Lehigh Coal Company

The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company was a mining and transportation company that operated in Pennsylvania from 1818 (1820 & 1822) to 1964. It ultimately encompassed source industries, transport, and manufacturing, making it the first vertically integrated company in the United States.

Building on two predecessor companies incorporated in 1818, founders Erskine Hazard and Josiah White entered the coal industry to serve customers seeking a steady supply of fuel for foundries and mills on the falls of the Schuylkill River. Their LC&N spearheaded the Industrial Revolution in the United States, accelerating regional industrial development by taking on civil engineering challenges thought impossible and creating important transport and mining infrastructure. Most importantly, the LC&N established the Lower Lehigh Canal (begun 1818, usable 1820, improved 1821-24, and made two-way in 1827-29) and taught America to burn anthracite. By the early 1830s, the Lehigh Canal and its "bridging" river trip along the Delaware River inspired and connected four other canals.

The Company's success, along with White's reputation for advancing the state of mining and civil engineering, jumpstarted America's brief Canal Age. It also spurred investing in raw materials industries and bulk transportation infrastructure projects. Further, the dawdling funding efforts behind the Schuylkill Canal project (begun in 1814) was finally funded and finished once the LNC had showed the way. White and Hazard had backed the Schuylkill project since their mills were on the River, but became disgusted with the timid investment and management attitudes of its board, so explored the LCMC property and conducted feasibility examinations the winter of 1814-1815, so petitioned to build the canal that next year.

Upon their return they inked what was effectively a no cost option to take over management of the LCMC mines and mining rights; guaranteeing one ear of corn per year as a rental for the next 20 years. built the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad and had its hands in many other northeastern Pennsylvania shortline railroads, spurs, and subsidiaries; created the Ashley Planes and made or supported means to other novel solutions of transport problems; and created transport corridors still important today.It also pioneered the mining of anthracite coal in the United States, acquiring virtually the entire eastern lobe of the Southern Pennsylvania Coal Region, and brought in Welsh experts to bootstrap Iron production using blast furnace technology in the Lehigh Valley, building the first six such furnaces and puddling furnaces to create steel, which the company then provided to its own wire rope (steel cable) manufactury, the countries first it set up in Mauch Chunk. Completing the vertical integration, the wire ropes were then marketed to other mining operations, cable railways, and other industries needing high tensile reliability in managing weighty loads.

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