1 David Thomas

This episode of the MarkerQuest podcast explores the history of Catasauqua, a small community in Pennsylvania. The community is known for three main reasons: it has a house belonging to a signer of the Declaration of Independence, it was the first community in the US to raise $1 million in war bonds during WWI, and it was the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution. The podcast focuses on David Thomas, who is considered the father of the American anthracite iron industry. Thomas was born in Wales and developed a more efficient way to manufacture anthracite iron. He was invited to the US by the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company and became the richest man in Catasauqua, renaming the neighborhood Craneville. He also established the Thomas Iron Company in Hokendauqua. The company closed in 1927 and the ruins still stand. Hello, history fans, and welcome to the first full episode of the MarkerQuest podcast. I'm your friendly neighborhood blogger, Laura Klotz, and you're joining me for a look at the story behind one of the historical markers of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Before I get started, I want to offer a special thank you to one of my closest friends, Rachel D., because without her, this podcast would not be happening. Not only did she offer me more encouragement than practically anyone else, but she runs a YouTube channel showcasing her love for the Korean pop band BTS, and she's the one who helped me to understand how to record the episodes and gave recommendations for equipment and software. So if you enjoy the podcast, please know that she's my helper behind the scenes. And if you also like BTS, look for her channel on YouTube. It's called the Army Theorist Corner. Getting back to Pennsylvania, this episode is about the very first PHMC marker I covered in the blog, and the reason that I did this one first is because of a line from the movie The Wizard of Oz. Glinda the Good Witch tells Dorothy that it's always best to start at the beginning. So for the inaugural post, I set my quest marker on a small community in Lehigh County. The PHMC markers didn't begin there, but I did. So for me, it's the beginning. The community was originally known as Biery's Port, but since the mid-19th century, it's been called Catasauqua. If you've never heard of it, well, that's a pretty common reaction. Unless you live in the Lehigh Valley, or know someone who does, you probably don't have a reason to know the place. The funny thing is that it's actually sort of famous in its own weird way, for three main reasons. The first is that it has a house which belongs to a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and I'll be telling you about him in another episode. The second is that during World War I, it was the first community in the United States to raise $1 million in war bonds, thus earning it the nickname the Million Dollar Town. The third reason for Catasauqua being famous is that it was the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution, mostly because of the gentleman in this story. Now, the PHMC marker for David Thomas is situated on Pine Street in Catasauqua, right near the gates of the house he had built. It reads as follows: David Thomas, 1794 to 1882, father of the American anthracite iron industry, lived here. A native of Wales, he built crane ironworks, deemed the world's first anthracite iron furnace to be completely successful, both commercially and from an engineering standpoint. David Thomas was the son of David and Jane Thomas, and he was born on November 3, 1794, in Neath, which is in southern Wales. He was his parents' only son, and possibly their only child, although I can't confirm that. According to the book The History of Lehigh County, which includes detailed genealogical information about many of the region's prominent families at the turn of the 20th century, David had a very strict religious upbringing and an insatiable thirst for knowledge. As such, he was a much better student than most of his classmates, and he went into the iron industry at the age of 17. By the age of 23, he was already a general superintendent of the blast furnaces and the iron and coal mines of an iron company in the Swansea Valley. I am not going to try to pronounce the name of this iron company. During his more than 20 years in that position, he performed many experiments with anthracite coal in smelting. In 1837, he finally hit upon the use of a hot blast to smelt together iron ore and anthracite coal. Anthracite iron, as the resultant product was called, had already been patented 30 years earlier, but what David had developed was a much easier and more efficient way to manufacture it. As one of the foremost iron masters in the United Kingdom, David's reputation was extensive, and the news of his success spread to industrialists around the world. In Pennsylvania, the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company was one of the Lehigh Valley's biggest industries during the 19th century, and they invited David to come to the United States and do what he'd been doing in Wales. Since the Lehigh Valley had easy access to plenty of both anthracite coal and iron ore, it was exactly the sort of place that could use a process like the one our friend David created. He and his wife, the former Elizabeth Hopkins, had five children, Jane, Gwenny, Samuel, John, and David. They left Wales for New York on a ship called the Roscius, though I'll admit I'm not entirely sure if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Local apocrypha, which is generally held to be true, says that on July 9, 1839, David and his 13-year-old son, Samuel, walked into Berry's Port on the towpath owned by the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company. Just a year to the day later, at the Crane Iron Works, the first successful anthracite iron furnace in the United States was fired up, and lo and behold, we've got ourselves an industrial revolution. Incidentally, another name for anthracite iron is pig iron. I honestly don't know why, but if you're at all local to the Lehigh Valley or the eastern side of Pennsylvania, you may well have heard of our minor league baseball team, the IronPigs. Their name has nothing to do with bacon, it's inspired by the pig iron industry. Now, I'm sure it comes as no surprise when I say that David quickly became the richest man in Biery's Port, and when you're the richest man in the neighborhood, this sometimes means you get to rename the neighborhood. So he dubbed it Craneville, just like his company, the Crane Iron Works. These were both named in honor of Mr. Crane, his old boss back in Wales, whom David held in extremely high regard. The name Catasauqua came a few years later in 1853, when it was formally incorporated as a borough, and the name is derived from the Lenni-Lenape word for thirsty ground. The borough has a downtown area known as the Mansion District, which is not something you might expect in a community that's roughly a mile square. