Viewfinder: Historic Jim Thorpe

Jim Thorpe is an easy and worthwhile day trip for residents of the Lehigh Valley.

Located about an hour north of Allentown and Bethlehem, this picuresque Carbon County borough was the seat of an anthracite coal empire in the 19th century, when it was known as Mauch Chunk.

The preserved Italianate mansion of coal baron Asa Packer, who founded Bethlehem's Lehigh University, remains one of Jim Thorpe's most recognizable landmarks.

Because of its location in a deep valley along the banks of the Lehigh River, Jim Thorpe acquired the nickname "Switzerland of America" not long after its founding in the early 1800s, and the Hotel Switzerland is another well-known downtown landmark. The famed Mauch Chunk Switchback Railway, which was a 9-mile gravity railway that operated until 1938 as an early rollercoaster, also contributed to the town's mountainous mystique.

Mauch Chunk was re-christened Jim Thorpe in the 1950s, as part of a bid to help bring recognition to the turn-of-the-century Native American athlete Jim Thorpe, who was infamously stripped of his Olympic gold medals in 1912.

Thorpe, who died destitute and largely forgotten in 1953, is buried on the outskirts of town in a mausoleum located at the center of a small memorial park. As of 2010, his son, Jack, was attempting to have his father's remains disinterred and returned to Oklahoma, where Jim Thorpe was born in 1888.