The Delaware Canal

by Marie Murphy Duess

  His enthusiasm impressed President Washington, who founded the Patowmack Company to make improvements in the navigability of the Potomac River. Once established, the company built canals that skirted the major falls and allowed boats and rafts to float downstream toward Georgetown. Moving upriver, against the current, was more difficult, however.

  The first notable American canal project began in 1793 with the chartering of the Middlesex Canal in Massachusetts by Governor John Hancock. Upon completion in 1803, this twenty-seven-mile canal connected the Merrimack River with the port of Boston.

  New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia and the Carolinas all began to investigate the viability of man-made waterways. In 1810, New York laid plans to build a canal from Albany to Lake Ontario, but these plans were waylaid by the onset of the War of 1812. When construction began again in 1817, it was decided to change the direction of the canal route and travel to Lake Erie, near Buffalo, bypassing Lake Ontario, where there were still some hostilities. Completed in 1825 and called the Erie Canal, this waterway opened the route from the Hudson River in New York City to the Great Lakes. As a result, New York City suddenly became one of the world’s most important seaports, and the “canal age” in this country began in full force with the support of millions of dollars of government money, bonds purchased by foreign banking houses and a few private American investors.

  The introduction of canals resulted in the country’s first tunnels, launched the need for additional engineering and scientific inventions and set the precedent for eminent domain. But the engineering and building of these first man-made waterways in America was not easy. At the time that the Erie Canal was built, West Point was the only college that offered engineering. Most of America’s canals were built by trial and error and were overseen by inventors, lawyers and bankers with no engineering education. Not until the Erie Canal was completed did Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth and other Ivy League schools in the nation introduce engineering courses.

  Although very few remnants of the canal age remain intact in this country, at its height there were five thousand miles of canals stretching across the United States that opened trade in major marketplaces for once-isolated farmers and manufacturers. The country’s mule-drawn canalboats transported adventurers and immigrants and the goods they needed to expand the nation westward, while cargoes of coal, grain and lumber were brought to the East to feed the Industrial Revolution. The canal age’s contribution to the history of this nation is undeniable, even if mostly forgotten.

  The Pennsylvania Canals

  When King Charles II gave a charter to establish a colony in America to William Penn, it was in payment for a debt owed to Penn’s father. The king called the land the “Woods of Penn”—or “Pennsylvania”—and appointed William the proprietor of the land, accountable to the king directly.

  A Quaker who had suffered greatly in England because of his conversion to the Society of Friends, Penn longed for a place where people could worship according to their own consciences. He was a man with great vision, deep spirituality, intelligence and idealism. And although he was a modest man who lived according to the dictates of the Society of Friends, he was one of the colonies’ greatest diplomats.

  Even before leaving for America, Penn had developed the First Frame of Government, which provided religious tolerance as well as secured private property, unlimited free enterprise, a free press and trial by jury. Upon arriving in America in 1682 aboard the Welcome, he immediately began plans for the first Pennsylvania city of Philadelphia. When it was completed, it became one of the country’s first and busiest seaports.

  During that time, Penn proposed another settlement that would be located on the Susquehanna River, where he believed it would be possible to establish a branch of the river that would open up trade and transportation by water to the west and northwest. Unfortunately, the canal he proposed in 1690 was not built.

  Shortly after he arrived in the colonies, Penn needed to return to England, and although he directed the progress of Pennsylvania from his estates in Ireland and England, he could not return to Pennsylvania until 1699. Two years later he was again forced to return to England, where Parliament was threatening to terminate his proprietorship. Although he always intended to return to what he considered his home, he never did. Though many of his plans—including the Holy Experiment, as he called it—continued in his absence, William Penn was never to enjoy its success personally.

  Between 1762 and 1770, renowned American astronomer, inventor, mathematician and surveyor David Rittenhouse and Dr. William Smith, the provost of the University of Pennsylvania, surveyed the route that connected the Susquehanna and Delaware Valleys that Penn had proposed. That route later became the Union Canal, and in fact was the first canal to be surveyed in the United States, even though it wasn’t the first to be built. Construction began in 1792 during George Washington’s administration (he turned the first shovel of earth), and approximately fifteen miles were completed. Work stopped on the canal when the company building it suffered financial difficulties, and it did not begin again for twenty-seven years.8

  William Penn (1644–1718), founder and proprietor of the colony King George II called Pennsylvania, was a Quaker and renowned diplomat and statesman. Courtesy of Pennsbury Manor.

  The Pennsylvania legislature authorized a lottery to raise funds for the completion of the canal in 1795, and although it was the most significant canal lottery in United States history, more prize money was given out than funds raised to give to the canal company for production and construction purposes.

  The enthusiasm to build canals in Pennsylvania seemed to have declined after that. Then, when a very important discovery was made in the mountains of Pennsylvania, indifference to canals turned into necessity—and in the case of the Pennsylvania canals, necessity truly was the mother of invention.

