When historian Frank Whelan first traveled through the Lehigh Gap on his way to Jim Thorpe to see the Asa Packer Mansion, he noticed two things.

The first was the bare hillside due to contamination and the second was the house on the hill.Jokingly, he said he assumed it belonged to the Addams Family.The 30-year veteran reporter for the Morning Call spoke about the house on Marshall's Hill and the family who built it at a recent meeting of the Palmerton Historical Society.Ralph Kramer, also from the Call, gave him some information and he started researching the Marshall family.The first thing he realized was that Elisha Marshall, the fourth child of Chauncey and Mary Marshall, was brave and a heroic soldier during the Civil War.No one knew much about his early life.Chauncey, a prolific clockmaker, earned $40,000 in 1836, but the next year there was a financial panic and the bottom dropped out. He was ashamed and committed suicide.Mr. Adams, who managed the business, stole the clocks after Marshall's death. He took them to Chillicothe, Ohio, to sell.Elisha Marshall had been born in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1829, and wanted to go to West Point, but he wasn't accepted.He joined the military and saw action on the western frontier. In New Mexico he fought American Indians. A newspaper said the military should take out the Mormons.He became a colonel with the 13th Regiment in the Union Army of the Potomac. In 1862 he participated in several major battles: Manassas, Antietam and Fredericksburg, where the Union soldiers were killed by the hundreds. Marshall was wounded and sent home.At St. Petersburg, which is just outside Richmond, the Southern capital, he was back in the war and taken prisoner. Some Schuylkill soldiers dug a tunnel under Confederate entrenchments. They used 4,000 pounds of black powder to blow a hole in the Confederate lines.Black troops had been trained for an assault by going around the blast hole. White troops went instead and charged into the crater and could not climb out. It was described as looking into hell.Congress had a field day investigating. Marshall's unit was mustered out and, because there were too many high-ranking officers, he was demoted to major. He was sent to New Mexico, where he resigned in 1869.He married Janet Rutherford. The Rutherford family lived where the Blue Ridge Country Club was built.In 1881 the Marshalls built a house in Lehigh Gap on top of the hill on the town side of the gap.People asked what brought him to Palmerton and Whalen said it was probably because his wife was from there.Why was the hilltop location chosen? Whelan thinks it was because they wanted the isolation and the view of the river. Also, the railroad ran along the river and gave easy access.Before the four-lane highway was built there was a second house on the hill that was demolished for the highway. This second house may have been built by Janet Rutherford's father, James, but it is not known for sure.She was seldom seen in town because a groundskeeper ran most of the errands.Marshall suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and carried a lot of shrapnel in his body. Whelan said it was understandable that the two argued.He died of war wounds in 1883, though Janet continued in the home.Elisha was buried in New York. In 2000, the body was taken from the grave and the head was removed, believed to have been for a satanic ritual.The head was never recovered.