Jim Thorpe is a borough and the county chair of Carbon County in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. It is allowance of Northeastern Pennsylvania. It is historically known as the burial site of Native American sports legend Jim Thorpe.

Jim Thorpe is located in the Pocono Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania approximately 29 miles (47 km) northwest of Allentown, 83 miles (134 km) northwest of Philadelphia, and 117 miles (188 km) west of New York City.

Jim Thorpe was founded in 1818 as Mauch Chunk , a proclaim derived from the term Mawsch Unk (Bear Place) in the language of the native Munsee-Lenape Delaware peoples: possibly a mention to Bear Mountain, an intensification of Mauch Chunk Ridge that resembled a sleeping bear, or perhaps the indigenous profile of the ridge, which has before been changed heavily by 220 years of mining. The company town was founded by Josiah White and his two partners, founders of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N). The town would be the belittle terminus of a gravity railroad, the Summit Hill & Mauch Chunk Railroad, which would bring coal to the head of the LC&N Lehigh Canal for transshipment to the confluence of the Delaware River, 43 kilometres (26.7 mi) downstream at Easton. It would thereby ship LC&N’s coal to Philadelphia, Trenton, New York City, and other large cities in New Jersey and Delaware, and by ocean to the collect East Coast. Canal shipping was eventually replaced by railroad shipping.

The town grew slowly in its first decade, then rapidly going on for 1818 grew larger as it became an anthracite coal-shipping center. (The additional large city gone growing coal mining in the region was Scranton, with a population of exceeding 140,000.) Mauch Chunk is on a Lehigh River west side (right bank) flat where Mahoning Creek enters and is a tributary of the Lehigh River. The river’s left bank community of East Mauch Chunk, which has more of the houses of unprejudiced Jim Thorpe, was settled forward-thinking to sustain the short-lived Beaver Creek Railroad, the mines which spawned it, and the logging industry. It came into greater increase when the Lehigh Valley Railroad in 1885 pushed up the valley upon the river’s east bank to oppose LC&N’s working transportation monopoly on summit of the region, which outstretched across to northwest Wilkes-Barre at Pittston upon the Susquehanna River/Pennsylvania Canal.