Lehigh Canal | |
![]() The Lehigh Canal in Glendon, Pennsylvania in 1979 | |
Location | Lehigh River in Pennsylvania. Upper: Nesquehoning to White Haven Lower: Jim Thorpe to the Delaware River in Easton |
---|---|
Coordinates | 40°46′09″N75°36′13″W / 40.76917°N 75.60361°W |
Built | 1818-1821; 24-27 upper: 1838-1843, Upper ruined and abandoned: 1862 |
Architect | Canvass White, Josiah White |
Architectural style | Fitted stone, iron, and wood |
NRHP reference No. | 78002437, 78002439, 79002179, 79002307, 80003553 [1] |
Added to NRHP | Earliest October 2, 1978 |
The Lehigh Canal is a navigable canal that begins at the mouth of Nesquehoning Creek on the Lehigh River in the Lehigh Valley and Northeastern regions of Pennsylvania. It was built in two sections over a span of 20 years beginning in 1818. The lower section spanned the distance between Easton and present-day Jim Thorpe. [2] In Easton, the canal met the Pennsylvania Canal's Delaware Division and Morris Canals, which allowed anthracite coal and other goods to be transported further up the U.S. East Coast. At its height, the Lehigh Canal was 72 miles (116 km) long.
Although the canal was used to transport a variety of products, its most significant cargo was anthracite coal, the highest quality energy source then available in the United States, and pig iron, a vital input product used in manufacturing steel. Both proved cornerstones of the Lehigh Valley's ascent as a central hub of the American Industrial Revolution, and their mining and transportation defined the rugged blue collar character of the Lehigh Valley towns that surrounded the canal. [3]
The route initially consisted of canals and dammed-off sections of the Lehigh River. Boatmen had to navigate barges periodically from the canal through a lock onto the river or vice versa. This design saved time and money and made the canal functional while it was being built, although it made for a slower, more difficult trip for canal-boat captains.
The Lehigh Coal Mine Company (LCMC) was founded in 1792, a few months after anthracite was discovered at Sharp Mountain, a peak of the Pisgah Ridge near present-day Summit Hill, Pennsylvania; [lower-alpha 2] Its principals secured rights to over 10,000 acres (40 km2) before the Lehigh Canal was built. The company found it fairly easy to find and mine coal from a pit on the mountainside. The coal had to be loaded into sacks and then onto pack animals, which carried the coal at least 9 miles (14 km) to the Lehigh shore. Disposable skiffs known as arks were built from local timber, which were manned along the lower Lehigh River rapids. Despite many politically connected stockholders and officers, the operation was unsupervised by upper management. [4]
With no officer willing to manage from the field, the LCMC hired contractors or sent out teams, which was only sporadically successful in getting coal to Philadelphia. [4] Firewood and charcoal were expensive and hard to find in the eastern U.S. by the War of 1812. Before the war, the LCMC's record of getting coal to market was so dismal that coal imported from England was cheaper and more readily available. [4] The War of 1812 gave the company an incentive to send another expedition by independent contractors in 1813. After a year, they had built five boats but brought only two to market. This resulted in another financial loss for the company [4] and proved the last straw for many of the company's backers, who were unwilling to fund more expeditions.
The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, its founder Josiah White and White's protégé and partner Erskine Hazard (operations managers into the mid-1860s) established a reputation for innovation. White and Hazard researched (or invented) emerging technologies as needed, pioneering industrial innovations including the first wire suspension bridge over the Schuylkill River. [lower-alpha 3]
There are few rivers, the navigation of which has been more the subject of legislation than that of the Lehigh.
The river was first declared a public highway on the fourteenth of March, 1761, and an Act, supplementary to this, was passed in 1771. Acts, conferring corporate privileges on the Lehigh Navigation Company, were passed February 27th, 1798, March 7th, 1810, March 22d, 1814, March 19th, 1816, and March 24th, 1817. By 1818, however, considerable sums were expended with limited progress.
