White Haven started with a log cabin in 1824. Now, the borough will toast its 200th anniversary with a street festival this weekend.
Lifelong resident and Borough Council member Robert Lamson is thrilled to bring the celebration back to Main Street, in the spirit of events that once were held here.
“Our street fair has a history. We used to call it the River Festival and then we called it the Jam Below the Dam … and it used to span the entire length of Main Street at one point in time, but you know, as economies change … it kind of got away from us,” said Lamson.
“But now, there’s definitely an interest in seeing a resurgence of that fair on an annual basis.”
Preparations for preparing for this festival began last fall as an opportunity to boost local businesses, Lamson said.
Over 40 vendors will line Main Street alongside live music, food trucks and historical displays. Staff from the White Haven Historical Society, Anthracite Railroads Historical Society and more will share stories from the borough’s history.
Early days
Lamson said White Haven’s tale started with John Lines, who settled in White Haven 200 years ago by building a log cabin in what was otherwise uninhabited land. His memory lives on in Linesville Park, which was later named after him.
But White Haven’s story truly kicked off with Josiah White in 1835. The industrialist brought his company, Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LCN) into the region to expand its anthracite coal mining business. The Borough of White Haven was named in White’s honor for his ingenuity in building bear trap locks along the Lehigh River, according to Wilkes-Barre City Council Vice-Chair and local historian Tony Brooks.
The new borough made history in 1843, not only for itself, but for Luzerne County, Brooks added.
“The number one thing that stands out for White Haven is that it was the second village to be incorporated as a borough in Luzerne County.”
White’s Lehigh Coal & Navigation had turned the fledgling borough into a transportation hub for coal and timber, said Lamson.
“They’re the architects and builders of the canal that ran along the Lehigh that was utilized to transport timber from north of White Haven, down into the Philadelphia area,” said Lamson.
White Haven was home to complicated technology. It housed LCN’s first lock on the canal. ‘Locks’ control a canal’s water level, which allows engineers to channel more or less water into the canal and allows watercraft to travel over changing terrain.
These developments made White Haven a catalyst for the Industrial Revolution, explained Brooks. White and his contemporaries like Charles Miner and Jacob Cist were on “the ground floor of transportation efforts.”
“The hardest thing about coal in the Wyoming Valley in Northeastern Pennsylvania is, ‘How do we get it out over these mountains, how do we get it onto canals and eventually railroads?’ That fuels the Industrial Revolution… [These men] are the pioneers of the anthracite industry,” said Brooks.
And the coal industry demanded that White Haven become a central transportation site for lumber.
“Lumber was another cheap industry in Northeast Pennsylvania in the very beginning. And lumber and coal go together, because when you do … deep mining, lumber was used to hold up the tunnels and the shafts that they were creating in the anthracite mines,” said Brooks. “So, lumber and coal go together.”
Besides the canal system, the borough connected to the Central Railroad of New Jersey and down through the Lehigh Valley to transport coal and lumber to larger cities, according to Lamson.
Becoming a tourist hotspot
Now, 200 years later, Lamson said the borough is reinventing itself as a tourist hotspot.
“Two-hundred years I think is pretty significant for any community to still be incorporated and still thriving … It’s now enjoying a little renaissance, if you will. We’ve embraced tourism here. We use the river as one of the best whitewater rivers in the state,” said Lamson.
The borough is nestled between three state parks, Lehigh Gorge, Nescopeck and Hickory Run. It also boasts two trailheads of the D&L Trail. Four blocks of Main Street border the trail.
“The D&L Trail through White Haven is somewhat unique, in that the 165 miles of the D&L Trail, White Haven is the only portion of that trail that actually runs along the main street of the town that it goes through," said Lamson.
The borough's birthday bash will include a balloon artist and magician act for the kids at the Library Rail Park.
Michele Yohey, owner of Soapy Bee Country Store, is hosting a comedy act at her cafe on Saturday. The Legion Theater Group, a nonprofit, will run 15-minute skits every hour from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
"I'm excited that the town is doing this event," said Yohey. "It's great that we all get to celebrate the 200th birthday of White Haven. I hope it brings in a lot of traffic to the brick and mortar stores as well as on the street ... I think it's going to be fun."
White Haven’s Bicentennial Festival starts on Friday, July 26 at 4 p.m. and runs through Saturday, July 27 from 10 a.m to 8 p.m on Main Street from Berwick Street to Susquehanna Street. Live music will run until 10 p.m. on Saturday.
