The community was originally called Alger, located at a crossing of the Swatara Creek. During the early 19th century it became a point of interest along the Union Canal, which connected the Schuylkill River to the Susquehanna River. It was here that the canal company built a pumping station, the water works, to lift water from the Swatara Creek to feed the canal, which ran parallel from this point to the Susquehanna River at Middletown. The Union water works was such a major feat of engineering, that Union Water Works quickly became the de facto name of the village as well. The canal began operation in 1827, and between 1828 and 1830 a branch canal was built north to Pine Grove to service the mines of the Southern Schuylkill Anthracite Coal Region of Pennsylvania. The branch canal connected to the main canal at the Water Works Dam. The business of the canal company included the pumping station, a weigh station and toll house, several nearby locks, and the ice dam in winter. Local residents established a hotel, a general store, a grain mill, a lumber yard, a community park, and the Union Water Works Church.
The Union Canal ceased operation in 1885, and evidence of the canal at Water Works has nearly disappeared. The dam was destroyed in 1972 when flooding from Hurricane Agnes caused the earthwork dam to break, spilling the entire reservoir into the Swatara Creek. Today, some stone masonry of the weigh station, towpath, and nearby canal locks remain, but they are all on private property and are essentially unrecognizable to the casual observer. The former Mount Union Hotel, which became the Peiffer Hotel, is still inhabited, now as an apartment building. The church continues to serve the congregation as the Water Works United Methodist Church. The Union Water Works Fire Company, a volunteer organization, is perhaps the last link to the Union Canal era.
Bernville is a borough in Berks County, Pennsylvania, United States. The population was 955 at the 2010 census. Bernville is bordered by Penn Township to the north, east, and south and by Jefferson Township to the west.
Pine Grove is a borough in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, United States. As of the 2020 census, the borough population was 2,054.
The Susquehanna River is a major river located in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States, overlapping between the lower Northeast. At 444 miles (715 km) long, it is the longest river on the East Coast of the United States. By watershed area, it is the 16th-largest river in the United States, and also the longest river in the early 21st-century continental United States without commercial boat traffic.
The Chesapeake & Delaware Canal is a 14-mile (22.5 km)-long, 450-foot (137.2 m)-wide and 35-foot (10.7 m)-deep ship canal that connects the Delaware River with the Chesapeake Bay in the states of Delaware and Maryland in the United States.
Tulpehocken Creek is a 39.5-mile-long (63.6 km) tributary of the Schuylkill River in southeastern Pennsylvania in the United States, and during the American Canal Age, once provided nearly half the length of the Union Canal linking the port of Philadelphia, the largest American city and the other communities of Delaware Valley with the Susquehanna basin and the Pennsylvania Canal System connecting the Eastern seaboard to Lake Erie and the new settlements of the Northwest Territory via the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers at Pittsburgh.
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.
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.
Swatara State Park is a 3,515-acre (1,422 ha) Pennsylvania state park in Bethel, Swatara and Union Townships, Lebanon and Pine Grove Township, Schuylkill Counties in Pennsylvania in the United States. 8 miles (13 km) of Swatara Creek lie within the park's boundaries, which are roughly formed by Pennsylvania Route 443 to the north and Interstate 81 to the south. The park is in a valley in the ridge and valley region of Pennsylvania between Second Mountain (north) and Blue Mountain (south).
The Lebanon and Tremont Branch of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad was a railroad line in Lebanon and Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, built to tap the coal fields in the West End of Schuylkill County and send coal southward to Lebanon.
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. In Easton, the canal met the Delaware 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.
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.
The West Branch Division of the Pennsylvania Canal ran 73 miles (117 km) from the canal basin at Northumberland, Pennsylvania, at the confluence of the West Branch Susquehanna River with the main stem of the Susquehanna River, north through Muncy, then west through Williamsport, Jersey Shore, and Lock Haven to its terminus in Farrandsville. At its southern terminus in the Northumberland basin, the West Branch Canal met the North Branch Canal and the Susquehanna Division Canal. Through these connections to other divisions of the Pennsylvania Canal, it formed part of a multi-state water transportation system including the Main Line of Public Works.
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.
Barnesville is an unincorporated community in Ryan Township, Pennsylvania, United States. Originally built to support nearby rust belt industries, the hamlet is between the center and eastern thirds of the Southern Anthracite Coal Region. The community is part of a wide-ranging township and is situated atop a summit and drainage divide flanked by two long climbs that are traversed by local transport infrastructure, railways with an important switching junction within the village, and Pennsylvania Route 54, which collects towns like beads on a string along a particular combination of connected valleys in the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians.
The Swatara Furnace is a historic iron furnace and 200-acre national historic district located along Mill Creek, a tributary of the Swatara Creek in Pine Grove Township, Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania.
The Schuylkill and Susquehanna Navigation Company was a limited liability corporation founded in Pennsylvania on September 29, 1791.
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. Cultures make canals as they make other engineering works, and canals make cultures. They make industry, and until the era when steam locomotives attained high speeds and power, the canal was by far the fastest way to travel long distances quickly. Commercial canals generally had boatmen shifts that kept the barges moving behind mule teams 24 hours a day. Like many North American canals of the 1820s-1840s, the canal operating companies partnered with or founded short feeder railroads to connect to their sources or markets. Two good examples of this were funded by private enterprise:
The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company used vertically integrated mining raw materials, transporting them, manufacturing with them, and merchandising by building coal mines, the instrumental Lehigh Canal, and feeding their own iron goods manufacturing industries and assuaging the American Republic's first energy crisis by increasing coal production from 1820 onwards using the nation's second constructed railway, the Summit Hill and Mauch Chunk Railroad.
The second coal road and canal system was inspired by LC&N's success. The Delaware and Hudson Canal and Delaware and Hudson Gravity Railroad. The LC&N operation was aimed at supplying the country's premier city, Philadelphia with much needed fuel. The D&H companies were founded purposefully to supply the explosively growing city of New York's energy needs.
Suedberg is an unincorporated community in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, United States.
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