Welcome to the Lehigh Valley Landmarks with Leon podcast series, celebrating 250 years of independence. I'm your host, Rachel Leon. Since being elected in 2022 and serving as Vice President of Bethlehem City Council, I'm humbled by the opportunity to serve the diverse communities that make up our great city. But to understand where we're going, we need to understand our past. Each week, I'll share a short feature with a big story about the 250 years that made the Lehigh Valley and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, known as the Christmas City, as we explore historic landmarks.
In June 1879, Harper’s Weekly published, “Asa Packer died, the richest man in the Commonwealth, and second to none in grandeur of achievement and measure of influence.
Asa Packer was born on December 29th, 1805 in Mystic, Connecticut into a modest farming family. When he was seventeen years old, Packer hiked from his hometown to Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, where he became a carpenter’s apprentice.
While in Susquehanna, Packer met Sarah Minerva Blakslee. The couple married on January 23, 1828. After a brief stint attempting to run a farm, they moved to Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania—now known as Jim Thorpe—in the spring of 1833 to captain a coal barge on the Lehigh Canal.
In just three years Packer moved from a canal boatman, to boat-builder, canal builder, merchant, and landowner.
Packer’s influence extended beyond the Lehigh Valley. In 1842 and 1843 he was elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Ten years later, Packer was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he served for four years.
During his time in Congress Packer built the first stretch of his railroad which spanned from Mauch Chunk to Easton, Pennsylvania.
As Packer grew in wealth and influence, he strove to find a greater cause toward which he could put his newfound fortune. In the fall of 1864, he met with William Bacon Stevens, an Episcopal bishop in Philadelphia, and expressed his desire to found a university.
In 1865, with an endowment of $500,000 Asa Packer founded Lehigh University and William Bacon Steven served as the first President of the board of trustees. Asa Packer hoped to create an institution from which students graduated with a balanced humane and scientific education. Packer understood the importance of an engineering education from his work in the industrial fields but did not want to constrain Lehigh’s students to just technical knowledge. In fact, in 1878, a body of alumni presented a petition to him to make Lehigh exclusively an engineering institution, which Packer refused.
When Lehigh University first opened its doors, it consisted of one building, Christmas Hall. After its conversion from a Moravian church to a university building, Christmas Hall, now known as Christmas-Saucon Hall, held a chapel on the first floor, classrooms on the second, and dormitories on the third. The campus expanded with the construction of Packer Hall, the large building in the middle of campus now known as the Clayton University Center at Packer Hall.
From humble beginnings with just five professors, today Lehigh employs 600 full time faculty members and offers over 100 majors. Lehigh’s continued focus on interdisciplinary education keeps Asa Packer’s legacy and dream for the university alive.
Information for this episode was provided by AsaPackerMansion.com, and from the books, the Official Charter of Lehigh University by A. G. Curtin, the former Governor of Pennsylvania, The Lehigh University, its Origins and Aims: An Historical Discourse by William B. Stevens, History of Lehigh University by Catherine Drinker Bowe, and Asa Packer by Lawrence H. Gipson.
We want to give a special thanks to Jordan Knox, an undergraduate student studying English and Environmental Studies at Lehigh University for her writing contribution for this episode.
