Mahlon S. Kemmerer Memorial Park might be one of Jim Thorpe’s best kept secrets.

Some might say that’s a blessing for the park situated in the tourism mecca that sees thousands flooding into the borough’s historic downtown. It remains a shady respite away from the masses.

But Jack Sterling would like to see more people use the lush, green park, which sits along Packer Hill across from the Harry Packer Mansion.

The park, a gift to the people of Mauch Chunk in the 1920s, boasts paved walking paths, a stone picnic pavilion, a kiddie play area, basketball and tennis courts, and benches where visitors can enjoy glimpses of a rich history.

But few people seem to use the park, despite its many charms, said Sterling, president of the board that oversees the park. Even as many gathered for train rides down below, the park remained silent on a recent warm Wednesday.

On another day, a hollow bouncing sound caught Sterling by surprise. He went to investigate and found two couples playing pickleball on the tennis court.

“We talked to some people about turning this into a pickleball court, because that’s more popular than tennis, but nothing has materialized,” he said, but those using the court seemed to manage.

Another day, Sterling said, he talked to a young man who lives on West Broadway and shoots hoops on the basketball court.

“It’s very seldom that I see anybody else in there playing basketball,” he said. “But I think the parking might be the issue.”

The park has no parking of its own. Situated on the site of the former Mahlon S. Kemmerer mansion, a narrow private drive winds its way into the park from a small, county-owned parking lot across from the Asa Packer Mansion.

Two walking paths also come out of the park on either side of the tennis courts into the small county lot, where the public can park for a fee after business hours.

One park entrance is across from Harry Packer Mansion, off Packer Hill Drive, and another is along Route 209 near the U.S. Post Office, across from the large county parking lot adjacent to the train station.

A Boy Scout took on clearing the path up to the park from the highway about 12 years ago as an Eagle Scout project, Sterling said.

“It’s not a bad path,” he said. “It was just overgrown. He put in two benches and got all the way down at the bottom, and we ran out of money. So, it never got quite finished.”

Finishing that project could happen this year, Sterling said. He’d like to place large, flat stones at the bottom of the path to eliminate a big step that exists now, he said.

“Now, it’s not going to be something you run your baby carriage up, or anything like that, but the people coming from the (large, county) parking lot can come up that way,” he said, about the lower entrance near the former Subway shop, now an insurance company.

The park directors lease the site to Jim Thorpe and secure permission from the borough for special uses in advance, Sterling said.

The board and the borough have been working together on park improvements, including having summer help through the state Office of Vocational Rehabilitation clear overgrowth along an upper path, remove limbs and spread mulch.

That small county parking lot on Packer Hill was once the site of another mansion, that of John Leisenring, M.S. Kemmerer’s father-in-law and superintendent of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Co.

The coal company owned all of the property, which Leisenring purchased after the coal chutes and planes at the north end of the property ceased operation in the 1870s. He then gave Kemmerer, who married his daughter, Annie, a portion of the property.

Decades later, Kemmerer passed and his surviving children who had moved from the area gave the 5-acre estate to people of the borough to be used for recreation.

Some of the park’s dominant features — the mortared stone walls, the tennis courts and pavilion — were done through the Works Progress Administration (WPA), part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal that put people back to work during the Great Depression.

Other features, like the towering sycamores and other trees, remain from the property’s transformation in the late 1870s.

The Kemmerer and Leisenring families also donated funds to renovate the stone carriage house, which was nothing more than a shell, Sterling said. Now, the board has someone living there.

A man recently asked to have a family reunion in the park, and Sterling believes that event will happen.

“It’s good to have people using the park,” he said. “A lot of people come in here and say, “Oh geez, I didn’t even know there’s a park here.

“That’s part of what I want to get done … have people know about it and have people use it,” Sterling said.

And make sure the secret gets out.