Lehigh University: Built for the Industrial Age
Near Allentown, Pennsylvania
You are passing through Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where one of the most consequential engineering schools in American history sits on a hillside above the city. Lehigh University was founded in eighteen sixty-five by Asa Packer, a self-made industrialist who had risen from a Connecticut farm boy to become the third-wealthiest man in the United States.
Packer made his fortune through canals, coal, and above all through the Lehigh Valley Railroad, whose iron rails tied together the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania's interior with the markets of the East Coast. When he decided to build a university, he donated five hundred thousand dollars outright along with sixty acres on South Mountain, at the time the largest single gift to any educational institution in America.
His intent was explicit: Lehigh was to train engineers for the industrial age, to produce the men who would run the mines, build the bridges, and manage the mills that a rapidly expanding America demanded. The first thirty-nine students arrived in September of eighteen sixty-six. The curriculum blended civil and mechanical engineering with metallurgy, chemistry, and the liberal arts, a deliberate combination of hand and mind.
Within a generation, the connection between Lehigh and the industrial Lehigh Valley became almost genetic. By the early twentieth century, Bethlehem Steel, then the second-largest steel company on earth, was staffed heavily with Lehigh graduates. It was said, with only slight exaggeration, that most of the iron, steel, and coal produced in America moved under the supervision of Lehigh-trained engineers.
Packer himself never lost his pragmatic working-class instincts. He demanded that the school be accessible, not a finishing academy for the wealthy. Today Lehigh enrolls about six thousand undergraduates and remains one of the premier engineering and business universities in the country. The hillside campus, with its Victorian Gothic buildings in stone quarried from nearby hills, still looks down on the valley that Asa Packer helped build.
