Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania

Everything Jim Thorpe is known for

1 song mention this city 1 artist from here

Music in Jim Thorpe

Songs About Jim Thorpe

Reunited
Wu-Tang Clan
5%
"great hero Jim Thorpe"

Artists From Jim Thorpe

J
Joshua Finsel
folk Pop: 1

History of Jim Thorpe

Why Every Real Pool Table Hides a Slab of Rock RoadyGoat

Lift the felt off any serious pool table and you'll find the same rock Slatington was built on: slate. The reason is physics. A ball rolling true needs a bed that is dead flat and stays that way, and slate can be ground smooth to a few thousandths of an inch. Being solid stone, it doesn't warp or swell with humidity the way a wood or fiberboard top will. That's why tournament rules call for three matched pieces of slate, each a full inch thick, seamed and shimmed level during installation. The weight alone, with one-inch slate running far heavier than thinner cuts, helps pin the bed flat to the floor. So the perfect roll of a banked shot owes itself to a metamorphic rock from old sea-floor mud, the very stone that gave a Pennsylvania borough its name.

10.7 mi away

The Town That Took Its Name From a Rock RoadyGoat

1845

Here's a town that bet its whole identity on a rock. Slatington sits on the west bank of the Lehigh River in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, and it is named, plainly and proudly, for the slate quarried right under it. In the eighteen-forties two Welshmen are credited with discovering the slate beds here, and the Lehigh Slate Company laid out the town in eighteen fifty-one. No fewer than twenty quarries opened in and around the village, making this stretch the heart of the Lehigh Valley 'slate belt,' one of the great slate-producing regions in America. The stone went out as roofing shingles, mantels, and classroom blackboards. The industry slumped after World War One, but the name stayed. You are standing in a place that told the world exactly what it was made of.

10.8 mi away

Mud That Learned to Split in Straight Lines RoadyGoat

Slate begins life as the dullest thing imaginable: mud. Layers of fine clay settle on an ancient sea floor and harden into shale. Then the Earth goes to work. Buried deep and squeezed by mountain-building pressure, with the heat that comes with depth, the shale is metamorphosed. Its microscopic, flaky clay minerals can't survive that squeeze lying every which way, so they rotate and regrow, all lining up in the same direction, perpendicular to the pressure. That hidden alignment is why slate splits into thin, flat, even sheets along planes that often have nothing to do with the original mud layers. Geologists call it slaty cleavage. It is the reason Slatington's stone could be peeled into roofing shingles and blackboards. The rock under this town remembers, in every clean split, the direction the mountains once pushed.

10.8 mi away

Jim Thorpe (Mauch Chunk)

1954

A former coal town that renamed itself after the Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe in 1954, hoping to attract tourism and a memorial.

Old Jail Museum (Molly Maguires)

1877

Twenty Irish-American coal miners were hanged in Carbon and Schuylkill counties in the 1870s as alleged members of the secret Molly Maguires organization.

3.2 mi away

Everything Near Jim Thorpe

15 stories, landmarks & places within ~20 miles — the same local lore RoadyGoat plays as you drive through.

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