Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company

The Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company (LCAN) (1988–2010) was a modern-day anthracite coal mining company headquartered in Pottsville, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, U.S. which acquired many of the 'Old Company' (LC&N) properties and re-launched the Lehigh Coal Companies brand in 1988. The LCAN ran strip mining operations in the Panther Creek Valley east of Lansford along U.S. Route 209; with vast properties dominating the coal areas of Tamaqua, Coaldale, and Lansford. These properties are largely the same real estate assets as were acquired in the Panther Creek Valley by the predecessors: the haphazard Lehigh Coal Mine Company (1792-1822) and the builders of the Lehigh Canal and first American blast furnaces, the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (Old Company, LC&N), which spearheaded the U.S. Industrial revolution. The new company was incorporated in 1988 acquiring LC&N assets after bankruptcy proceedings, taking the name of the original.
Background.
The "Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company" was a prominent coal mining and transportation infrastructure company first established in 1822 after four years of successfully delivering regular shipments of anthracite coal to the docks of Philadelphia via their pioneering Lehigh Canal. In the merger of "The Lehigh Coal Mining Company" and the "Lehigh Navigation Company", both of which operated in the Lehigh Valley area of Pennsylvania between 1818-1822, the lease on the land rights of the Lehigh Coal Mine Company was ended with a subsidiary acquisition purchase by stock swap — and these lands once owned were used to open up the whole Northeastern Pennsylvania 19th century frontier area (Tamaqua, Coaldale), Lansford, Summit Hill, Nesquehoning, and Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania—among other company towns outside the long strip in which the LCAN 'New Company' operated.) The remaining 8,000-acre anthracite-rich tract between Jim Thorpe and Tamaqua originally owned by the Lehigh Coal Mine Company is arguably the richest vein of high quality anthracite known in the world with the possible exception of the valley floor deposits of the Wyoming Valley, but without a River above leaking into shafts, far easier to mine. Like most commercially feasible coal mines today in the USA, the ongoing mining operations use mountain top mining (strip mining) techniques.
Brand history.
Through the 19th and part of the 20th centuries, LC&N mined the tract in Summit Hill, Nesquehoning, Lansford, Coaldale and Tamaqua. In the 1960s, LC&N ceased its operations. The coal lands were acquired by the Fazio Brothers. Bethlehem Steel bought it in 1974 and ran it until 1989. In 1989, James Curran bought the property and reestablished the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company brand. By 2008, the new LC&N's plans for expansion put them into debt as sales plummeted during the recession, and they became bankrupt.
The earlier company, called "the Old Company" had owned and operated an extensive system of coal mines in Carbon and Schuylkill Counties, two canals, the Lehigh Canal and the Delaware Division of the Pennsylvania Canal, the historic Mauch Chunk & Summit Hill Railway (MC&SH or "Summit Hill and Mauch Chunk Railroad"), the funicular railway called the Ashley Planes, and a railroad system, the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad (L&S). The L&S extended from the foot of River Street in Wilkes Barre and North Branch Canal docks at Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania on the Susquehanna River to the Lehigh River Gorge past Mauch Chunk, Allentown and Easton, Pennsylvania. In the 1870s, the L&S was leased to the Central Railroad of New Jersey), which extended the route into a Scranton-NYC prestige line. It also built the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway to move coal.
Demise of the new company.
In the mid-1960s, LC&N ceased its operations, and eventually the railroad revenues which had kept it awash in cash flow, failed with the crisis and collapse of U.S. railroads, leases held by leaseholders such as the Central Railroad of New Jersey (subsidiary: Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad), Lehigh and New England Railroad and the Lehigh Valley Railroad (and a few others being liquidated) with most mainlines being forced into Conrail. Today the mainline pioneered by the LC&N are still the mainstay of several key transportation corridors in Northeastern Pennsylvania and operated by Norfolk-Southern, or Reading, Blue Mountain and Northern Railroads.
Like other Pennsylvania mining companies, Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company was criticized for polluting the environment, and received several legal notices and fines. The LCAN company (re-branding) was founded by James J. Curran, a Schuylkill County attorney. In 2004, the re-incarnated company was forced into bankruptcy by some of its creditors, and some of its land was at risk of being sold for back taxes. In 2006, the company's operations were suspended unless Curran stepped aside and kept out of actual operations, citing a violation of a consent decree from previous complaints — for a management team satisfactory to mining and EPA authorities, so a new management team took over. LCAN went bankrupt again in 2008 and was sold to creditors, who created Lehigh Anthracite, disestablishing the New Company.