had purchased from Cist, Miner and Robinson, secured control of the entire property of the Lehigh Coal Mine Company under the terms of a lease for twenty years. George F. A. Hanto joined them in the venture and was largely depended upon to secure the necessary financial assistance to make the property productive. Under the conditions of the lease, it was stipulated that, after a given time for preparation, they should deliver for their own benefit at least forty thousand bushels of coal annually in Philadelphia and the surrounding districts, and should pay, if demanded, one ear of corn as a yearly rental.", Brenckman, pp. 77–78</ref> 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. Buying out partner George Hauto, and forming the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N) in 1822 by combining the Lehigh Coal Mining Company (1893), the Lehigh Coal Company (then, leasing the lCMC's properties) and the Lehigh Navigation Company, it represented the first merger of interlocking companies in the United States. Five years later, the company built the Mauch Chunk and Summit Hill Railroad, the first coal railroad and just the second railroad company in the country to be constructed after the Granite Railroad of Quincy, Massachusetts. It was founded by industrialists Josiah White (1780–1850) and Erskine Hazard (1790–1865), who sought to improve delivery of coal to markets. and a thickly accented German immigrant miner named Hauto.<ref name="EarOcorn">Hurlbert, Chapter III, quote: Believing that coal could be obtained more cheaply from Mauch Chunk than from the mines along the Schuylkill, White, Hauto, and Hazard formed a company, entered into negotiation with the