased the home and adjacent property. In the late 1870s he gifted the northern part of the property to Mahlon Sistie Kemmerer, who had married his daughter Annie in 1868.

Kemmerer planned to build his mansion on the hillside overlooking the Lehigh River, but first the property had to be transformed. The inclined plane was removed, along with the coal chutes and storage bins that reached as far as the Liberties Hill section of town. By early 1879 the mansion was completed, the grounds improved and the Kemmerers moved into their new home.

The property extended to the Liberties section of town, with a horseback trail hugging the sheer cliff side running parallel to the Gravity Railroad. In the 1890s there was speculation that Kemmerer had bought the Liberties village, which had belonged to the LC & N, and his trail extended through the village along Mount. Pisgah, going as far as James’ Run along the Broad Mountain. The stone posts along Liberties Hill Road can still be seen in the thick brush, marking the northern end of the Kemmerer trail.