LACKAWANNA COUNTY Formed August 13, 1878; named for the great Lackawanna coal basin; an Indian word, signifying “The Forks of a Stream.” Chief industry, anthracite coal mining, confined to the long-depressed trough forming the Lackawanna Valley and to the mountains bordering it on both sides, with Bald Mountain, in Lackawanna Range, 2250 feet high, and Big Stoney among the Moosic Mountains, 2230 feet. Originally settled by Connecticut people who disputed the right of Pennsylvania to jurisdiction; life and growth have been the result of the coal-mining industry, which brought into it large numbers of Welsh, Irish, German, English, and Scotch, whose descendants dominate the region; latterly have come Polish, Slavs, Italians, and Lithuanians, a heterogeneous but rapidly assimilating mining population. The mining of anthracite coal began at Carbondale in the early twenties; the old No. 1 plane is marked with monument and tablets; coal was taken over the Moosic Mountains to Honesdale, Wayne County, by steep inclined planes, up which the loaded cars were drawn by ropes or cables, and the empty cars let down; thence by canal to Roundout, on the Hudson; on the levels, between planes, cars were drawn by horses; later a descending grade was given to the tracks over which the cars ran by gravity; a similar gravity railroad near Scranton, carried coal to the Delaware & Hudson Canal at Hawley, below Honesdale, both now abandoned for steam roads. The country northwest has well-cultivated farm lands; that, southeast, blends with the Pocono Highlands, is wild and picturesque; an almost unbroken wilderness for thirty miles, excepting along the line of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad; on both sides of this road are good highways; the main road, the whole length of the valley, is exceptionally fine. The road from Gouldsboro Station was built by Jay Gould, 1855, when he was interested with Mr. Pratt in a tannery at Gouldsboro (now Thornhurst). At Carbondale, crossing Moosic Mountains, is road to Honesdale, following the line of the old Delaware & Hudson gravity road; at Dundaff, about five miles north of Carbondale, this road runs along the edge of Crystal Lake, near are the Twin Knobs of Elk Hill, about 2500 feet high. A point of geologic interest is the Archbald Pot Hole, said to be largest of the kind in this country; a cylindrical hole twenty feet deep, by thirty feet wide, eroded in the ice age through the overlying rocks down to the coal measures. SCRANTON, county seat, population 137,783; laid out on site of an Indian village, Muncy Tribe; began as an iron town; iron in large quantities was found in the hills three miles south of the city, and a suitable quality of limestone was also supposed to exist there; but the coal business superseded; the old ore mine, and abandoned road to furnaces at Scranton, are of historic and picturesque interest.