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Schuylkill County is a county in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. As of the 2020 census, the population was 143,049. The county seat is Pottsville. The county was created on March 1, 1811, from parts of Berks and Northampton counties and named for the Schuylkill River, which originates in the county. On March 3, 1818, additional territory in its northeast was added from Columbia and Luzerne counties.
Lansford is a county-border borough (town) in Carbon County, Pennsylvania, United States, located 37 miles (60 km) northwest of Allentown and 19 miles south of Hazleton in the Panther Creek Valley about 72 miles (116 km) from Greater Philadelphia and abutting the cross-county sister-city of Coaldale in Schuylkill County. The whole valley was owned and subdivided into separate lots by the historically important Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company which likely settled some structures on the lands by 1827.
Auburn is a borough in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, United States. The population was 741 at the 2010 census.
North Manheim Township is a township in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, United States. The population was 3,287 at the 2000 census. It was created in 1845 by dividing Manheim Township into South Manheim and North Manheim Townships.
Paw Paw is a town in Morgan County, West Virginia, United States. The population was 508 in the 2010 census. The town is known for the nearby Paw Paw Tunnel. Paw Paw was incorporated by the Circuit Court of Morgan County on April 8, 1891 and named for the pawpaw, a wild fruit which grows in abundance throughout this region. Paw Paw is the westernmost incorporated community in Morgan County and the Hagerstown-Martinsburg, MD-WV Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Swatara Creek is a 72-mile-long (116 km) tributary of the Susquehanna River in east-central Pennsylvania in the United States. It rises in the Appalachian Mountains in central Schuylkill County and passes through northwest Lebanon County before draining into the Susquehanna at Middletown in Dauphin County.
The Union Canal was a towpath canal that existed in southeastern Pennsylvania in the United States during the 19th century. First proposed in 1690 to connect Philadelphia with the Susquehanna River, it ran approximately 82 mi from Middletown on the Susquehanna below Harrisburg to Reading on the Schuylkill River.
This is a list of the earliest railroads in North America, including various railroad-like precursors to the general modern form of a company or government agency operating locomotive-drawn trains on metal tracks.
The Main Line of Public Works was a package of legislation supporting a vision passed in 1826—a collection of various long proposed canal and road projects that became a canal system and later added railroads designed to cross the breadth of Pennsylvania with the visionary goal of providing the best commercial means of transportation between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Built between 1826 and 1834 by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, it established the Pennsylvania Canal System, the Allegheny Portage Railroad, and the Pennsylvania Canal System administrated under a new Commission.
The Schuylkill Canal, or Schuylkill Navigation, was a system of interconnected canals and slack-water pools along the Schuylkill River in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, built as a commercial waterway in the early 19th-century. Chartered in 1815, the navigation opened in 1825 to provide transportation and water power. At the time, the river was the least expensive and most efficient method of transporting bulk cargo, and the eastern seaboard cities of the U.S. were experiencing an energy crisis due to deforestation. It fostered the mining of anthracite coal as the major source of industry between Pottsville and eastern markets. Along the tow-paths, mules pulled barges of coal from Port Carbon through the water gaps to Pottsville; locally to the port and markets of Philadelphia; and some then by ship or through additional New Jersey waterways, to New York City markets.
Canvass White was an American engineer and inventor. He was chief engineer at the Delaware and Raritan Canal and he patented Rosendale cement, which became the dominant cement in the United States until 1900.
The Schuylkill River Trail is a multi-use trail along the banks of the Schuylkill River in southeastern Pennsylvania. Partially complete as of 2018, the trail is ultimately planned to run about 140 miles (230 km) from the river's headwaters in Schuylkill County to Fort Mifflin in Philadelphia.
The Allentown Railroad was a rail line proposed in the 1850s to connect the Central Railroad of New Jersey at Allentown with the Pennsylvania Railroad's main line across the Allegheny Mountains. Though grading was almost entirely finished, the project was halted by the Panic of 1857, and the completion of the East Pennsylvania Railroad in 1859 made the Allentown Railroad's proposed line largely redundant. As a result, track was never laid on most of the line. The small portion that did became a branchline of the Reading Company from Topton to Kutztown, and was nominally owned by the Allentown Railroad until the Reading dissolved it in 1945 to simplify corporate bookkeeping. Other Reading subsidiaries also laid track on parts of the right-of-way elsewhere along the route.
