ABSTRACT
When John Leisenring's eldest son, John, a tall and rangy youth of seventeen, went to work for the LC&N in 1836, few people could boast a better coal lineage. John Leisenring Jr. had been nine years old when his parents moved to Mauch Chunk in 1828. As a boy he was on hand when Josiah White and Erskine Hazard built their first canal from Mauch Chunk to White Haven and then the gravity railroad linking White Haven to the anthracite fields at Summit Hill. Instead of serving an apprenticeship under his father or another local merchant, when he was seventeen his father utilized his nascent web of family connections to find a better opportunity. Of John's seven grown children, three married children of Lehigh Coal & Navigation Co. officers, including the general foreman and the chief bookkeeper. These blood relationships created the nucleus of what became one of the two major business factions in Mauch Chunk (the other revolved around Asa Packer, who founded the Lehigh Valley Railroad).