On March 20, 1818, the new Lehigh Navigation and Coal Company was given expanded ownership of the Lehigh Canal to encourage the canal's development with the understanding that the state might at some point exercise its right to require the canal be made a two-way water transport highway with appropriate locks and dams. [6]
The lower canal began as a collection of removed stone obstructions and low rock dams with a system of wooden "bear-trap locks" invented by Lehigh Navigation and Coal Company managing partner Josiah White, who debugged scale models of the lock design on Mauch Chunk Creek. Experiments with the bear-trap locks gave Bear Lane, an alley in Mauch Chunk off Broadway in today's Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, its name. [7] White and partner Erskine Hazard, who operated a wire mill, foundry and nail factory at the Falls of the Schuylkill, needed energy. After learning the value of anthracite during the British blockades in 1814, White and Hazard joined a number of Philadelphians in a joint-stock venture to build the Schuylkill Canal but quarreled with those on the board of managers who did not favor rapid development. They learned that the managers of the Lehigh Coal Mine Company were willing to option their rights because of their long-term inability to make a profit by transporting anthracite nearly 110 miles (180 km) from Pisgah Ridge. The Lehigh Navigation Company held a charter to improve the navigability of the Lehigh River, but had accomplished little and the charter would expire in 1817. White and Hazard made a proposal specifying improvements for downriver navigation only, and received a charter giving the company ownership of the river in March 1818. The charter had a fall-back provision allowing the legislature to require improvements enabling two-way navigation. [3]
The plan, says Josiah White, who was its originator, was to "improve the navigation of the river by contracting the channels funnel fashion, to bring the whole flow of water at each of the falls to as narrow a compass as the law would allow, by throwing up the round river stones into low walls not higher than we wanted to raise the water for the required depth of fifteen or eighteen inches by the natural flow, to make artificial freshets to supply the deficiency; that is, by making ponds of water of as many acres as we could get, and letting it off periodically, say once in three days. I supposed we could gather water enough to secure the required quantity, and thus secure a regular descending navigation. The plan for locks and gates for letting out the freshet in a proper manner was left for the present to be devised in due time if found necessary.
— Fredrick Brenckman, History of Carbon County (1884) [8]
Sometimes called the Stone Coal Turnpike, [3] the lower canal (46.5 miles (74.8 km)) was built by the Lehigh Navigation Company as a toll road to supply coal to Eastern seaboard cities between 1818 and 1820 with downriver traffic only. It was later rebuilt with locks supporting two-way traffic between 1827 and 1829 by the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company and remained in operation until 1931. The lower canal connected the eastern part of the southern Coal Region to the Delaware River basin (primarily the Panther Creek Valley, Nesquehoning Creek Valley and mines in Beaver Meadows and along Black Creek), connecting via Penn Haven Junction to the canal head at Mauch Chunk in present-day Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania.
The lower canal began below Packers Dam. A wing wall projected into the upper pool to create slack water next to the loading docks, at the same level as the top of the first guard dam. That dam (known as Dam 1) was downstream of Broadway, opposite Flagstaff Hill and the cross-canal Bear Mountain for which Mauch Chunk was named. The 44 lift locks begin with Lock 1 at the dam. This was a weighing lock, using a platform which lifted a barge and weighed the boat and its load. Each non-LC&NC barge on the canal was recorded. Empty weights were subtracted, and tolls were assessed by the ton per mile traveled. Most of the 44 locks on the descent to Easton were spillway variants of White's bear-trap lock. When tipped or triggered, they released several acre-feet (creating a wave to raise the water level as the canal boat sank downriver). [lower-alpha 4] The canal carried central Lehigh Valley anthracite to northeastern urban markets, particularly Philadelphia, Trenton and Wilmington, and supporting new industry in Bristol, Allentown and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania with the Morris and Delaware and Raritan Canals and a number of railroads. The privately funded canal became part of the Pennsylvania Canal system, a complex of canals, towpaths and (eventually) railroads.