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Catasauqua had more self-made millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Many of their stately homes are still standing, most of them having been turned into residential apartments, and that includes the gray stone mansion at 2nd and Pine Streets. It sits on a sloping lawn, and even though the Thomas family hasn't owned it in decades, the wrought iron gate of the low stone fence still has their monogram worked into it. Across the street is the First Presbyterian Church of Catasauqua, which the Thomases founded, and which remains the oldest surviving church in the borough. David Thomas also installed the public waterworks, started the First Fire Company, and served as the First Burgess. He and Elizabeth were known to their neighbors as the Father and Mother of Catasauqua, and frequently addressed as Father and Mother Thomas. In 1854, David handed off the reins of the crane ironworks and established a second company, the Thomas Iron Company, on the far side of the Lehigh River in an even smaller community called Hokendauqua. Unlike the Crane Iron Works, which I'll be discussing in a future episode, the Thomas Iron Company does not have a historical marker, or at least it doesn't as of this recording. Much as he had done for Catasauqua, David established many services for the residents of Hokendauqua, who were chiefly his own employees and their families. Every family had a tidy little home and a plot out back for a vegetable garden. He was also very committed to making sure that Hokendauqua had a safe supply of clean drinking water. David himself did not ever touch alcohol, and he was of the opinion that as long as men had access to good water to drink, they would likewise avoid getting drunk. The Thomas Iron Company closed its doors in 1927, and the plant was sold to Bethlehem Steel, which shut it down completely in 1936. But the ruins of the company buildings are still standing in the woods, just off of the Ironton Rail Trail, and can actually be accessed by diverting off the trail and hiking down an old staircase. My husband Kevin and I explored them once, and I got some great pictures. There's apparently a plan in the works to revitalize the site and turn it into an outdoor museum to the iron industry. I haven't heard any details on that lately, but I really hope that's what ends up happening because I'm sure it will be fascinating. As I mentioned, the Thomases were devout Presbyterians and helped to establish the Presbyterian church in Catasauqua. But one of my favorite pieces of trivia about the family has to do with another church. This was really more Elizabeth's thing than David's. There were a number of people who had, like the Thomases, immigrated to Catasauqua from Wales, and they wanted to worship in their native language. So she helped them establish the Welsh Congregational Church where they could do just that. And because of her patronage, the church never had debts of any kind. All the same, however, the congregation gradually dwindled, and the church eventually closed its doors. And to this day, nobody knows for sure why. It's possible that the older generations who had spoken Welsh eventually passed away, and the younger ones may not have learned their ancestral language. I study Welsh myself, and I can confirm that it is extremely difficult to learn, so I wouldn't be surprised if language were indeed a factor in the congregation shrinking. What's even more mysterious is the fact that nobody even knows who used to worship there, because somehow all of the church records have disappeared. I only know of one surviving photograph of the building, which you can see in the book Images of America: Catasauqua and North Catasauqua, by Martha Capwell Fox. It was a very pretty church. My other favorite piece of trivia about the family came up when I was researching my own book about the defunct amusement park Laury's Island in what today is North Whitehall Township. David and Elizabeth's grandson, Samuel, married Bessie Laury, a granddaughter of Judge David Laury, another very wealthy and highly regarded landowner of the period, and it was probably the closest thing the Lehigh Valley had to a royal wedding because of how prominent the two families were. Outside of his contributions to the welfare of his neighbors in Catasauqua and Hokendauqua, David was a busy and well-known man. Anthracite iron from the Crane Ironworks was used in many high-profile projects across the country, including the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels in New York City. You can actually see a picture of the Lincoln Tunnel in construction on the cover of Images of America: Catasauqua and North Catasauqua. David was also chosen to serve as the first president of the American Society of Metallurgy. It was a sort of symbolic post which he held for just one year. They're known today as the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers, and they keep his picture and biography on their website. He's also pictured on the plaque that was installed for their 150th anniversary. I attended that ceremony up in Wilkes-Barre, and I will be telling you more about that organization in a future episode. David and Elizabeth Thomas, along with many of their children and grandchildren, are interred in Fairview Cemetery. Technically speaking, this is in the community of Whitehall, but during their lives, the neighborhood was known as West Catasauqua, and many of the locals still call it that today. The Thomas family vault is a bit of an oddity, because you don't know what it is if you don't know what it is. It rises in one part of the cemetery like a green hill with a door on it, almost like a hobbit house from the Lord of the Rings books. It hasn't been opened in a long time. I remember reading that the last member of the family to be entered into the crypt was a granddaughter sometime in the mid-20th century. Industry in Catasauqua largely waned after the World Wars, with other local communities getting in on the act, so there's not much left of Crane Iron Works today. The borough has plans for what remains of the property, though, and it also has its own historical marker, so I'll be telling you more about it in another episode. But Father Thomas can rest easy, because the borough he built has never forgotten him. I want to give a quick shout-out to the members of the Historic Catasauqua Preservation Association, who work tirelessly to preserve the history of my hometown. Their profile of Father Thomas provided quite a bit of the information in this podcast and the original blog post. Some of their members are regular readers of my blog, and they have kindly shared many of my posts on their Facebook page. Every year, they conduct a walking tour of the mansion district, during which several of the beautiful old homes open their doors for the public, so keep that in mind if you're in the area. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please subscribe to my podcast, leave a review or a comment, and tell your friends about what you learned. Next time, I'll take you to Carbon County and share the terrible details of a mass murder in colonial times. Until then, you might like to read about my other adventures by visiting pamarkers.blogspot.com, and you can also find MarkerQuest on Facebook. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, this is Laura Klotz with MarkerQuest, and this episode is history.