Founder of Lehigh Coal & Navigation

Erskine Hazard was scarcely second to White as a promoter of the several enterprises along the Lehigh. He was a man of great ingenuity and an excellent machinist. He had been in partnership with White at the Falls of Schuylkill, in the manufacture of wire, as early as 1811, and in later years, when the great work of opening the mines and putting coal in the market had been performed, his mind seems to have reverted to the handling of iron. In 1839 he went to Wales to learn all that was known of the smelting of iron by the use of anthracite, and it was through that trip that the Lehigh Crane Iron-Works, the first to successfully use anthracite in this country, were brought into existence. (See history of Catasauqua.) He had previously experimented with anthracite as a fuel for smelting iron at Mauch Chunk, as is related elsewhere in this chapter. He also conceived the idea and made the first drafts of a machine for making wire rope, which was afterwards erected in the old stone mill-building by E. A. Douglass, superintendent of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, and which made all the wire rope used by that company for many years. He invented a propeller screw, several improvements in firearms, the first spark-arrester used on the Camden and Amboy Rail
road, and a number of other articles of practical value. He wrote largely on topics of scientific and general interest, his articles appearing iii the Philadelphia Public Ledger and in the Journal of the Franklin Institute. He was also a deep thinker on the various topics of political economy, and when the war broke out, in 1861, it is said that it was he who gave Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, the idea of the United States notes and greenback currency. A writer has said of him," His life was spent in endeavors to advance the public good, and though, as years advanced, he retired from all active business, except as one of the managers of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company and of the Crane Iron Company, his thoughts and pen were always busy." He died suddenly, of heart disease, Feb. 26, 1865, a little over seventy-five years of age. Erskine Hazard was a son of Ebenezer Hazard, Postmaster-General of the United States (1782-89), and was born in New York, Nov. 30, 1789. Ebenezer Hazard (who was descended from a certain Thomas Hazard, who became a freeman of Boston in 1636) removed with his family to Philadelphia in 1790 or 1791, and it was there and in college at Princeton, N. J., that the subject of our brief sketch received the education which was to enable him to be of such great use to his fellow-men. A son, Fisher Hazard, remains in Mauch Chunk.