Pennsylvania's Canal Fever
/When researching my first mystery, I talked with an educator at Greenwood Furnace State Park in central Pennsylvania. Paul Fagley had developed a museum and interpretive program around the remains of a 19th-century charcoal-fired ironworks within the 423-acre park.
“Weigh-lock” on the Pennsylvania Canal in Johnstown. Tolls were based on weight. Credit: Johnstown Area Heritage Association
Paul kindly agreed to read the manuscript for A Stranger Here Below and help me get the charcoal- and ironmaking details right.
One scene tripped him up, though. I had one of my characters exclaim how the local economy would boom once the railroad arrived in my fictional Colerain County. “People weren’t talking about railroads in the 1830s,” Paul told me. “It was all canals.”
Lately I’ve been reading about those canals. Nationally, the most famous was the Erie Canal; it opened in 1825, linking Albany on the Hudson River in eastern New York with Buffalo on Lake Erie in the west.
(I can’t resist an aside: In the 1840s, as a young boy, my great-grandfather Addison Foote traveled on the Erie Canal with his family after they sold their farm in upstate New York and removed to another farm in the Wisconsin Territory. Thus did they join thousands of other 19th-century Americans moving west. Addison recalled in a memoir: “Passing through Lockport – where I became much interested in the manner of working the locks – Father took me on deck so I could see them, also the driver and horses, and heard the captain abuse the driver because he did not drive to suit him.”)
But back to Pennsylvania’s canals. In 1826, ground was broken for the state-funded Main Line Canal, meant to compete with the Erie Canal. It would connect Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, 297 miles apart. It relied on water-filled canals alongside rivers (the Susquehanna, Juniata, Conemaugh, and Allegheny); locks that raised and lowered boats to accommodate changes in elevation; dams to maintain water levels in certain sections; aqueducts, essentially water-filled troughs that carried the canal over rivers and other terrain features; and the Allegheny Portage Railroad.
William H. Shank, in The Amazing Pennsylvania Canals, a charming book published in 1960, called the Allegheny Portage Railroad “one of the most unusual means of overland transportation ever devised.” Rube Goldberg would have loved it.
In-place steam engines powered the Allegheny Portage Railroad; drawing by George W. Stone, 1839. Credit: Wikipedia
The Portage Railroad hauled passengers and freight up and over the Allegheny Front, a steep, rugged mountain ridge that long had been a barrier to east-west travel. The railroad included iron tracks on a series of inclined planes, with five inclines on each side of the summit.
Stationary steam engines powered cables (hemp at first; later, woven wire) to haul flatbed rail cars up the inclines. On relatively level terrain between the inclines, the cars were pulled by horses, locomotives, and steam-powered tugboats. The change in elevation was 1,400 feet when approaching the Front from the east and 1,172 feet from the west. Some canal boats made the trip up and over: they were built to be disassembled into shorter units that fit onto the rail cars.
At lower elevations, on the water-filled canals, horses and mules pulled packet boats carrying passengers and barges hauling freight. A two- or three-equine team walked along on a flat towpath beside the canal; a driver accompanied the animals on foot or riding on the hindmost horse. Wrote one traveler in 1835: “The horses are changed once in about three hours and seem very much jaded by their work.”
The speed limit was 4 miles an hour to avoid causing a wake that might undermine the canal’s graded earthen sides. In the boat, a steersman helped maneuver the craft using a tiller. Often the driver would help onshore lock tenders push on the large wooden beams to open and close the gates operating the locks.
Packet boats might have a crew of six, including a captain, a steward, a cook, and a chambermaid to attend to female passengers. Larger boats were 79 feet in length and could carry 25 to 40 or more passengers and 30 tons of freight. A typical layout had a ladies’ cabin in the bow, a freight area, a gentlemen’s room (with a bar, a table for meals, and beds and bunks), and a kitchen in the stern. A large boat might carry a spare team of horses. There were windows in the sides of the boats. Passengers lounged on top of the cabin to view the ever-changing scenery gliding past; they had to duck their heads when the boat went under a bridge. Other than on the Allegheny Portage Railroad, boats traveled by night as well as by day.
Water-filled aqueduct bore the canal across the Little Conemaugh River. Credit: Johnstown Area Heritage Association