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| Students gather high above the Lehigh waters to hear about recent efforts toward ecological recovery of the mountain. |
Our classes recently studied Living Systems and Ecosystems in the field with Lehigh Gap Nature Center science and education directors Chad and Brian.
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| This was the only bridge over the Lehigh just below the gap. It survived from the 1820s into the 1920s. Chains from this bridge can be found at the corner of the park in Palmerton to get a look at how it was built. It was one of the first suspension bridges and inspired more modern bridges such as the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. |
Our students spent the large part of six hours studying the history of the Lehigh Gap, back to its importance as a Native American trail known as the Nescopek Trail and modified by the Moravians becoming the Moravian Road.
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| Still resembling the landscape of Mars, despite a dramatic greener recovery, students hike down to the former Lehigh and New England railroad bed. This high-bridge was over 100 feet above the water and over 1,000 feet long. |
Ben Franklin celebrated his 50th birthday in what is now Palmerton due to heavy rains that forced him and his colonial militia men to seek shelter at the home of Nicholas Opplinger in January 1756. Franklin was on his way to Weissport to build Fort Allen to defend the settlers there from further Native attacks after the November 1755 Gnaden Hutten Massacre. (Our students are incidentally studying this period and events at this time in Social Studies Class.)
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| The New Jersey Zinc factory just north and west of the mountain-side produced pollution and acid rain that killed the ecosystems of the mountain. |
Students saw first hand how the years of pollution from the New Jersey Factory nearly completely wiped out every ecosystem of the mountain side due to acid rain and metal contamination. With the loss of vegetation, there was nothing to hold the soil from erosion, causing further damage from rock-slides and wind and rain erosion. The landscape looked more like something from Mars. Even decomposers (detritevores) failed to survive. And as a result, many trees died and simply could not decompose.
Students found evidence of coal from the Lehigh and New England Railroad bed of coal, cinders, and slag from the area's industrial past. They saw pictures and evidence of how soil and seeds were brought to the mountain by tractor and by crop-dusting airplanes.
They experienced how the successive layers of decomposing prairie grass is helping to add a new layer of soil. Though this will take another 1,000 years to regain what was lost.
Students walked the mountainside, up 200 feet of elevation to go through scrub to forest ecosystems. Then went along the river and compared the ecosystem of a semi-aquatic marshland.
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| Brian (#theBrain) and Chad discussed the history of transportation through the Lehigh Gap including canal boats hauling coal as well as the Lehigh and New England Railroad high bridge that went over it from the early 1900s until the bridge was demolished in 1967. |
Students were even treated to the story of the "Marshall Mansion." Whimsically referred to as the "Wolfman," Civil War General Elisha Marshall bought the top of a mud-stone hilltop across the gap in the 1880s (the hill is loaded with iron oxide, giving it a deep red color).
But he was not kind to his wife and they divorced. She stayed in the home after he returned to his home state of upstate New York. After he demise, with no one children, the home fell to disrepair. Several people owned it and leased it out over the years. But by the 1980s it was in an excess state of disrepair. Most people living in the area considered it "haunted" and given the eerie quality of the dead mountainside, it looked like something from a Scooby-Doo mystery.