The lower canal improvements were initially designed and engineered by LC&N founder Josiah White [3] : 4–5 [lower-alpha 5] after the company become disenchanted with the Schuylkill Canal's board of directors. [3] By the winter of 1814, the company was interested in transporting Lehigh Valley coal to Philadelphia. [3]
By late 1822, skepticism about anthracite was waning. [lower-alpha 6] The cost of building an ark for every load of coal delivered to the Philadelphia docks in 1822 (as LC&N operations were hitting their stride) worried the company's board of directors. [9] By mid-1822, managing director Josiah White was consulting with veteran Erie-Canal lock engineer Canvass White. By late in the year, White had shifted construction efforts from improving the one-way system (begun in 1818) to a test project on the four upper dams of the canal. The project involved two-way dams and locks with a wider lift channel and lengths of over 120 feet (37 m), capable of taking a steam tug and a coastal cargo ship from 45.6 miles (73.4 km) from the Delaware to the slack-water pool at Mauch Chunk. In 1823, White and Hazard proposed a plan to the Pennsylvania legislature.
In 1823, after building and testing four locks, Josiah White made a proposal to the Pennsylvania legislature to continue the improvements down the Lehigh River. His plan included locks suitable for a coastal schooner and towing steam tug, the types of boats which dominated ports along the 62 miles (100 km) of the Delaware River controlled by the LC&N. [3] The following year, the legislature rejected his proposal; lumber and timber interests feared that damming would prevent them from rafting logs on the rivers to local sawmills. White and Hazard scrambled to increase mine production while producing enough lumber for arks to send their coal along the Delaware to Philadelphia. In 1827, a revision to the Main Line of Public Works funded the promised Delaware Canal. The LC&N began converting the canal to support two-way operation, work which continued into 1829. In 1831, the LC&N stopped making one-way arks and began building large, durable barges, expecting their return via a connection with the Delaware Division of the Pennsylvania Canal in Easton.
The expanded Lehigh Canal extended 46 miles (74 km), between Mauch Chunk and Easton. Its 52 locks, eight guard locks, eight dams and six aqueducts allowed the waterway to rise over 350 feet (107 m) in elevation. A weigh lock .5 miles (0.80 km) south of Mauch Chunk determined canal-boat fees. A cable-ferry connection across the Delaware River to the Morris Canal and through New Jersey created a more-direct route from the Lehigh Canal to New York City. To the south, the Delaware and Raritan Canal had a complementary 22-mile (35 km) canal built along the east bank of the Delaware.
Inspired by the successful transport of freight over the Allegheny Front escarpment via the Allegheny Portage Railroad system, during the mid-1830s the business community and the legislature sought a 26-mile (42 km) extension. The Upper Lehigh Canal, designed by Canvass White, was built from 1837 to 1843 as authorized by the 1837 revision of the Main Line of Public Works.
The upper Lehigh was a turbulent river with steep sides; a large portion was in a ravine, the Lehigh Gorge. The upper canal rose over 600 feet (183 m) in elevation to the Mauch Chunk slack-water pool. Unlike the lower canal (where most locks lifted less than 6 feet (1.8 m) in easy stages, the upper-canal design relied on deep-lift locks. The maximum lift on the lower canal was less than 20 feet (6.1 m), but the upper-canal locks lifted a maximum of 58 feet (18 m); this is comparable to the lift of the lower canal in a bit over half the distance, using less than 11⁄18 as many locks per mile. The upper canal design's 20 dams, 29 locks and a number of reservoirs provided working flow even in dry summers.
The project included four major construction hurdles and three new railroad projects, for which LC&N created a new subsidiary: the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad (LH&S). From north to south, the rail projects were:
In 1862, the canal collapsed when a wet spring repeatedly overfilled embankment dam reservoirs until the dam above White Haven failed, triggering a cascade of failing dams in a flood on June 4. Between 100 or 200 people died in the villages and canal works below. The Pennsylvania legislature forbade the rebuilding of the upper canal. The canal was used for transportation until the 1940s, about a decade after similar canals ceased operations, and it was North America's last fully functioning towpath canal. In 1962, most of the canal was sold to private and public organizations for recreational use.
