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. His whole career is another example of what young men in this country may accomplish through keen intelligence, dauntless energy and unyielding integrity.”
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 to his cousin Edward. 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 after hearing about a work opportunity captaining coal barges on the Lehigh Canal.
Packer quickly made a name for himself in Mauch Chunk and the greater Lehigh Valley, acquiring a large amount of wealth in just three years. Packer started life in Mauch Chunk as a canal boatman, then rose to boat-builder, canal builder, merchant, and landowner. Packer’s influence began to extend 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. Ever the multitasker, Packer built the first stretch of his railroad back at home, which spanned from Mauch Chunk to Easton, during his time in Congress.
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 1964, he met with William Bacon Stevens, an Episcopal bishop in Philadelphia, and expressed to him his desire to found a university. Together, the two decided that Packer would give $500,000 for the university’s initial endowment, an amount which at the time was described as “the noblest offering which an American had ever laid on the altar of learning.”
In founding Lehigh University, 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 of the mid-1900s, 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 would soon expand with the construction of Packer Hall, the large building in the middle of campus now known as the Clayton University Center at Packer Hall. When Lehigh first opened, its original faculty was made up of five professors.
Today, 600 full time faculty members teach in Lehigh’s four colleges offering over one hundred different majors. Lehigh’s continued focus on interdisciplinary education keeps Asa Packer’s legacy and dream for the university alive.
Asa Packer left a lasting legacy on the Lehigh Valley. Over the course of his lifetime, he gave $33 million to Mauch Chunk and the Valley. As written by Reverend Stevens, Asa Packer’s life was “a blessing to the Lehigh Region and the Commonwealth...and today it teems with the trophies of his far-seeing and wise planning mind.” “He was one of that far-sighted and prompt-acting band of pioneers who were willing to do much, and dare much for the future.”
