My Genealogy Hound

HON. ASA PACKER, or Judge Packer, as he was more generally known, was a philanthropist, a politician and a business man of the highest order. Few men in this community have become more widely and favorably known than he, for his name was famous not only in this, but in many adjoining states. To him is due the honor, to a large extent, of having opened up the riches of the inexhaustible beds of the anthracite coal regions.

The birth of Judge Packer occurred in Groton, Conn., December 20, 1806, and he departed this life in Philadelphia, May 17, 1879. After receiving common-school advantages he commenced learning the tanner’s trade, but in 1822 went to Susquehanna County, Pa., where he learned the carpenter’s trade with a relative, and he afterward worked at this calling in New York City. Returning to the Keystone State, however, when the Lehigh Valley Canal was opened in 1823, he established his home in Mauch Chunk, becoming the owner and master of a boat which carried coal to Philadelphia. He also acquired an interest in other boats, but in 1831 gave up the business in order to carry on a store and boatyard. In 1837 he completed a contract for locks, becoming well known as a contractor in this line. A year later he began to build boats at Pottsville for the transportation of coal to New York by way of the new canal, which soon attracted all the traffic that had before passed through Philadelphia. Judge Packer became extensively engaged in mining and the transportation of coal, working the mines of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company and operating new mines at Hazleton.

In 1844 the Judge was elected to the Legislature and secured the creation of the separate county of Carbon, with the county seat at Mauch Chunk. Afterward he filled for five years the post of County Judge, and projected the Lehigh Valley Railroad, for which he secured the necessary subscription, and by 1855 had the line completed from Mauch Chunk to Easton, with branches to Hazleton and Mahoning. Subsequently he procured its extension northward to connect with the Erie Railroad, thus giving the anthracite coal region an outlet. He was President of the company and, though financially embarrassed before the completion of the line, shared largely in the profits that afterward accrued to the company, becoming the richest man of his day in Pennsylvania.

On the Democratic ticket Judge Packer was elected to Congress, and was re-elected as a Free-soil Democrat, serving from December, 1853, to March, 1857. In 1868 he received the votes of the Pennsylvania delegates for the Presidential nomination in the National Democratic Convention. The year following he was a candidate for Governor, and in 1876 he was a Commissioner for the Centennial Exposition. In 1865 Judge Packer gave (1500,000, eighty-one hundred and fifteen acres of land, to found Lehigh University at South Bethlehem, for the purpose of affording the young men of the Lehigh Valley advanced technical education without charge. The scherne of studies embraces civil, mining and mechanical engineering physics, chemistry, metallurgy and classics. By his last will he secured an endowment of $1,500,000 to the university and one of $500,000 to the library. His daughter, Mrs. Mary (Packer) Cummings gave a memorial church, which was dedicated on October 13, 1887, the anniversary of the founding of the university.