Several segments of the canal were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, including "Lehigh Canal", "Carbon County Section of the Lehigh Canal" (#79002179), "Lehigh Canal: Eastern Section Glendon and Abbott Street Industrial Sites" (#78002437) and "Lehigh Canal; Allentown to Hopeville Section" (#79002307). For the Carbon County section, also known as "Upper Canal Lock #1 to Lower Canal Dam #3", the listing included 30 contributing structures. [10]
The eastern section (now preserved as a recreational-boating area) runs along the Lehigh River from Hopeville to the confluence of the Lehigh and Delaware Rivers in Easton and includes the Chain Bridge, which was NRHP-listed in 1974. The eastern-section listing is for a 260-acre (110 ha) area with three contributing buildings, seven contributing sites and 11 contributing structures. [10] The Allentown-to-Hopeville section is a 53.9-acre (21.8 ha) area which includes Greek Revival and Federal architecture in its contributing building and 13 contributing structures. [10]
An 8-mile (13-km) segment of the canal towpath has been converted into a multi-use trail from Freemansburg through Bethlehem to Allentown. The trail runs along the river and active railroad tracks. A section near Jim Thorpe is also accessible to recreational users. The final section in Easton is maintained and operated by the National Canal Museum. Other short sections are accessible, but portions of the canal towpath are worn and unsafe to access. [11]
Beaver Meadows is a borough in Carbon County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is part of Northeastern Pennsylvania. The population was 897 at the 2020 U.S. census.
The Morris Canal (1829–1924) was a 107-mile (172 km) common carrier anthracite coal canal across northern New Jersey that connected the two industrial canals in Easton, Pennsylvania across the Delaware River from its western terminus at Phillipsburg, New Jersey to New York Harbor and New York City through its eastern terminals in Newark and on the Hudson River in Jersey City. The canal was sometimes called the Morris and Essex Canal, in error, due to confusion with the nearby and unrelated Morris and Essex Railroad.
Anthracite iron or anthracite pig iron is iron extracted by the smelting together of anthracite coal and iron ore, that is using anthracite coal instead of charcoal in iron smelting. This was an important technical advance in the late-1830s, enabling a great acceleration of the Industrial Revolution in the United States and in Europe.
The Coal Region is a region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. It is known for being home to the largest known deposits of anthracite coal in the world with an estimated reserve of seven billion short tons.
The Main Line of Public Works was a package of legislation passed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1826 to establish a means of transporting freight between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. It funded the construction of various long-proposed canal and road projects, mostly in southern Pennsylvania, that became a canal system and later added railroads. Built between 1826 and 1834, it established the Pennsylvania Canal System and the Allegheny Portage Railroad.
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.
The Delaware Division of the Pennsylvania Canal, more commonly called the Delaware Canal, runs for 60 miles (97 km) parallel to the right bank of the Delaware River from the entry locks near the mouth of the Lehigh River and terminal end of the Lehigh Canal at Easton south to Bristol. At Easton, which today is the home of The National Canal Museum, the Delaware Canal also connected with the Morris Canal built to carry anthracite coal to energy-starved New Jersey industries.
Lehigh Gorge State Park is a 4,548 acres (1,841 ha) Pennsylvania state park in Luzerne and Carbon Counties, Pennsylvania. The park encompasses a gorge, which stretches along the Lehigh River from a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flood control dam in Luzerne County to Jim Thorpe in Carbon County.
The Pennsylvania Canal, sometimes known as the Pennsylvania Canal system, was a complex system of transportation infrastructure improvements, including canals, dams, locks, tow paths, aqueducts, and viaducts. The canal was constructed and assembled over several decades beginning in 1824, the year of the first enabling act and budget items.
