Anthracite coal was discovered in 1792 at Summit Hill, nine miles west of Mauch Chunk, but the chief market was a hundred miles away in Philadelphia, making transportation difficult. The problem of getting coal from wagon to ark was solved by constructing an inclined loading chute at Mauch Chunk that extended downward from Mount Pisgah to a coal-loading house along the Lehigh River, where the coal house projected over the river's edge to facilitate loading boats. After buying the mine and taking control of the river in 1818, Josiah White and Erskine Hazard built first a road and then a gravity railroad to bring coal down from Summit Hill to their new village of Mauch Chunk. There shallow boats carrying 8 to 10 tons of coal traveled down the wild and rocky Lehigh through low dams with gates that let them float over the rocks to Easton, then continue on the Delaware River to Philadelphia. Their Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company soon sent thousands of tons of anthracite south, and later millions of tons after a river and canal system allowed mule-drawn, 100 ton canal boats to travel both ways. Inclined planes brought still more coal from more distant mines into the river system, and later the Lehigh Valley and Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroads were built along its banks. By the middle of the 19th century, anthracite powered the nation, especially the iron industry, and Mauch Chunk became the center of coal transportation for much of northeastern Pennsylvania's anthracite fields and one of the wealthiest communities in America. Demand for anthracite declined steadily after World War I, and Mauch Chunk, now Jim Thorpe, declined with it until tourism resurged in the 1980s.