Mont Clare is a village in Upper Providence Township, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, United States. The village is located on the left bank of the Schuylkill River, opposite Phoenixville and Chester County. Mont Clare is at the site of the former Jacobs' ford. Mont Clare hosts the only functional lock and one of only two remaining watered stretches of the Schuylkill Canal. Mont Clare was the birthplace of the infamous outlaw Sundance Kid.
The Pennsylvania Canal was a complex system of transportation infrastructure improvements including canals, dams, locks, tow paths, aqueducts, and viaducts. The Canal and Works were constructed and assembled over several decades beginning in 1824, the year of the first enabling act and budget items. It should be understood the first use of any railway in North America was the year 1826, so the newspapers and the Pennsylvania Assembly of 1824 applied the term then to the proposed rights of way mainly for the canals of the Main Line of Public Works to be built across the southern part of Pennsylvania.
Daylighting a tunnel is to remove its "roof" of overlying rock and soil, exposing the railway or roadway to daylight and converting it to a railway or roadway cut. Tunnels are often daylighted to improve vertical or horizontal clearances—for example, to accommodate double-stack container trains or electrifying rail lines, where increasing the size of the tunnel bore is impractical.
William Weston was a civil engineer who worked in England and the United States of America. For a brief period at the end of the 18th century, Weston was the pre-eminent civil engineer in the new United States and worked on the Schuylkill and Susquehanna Navigation Company, the Western and Northern Inland Lock Navigation Companies in New York, the Middlesex canal in Massachusetts, the Schuylkill Permanent Bridge at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the Potomac navigation.
The Schuylkill and Susquehanna Navigation Company was a limited liability corporation founded in Pennsylvania on September 29, 1791. The company was founded for the purpose of improving river navigation which in the post-colonial United States era of the 1790s meant improving river systems, not canals. In this Pennsylvania scheme, however, two rivers, a large river, the Susquehanna and a smaller one, the Schuylkill were to be improved by clearing channels through obstructions and building dams where needed. To connect the two watersheds, the company proposed a four-mile summit level crossing at Lebanon Pennsylvania, a length of almost eighty miles between the two rivers. The completed project was intended to be part of a navigable water route from Philadelphia to Lake Erie and the Ohio valley.
The Mill Creek & Mine Hill Navigation and Railroad Co. was the second railroad built in Pennsylvania and the third in the United States, beginning operations in mid–1829. It was a short four mile line extending from Port Carbon, Pennsylvania along the Mill Creek towards active anthracite coal mines. Its purpose was to transport mined coal to Port Carbon which was the terminus for the Schuylkill Canal, the conduit to markets in Philadelphia.
The Mt. Carbon Railroad (MC) was one of what was known as lateral railroads built in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania in the 1820s and 1830s, and which were first constructed to accommodate the Schuylkill Canal with coal produced from the coal district south of the Mine Hill and east of the West Branch Schuylkill River, covering an area of between sixty and seventy square miles. The MC opened on April 19, 1831 between the settlement of Mount Carbon, Pennsylvania on the Schuylkill Canal, north to the Norwegian Creek confluence and following that tributary to beyond both the East and West Norwegian Creeks. In 1842, the Philadelphia and Reading Railway Company (P&RR) made Mt. Carbon a termination point for its railroad line from Philadelphia in direct competition with the Schuylkill Canal. The P&RR leased the MC on May 16, 1862, and merged it into the parent organization on June 13, 1872.
References
- 1 2 3 4 Creighton, James E. (1920). "TUNNELS AND TUNNELING". The Encyclopedia Americana: A Library of Universal Knowledge. Albany, New York: Encyclopedia Americana Corp. p. 157.
- 1 2 "American Canal Society Canal Structure Inventory - Auburn Tunnel" (PDF). Retrieved 2012-10-30.
- 1 2 "Profile of the Schuylkill Navigation". Archived from the original on 2010-12-06. Retrieved 2008-11-29.
- 1 2 Historical Society of Schuylkill County (1910). Publications of the Historical Society of Schuylkill County. Volume 2 (1907-10). Historical Society of Schuylkill County. pp. 483–4.
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