In early periods of North American industrial development, an ark was a temporary boat used for river transport in eastern North America before slack-water canals and railroads made them obsolete. Because they could be built using relatively crude hand tools, arks were built in American colonial and early republic times, primarily to carry cargo downriver on the spring freshets, and especially to carry milled lumber, charcoal and other forest products and bulk agricultural produce to a city or a port downriver. While logs were often tied into rafts, on long trips which could take weeks, the rafts would be accompanied by such arks as crew support quarters. Deep rivers allowed large log arks as described below instead of less controllable rafts. Since by 1800, most eastern towns and cities were short on heating fuels, even badly processed timber or planks could readily be sold at the destinations.
The Susquehanna Canal of the Pennsylvania Canal System was funded and authorized as part of the 1826 Main Line of Public Works enabling act, and would later become the Susquehanna Division of the Pennsylvania Canal under the Pennsylvania Canal Commission. Constructed early on in America's brief canal age, it formed an integral segment of the water focused transportation system which cut Philadelphia-Pittsburgh (pre-railroad) travel time from nearly a month to just four days.
The Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company (LCAN) (1988–2010) was a modern-day anthracite coal mining company headquartered in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. It acquired many properties and relaunched the Lehigh Coal Companies brand in 1988. The LCAN ran strip mining operations in the Panther Creek Valley east of Lansford, Pennsylvania along U.S. Route 209 with vast properties dominating the coal areas of Tamaqua, Coaldale, and Lansford.
Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company was a mining and transportation company headquartered in Mauch Chunk, now known as Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. The company operated from 1818 until its dissolution in 1964 and played an early and influential role in the American Industrial Revolution.
Josiah White (1781–1850) was a Pennsylvania industrialist and key figure in the American Industrial Revolution.
The Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad is a defunct railroad that operated in eastern Pennsylvania during the 19th and 20th centuries. The company was a subsidiary of the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company (LC&N). For much of its lifetime, however, it was leased by the Central Railroad of New Jersey.
There are two types of coal found in Pennsylvania: anthracite, the hard coal found in Northeastern Pennsylvania below the Allegheny Ridge southwest to Harrisburg, and bituminous, the soft coal found west of the Allegheny Front escarpment). Anthracite coal is a natural mineral with a high carbon and energy content that gives off light and heat produced energy when burned, making it useful as a fuel. It was possibly first used in Pennsylvania as a fuel in 1769, but its history begins with a documented discovery near Summit Hill and the founding of the Lehigh Coal Mine Company in 1792 to periodically send expeditions to the wilderness atop Pisgah Ridge to mine the deposits, mostly with notable lack of great success, over the next 22 years.
Mauch Chunk Ridge or Mauch Chunk Mountain is a historically important barrier ridgeline north of the Blue Mountain escarpment and 3rd parallel ridgeline south of the Nesquehoning Creek after Nesquehoning Mountain and Pisgah Ridge in the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians of Northeastern Pennsylvania.
Erskine Hazard (1790-1865) 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.
The Canal Age is a term of art used by science, technology, and industry historians. Various parts of the world have had various canal ages; the main ones belong to Egypt, Ancient Babylon, and the historical empires of India, China, Southeast Asia, and mercantile Europe. The successes of the Canal du Midi in France (1681), Bridgewater Canal in Britain, and Eiderkanal in Denmark (1784) spurred on what was called in Britain "canal mania". In the Thirteen colonies in 1762 legislation was passed supporting in the colonial-era Province of Pennsylvania to improve navigation on the Schuylkill River through Philadelphia.
The Room Run Railroad was an early American gravity railroad with self-acting planes. It was built by the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company to transport coal from the Room Run Mine in Nesquehoning, Pennsylvania to landings at Mauch Chunk on the Lehigh River so it could be shipped on the Lehigh Canal to the Delaware River at Easton, Pennsylvania to markets in Philadelphia or New York City via the Delaware or Morris Canals.