Local historian and author Vince Hydro took people on a short journey along the Lehigh River to a tiny village of Lausanne Monday night.

The long since faded village sat about mile north of Jim Thorpe at the mouth of the Nescopeck Creek, Hydro told several dozen people gathered at the Nesquehoning Historical Society Museum, located at 157 West Railroad St.

The presentation was the first of two on the village, which wasn’t more than a handful of buildings with a sawmill and tippling house that never lived up to its promise as laid out on early maps.

A second presentation is planned Saturday at 1 p.m. at the historical society, as Hydro introduces his latest book, Outpost on the Lehigh River: The Lost Village of Lausanne.

Hydro used present day photographs and historical maps to illustrate where the village sat along the river – the point where the earliest ark shipments down the Lehigh began.

Records of the name Lausanne don’t surface until the early 1800s, but the area was known for the Union Sawmill, constructed by Jacob Weiss, as part of his lumber business several miles downstream, Hydro said. Weiss is known as the founder of Weissport.

Water was one means of transportation. Roads were another with the formation of the Evan Owen Road and later the Susquehanna and Lehigh Turnpike, which followed the same route.

The Evan Owen Road was completed in 1789, and two years later, Philip Ginder discovered anthracite atop Sharp Mountain at present day Summit Hill, Hydro explains in his book. The Lehigh Coal Mine Co. formed soon after.

Dr. Thomas C. James of Philadelphia and Anthony Morris acquired the land that became Lausanne, but the exact origin of the name remains unknown, Hydro said. But first documents with the name show up in 1804 and 1805 accounts.

James and Morris visited their property, meeting Ginder and learning about the discovery of coal. Both men were involved in the Susquehanna and Lehigh Turnpike, which the current state Route 93 roughly follows.

Taverns sprang up along the toll road, including one at Hartz Station in the Quakake valley, now Hudsondale, at the base of the Spring Mountain before the ascent to Beaver Meadows, where Nathan Beach discovered coal in 1812.

Lausanne’s tavern, also located near a tollhouse, became a stage stop continuing through the 1820s and 1830s during nearby Mauch Chunk’s boom years.

Beach began sending coal down the Lehigh in 1813 from the Landings at Lausanne, and ark pilots gave the tavern its name, the Landings Tavern, Hydro points out in his book. A store is built at Lausanne operated by William Turnbull, and later there is a reference to a white house.

A map of the Village of Lausanne is complete in 1815, but the village which was intended to become the site of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Co.’s headquarters at the head of “Lehigh navigation,” at the mouth of Nesquehoning Creek, never came about.

While accounts claim greed in setting the price of the land too high, Hydro said, it is more likely the owners declined to sell.

A flood in 1862 also impacted the village, as LC&N replaced the navigation above Mauch Chunk with rail, extending its Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad from White Haven to Easton.

The company also planned the Nesquehoning Valley Railroad, eliminating gravity railroads. This railroad was within the Lausanne tract, the purchase of which was entangled in a legal quagmire.

LC&N did acquire the Lausanne tract, and the village was abandoned by 1873 according to local reports, Hydro said. However, local newspapers reported people living there into the early 1900s, he said.

In 1906, the company began constructing the Lausanne drainage tunnel to remove water from the mines. A concrete portal replaced the original wooden one in 1913, Hydro wrote.

He showed both historical and more recent photographs of the area in his presentation, explaining how the village was slowly began being buried under fill and breaker waste around this time for the expansion of the Mauch Chunk freight yard to Lausanne. The Reading Blue Mountain & Northern Railroad placed a new bridge across the Lehigh in recent years, placing an abutment at the approximate site of the village, Hydro said.

Hydro will have copies of his book on Lausanne as well as other publications on Carbon County history available on Saturday at the historical society.

For more information on the historical society, visit the group’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/NesquehoningHistoricalSociety.