Erskine Hazard

Erskine Hazard (November 30, 1789 – February 26, 1865) and his partner Josiah White were industrialists who developed infrastructure projects in Pennsylvania and throughout the Northeastern United States, which proved influential in ushering in the Industrial Revolution in the United States, which served as a foundation for the rise of the United States as the world's foremost economic power.

Early life

Hazard was born in New York City, on November 30, 1789.

Partnership

In 1810, Hazard and Josiah White opened a foundry and wire drawing plant on the falls of the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia in 1810. Their first reputation establishing event was to build a small suspension bridge across the Schuylkill in order to better demonstrate their factory. When the U.S. President put an embargo in place on Bituminous coal imports from Great Britain in the tension prior to the War of 1812, the partners moved to secure an anthracite supply, which was then a barely known and unutilized commodity.

The discovery of anthracite in eastern Pennsylvania by hunter Philip Ginter in 1791 was large accidental. In the Lehigh Valley region, coal was discovered on Sharp mountain, where Summit Hill, Pennsylvania is now located. The discovery led to an appreciation of the value of the mineral on the part of the general public and to its being mined and placed on the market.

Pioneering

Educated as a geographer and surveyor Hazard would complement White's mechanical innovations with resourceful use of given landforms and the two would go on together to found what is arguably the most influential company of the first half of the 19th century, the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, build the Lehigh Canal, the Ashley Planes, the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad, and a half-dozen other subsidiary railroads and industries, most of which would last into the 1960s. They also had a major role in inspiring the use by others of the hard to burn anthracite, initially in industrial processes and later in large supplies transported to Philadelphia along the Schuylkill River valley.