Philip Ginter
Summit Hill, Carbon County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
While hunting, Ginter discovered anthracite on Sharp Mountain here in 1791. He showed it to Col. Jacob Weiss, a prominent area settler. In 1792 Weiss and others formed the Lehigh Coal Mine Co., the first Anthracite company and a forerunner of Lehigh Coal & Navigation.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
According to long tradition, in 1791 the hunter Philip Ginter stumbled upon a black, burnable stone on Sharp Mountain here—anthracite, the hard coal that would power a nation. He carried his find to the settler Col. Jacob Weiss, and the next year Weiss and others formed the Lehigh Coal Mine Company, the first anthracite venture and a forerunner of the great Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company.
Why it matters
This chance discovery opened Pennsylvania's anthracite fields, the fuel that drove America's iron furnaces, railroads, and cities through the industrial age.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1791 this corner of eastern Pennsylvania was rugged, wooded, thinly settled country. The young United States was only a few years into life under its new Constitution, still overwhelmingly rural and dependent on wood for heat and on charcoal and water power for what little industry it had. The vast mineral wealth beneath the ridges here was almost entirely unknown and unused.
Sharp Mountain, near what became Summit Hill in Carbon County, lay in the heart of what we now know as Pennsylvania's anthracite region. Anthracite is 'hard coal' — dense, clean-burning, and slow to ignite, quite different from the softer coals more familiar at the time. Because it was harder to light, its enormous value was not obvious at first.
The story the marker tells belongs to that early moment of discovery, when the resource that would one day power a nation was still just a strange black stone that a hunter might stumble across on a mountainside.
People & events
By long tradition, in 1791 the hunter Philip Ginter discovered anthracite on Sharp Mountain here. According to the account preserved on the marker, he came upon the hard coal while hunting and recognized that his find was something worth showing to others.
Ginter carried the stone to Col. Jacob Weiss, described as a prominent area settler. That handoff — from a hunter in the woods to a settler with the connections and capital to act — is the pivot on which the story turns. A chance find became a business prospect.
In 1792, Weiss and others formed the Lehigh Coal Mine Company, which the marker identifies as the first anthracite company and a forerunner of the later Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company. Like many origin stories of great discoveries, the tale of Ginter's find comes down to us through tradition, and it is best told as the enduring account of how the region's coal age began.
Its place in the American story
The discovery commemorated here opened Pennsylvania's anthracite fields — a source of fuel that would help drive America's industrial rise. Hard coal eventually heated homes and cities and fed the iron furnaces, railroads, and factories of a nation in the midst of transformation.
But the gap between the find and its impact was long. Anthracite's very hardness meant it took years, and much trial and error, before people learned to burn it efficiently and to move it to market. The founding of an early company in 1792 was a first step in a much longer effort to turn a mountainside curiosity into an industry.
That is what gives this modest marker its weight. It marks a beginning — the moment a resource was recognized — at the head of a story that would eventually reshape the American economy and build the coal towns, canals, and railroads of the anthracite region.
If you visit
Visit Summit Hill with an eye for terrain. The ridges and wooded slopes around you are the same kind of country where, by tradition, a hunter noticed a black stone that would help fuel a nation. Standing here, it's easy to feel how unlikely and how consequential that chance encounter was.
Let the marker anchor the bigger landscape. This is the heart of Pennsylvania's anthracite region, and the whole area carries the memory of hard coal — in its town names, its old workings, and the routes once built to carry coal out to distant markets.
For a road trip through Carbon County and the anthracite country, this is a fitting first stop, because it marks the beginning of the whole regional story. From here you can trace how a single discovery grew into the mines, companies, and communities that defined this part of Pennsylvania for generations.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Philip Ginter
- · Col. Jacob Weiss
Related events
- · Discovery of anthracite (1791)
- · Formation of the Lehigh Coal Mine Co. (1792)
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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Switchback Railroad
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Built in 1827, the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railroad used nothing but gravity to roll loaded coal cars nine miles down the mountain from the Summit Hill mines to the Lehigh Canal, with mules riding along to haul the empties back up. In 1844 engineers added back-tracks and inclined planes so the whole return trip could also be made by gravity. Once a marvel of early industrial engineering, it later became one of America's first tourist thrill rides—a forerunner of the roller coaster.
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Carbon County, formed in 1843 from Northampton and Monroe, was named outright for the element at the heart of its wealth: the rich anthracite coal beds that fueled America's industrial rise. Its seat began life as Mauch Chunk, a booming coal-shipping town on the Lehigh, and in 1954 took the name Jim Thorpe to honor the great Native American athlete, whose remains were brought there. The renaming stitched a legendary Olympian's memory to a hard-coal town.
Packer Mansion
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Asa Packer arrived in the Lehigh Valley a poor carpenter and left it one of the richest men in America, having built the Lehigh Valley Railroad into an anthracite-coal empire. In 1860 he crowned his fortune with an ornate Italianate mansion overlooking Mauch Chunk (today's Jim Thorpe), and he poured his wealth back into the region—most enduringly by founding Lehigh University in 1865. The house survives with its original furnishings intact, a preserved window into Gilded Age industrial wealth.