  Chapter 2

  From the Bowels of the Earth

  Raking Over the Coals

  When William Penn invited Europeans to settle in his “woods” and promised the sort of freedom that most had never known or even dreamed of, they accepted. English Quakers, Scotch-Irish and Germans were the first to cross the Atlantic and step off the ships onto what they believed was the proverbial land of milk and honey. And in many ways, Pennsylvania fulfilled their hopes. The earth was rich and fertile, the fruit trees heavy with succulent offerings and there were more than enough game and fish to feed their families. Additionally, due to William Penn’s fair and just treatment of the Native Americans, white settlers lived in peace with the Lenni-Lenape.

  As more people arrived, they decided to settle beyond Philadelphia and the local counties, moving west and up into the mountains. Living in colonial America wasn’t easy by any means, but the colonists’ hearts were filled with hope and they were willing to work hard in this new home that held such promise for them.

  Philip Ginder was one of them. A German immigrant, Ginder settled on Sharp Mountain (Mauch Chunk) and built his family a log cabin in the forest. But after this, the story gets a little confusing. One account relates that Ginder’s family lived on the game he shot as a backwoods hunter. There came a year when the game became sparse. Ginder was on his way home one rainy evening, empty-handed, worrying that his family would starve because his hunting expedition had failed, and he stumbled on a large black rock. Upon inspection of the boulder, he suspected it might be the hard coal he had heard about from Native American stories.

  In this account, Ginder took a portion of the coal directly to Fort Allen to Colonel Jacob Weiss, who in turn took it to Philadelphia to be inspected by three men—John Nicholson, the comptroller general of Pennsylvania; Michael Hillegas, the former treasurer of the United States; and a printer named Charles Cist, who was Weiss’s brother-in-law. When they wanted to see the precise location in which Ginder found the coal, the backwoodsman first asked for help in filing forms through the patent office to obtain a small tract of land to build a mill.

  Coal mined from
the anthracite region of Pennsylvania. Courtesy of Hillmann-Purcell collection.

  In another story it is suggested that Philip Ginder was actually a prosperous farmer and already a millwright when he found the anthracite. He took it to a blacksmith, who put it in a fire, and they discovered that it burned hotter and longer than bituminous coal or wood.9 Ginder then went to Weiss with the discovery, knowing that the influential Weiss could expedite the forms through the patent office. In the end, and much to Ginder’s dismay, it took so many years before he received his tract of land in 1797 that he was too old to clear it, and he sold it for 150 pounds of gold and silver.10

  Although both historical accounts name Ginder as the person who discovered the anthracite coal that would contribute to the Industrial Revolution, the fact is that Native Americans in Pennsylvania had been using coal for many years for different purposes. A historian from a Moravian mission wrote about tobacco pipe heads that the Native Americans made from “black stone” that was easy to carve. In the 1950s, an oil company that was excavating an area near the Susquehanna River found the floor of a prehistoric Indian site. When the Society for Pennsylvania Archeology was called in to study the site, it found anthracite nuggets that had been rubbed on stone, presumably to make paint.11 However, it isn’t clear if the Native Americans ever used coal as fuel.

  By the late eighteenth century, finding ways to keep homes warm and inventing methods to advance industry—particularly iron production, which was necessary to the growing new country—was becoming a challenge. Fuel was provided by wood from the region’s forests, but wood didn’t burn hot for very long. Colonists heated their homes with the use of fireplaces, a method that wasn’t ideal since the fires burned out quickly and a spark could cause fiery devastation. Many women and children were severely burned when their clothing caught fire in the large open hearths. Benjamin Franklin invented the cast-iron stove, which allowed people to warm their homes more efficiently and with less danger, yet the stove still required wood.

  Charcoal, which was the distillation of wood to its carbon content, burned hotter and cleaner, but it was time-consuming and costly, especially for iron production. Although the woodlands of America were still dense in the 1700s, the high demand for charcoal would soon strip the forests, a problem England was experiencing for the same reason. It took the yield of approximately an acre of woodland a day to feed furnaces that produced iron.

  Bituminous coal from Virginia was being shipped to Philadelphia’s ports, but the British blockade during the War of 1812 drove up the price of Virginia’s coal. It was clear to the colonists that finding an alternative method of heating homes and fueling furnaces for iron was becoming essential.

  Anthracite coal is a metamorphic rock that is formed through the buildup and decay of plant and animal material, causing organic sedimentary rock to form. Compressed vegetation forms coal, and the longer and deeper it is buried, the higher the quality.

  Anthracite is hard, with a bright black luster, and it burns without flame, smoke or odor. When burned, it gives off relatively little sulfur dioxide and provides intense heat.12 With the discovery of anthracite coal by Philip Ginder in the mountains of Pennsylvania, the young United States had found the alternative source of heat it needed, and the Industrial Revolution in America was launched.

  The Lehigh Coal Mine Company

  After Ginder brought the piece of coal he had found to Jacob Weiss, the group who inspected it—Hillegas, Cist and Nicholson—formed the Lehigh Coal Mine Company (LCMC) on February 21, 1792.13 With the incentive of a money-back guarantee, fourteen people took stock in the new LCMC. The board elected Nicholson as president; then it set rules and appointed committees to decide how to proceed with the mines. The LCMC acquired ten thousand acres of land, arranged for a road to be built from the mines to the Lehigh River and built a landing on the river. It also made arrangements to have the river improved for transporting the coal. All of this was more expensive than had been anticipated and necessitated the selling of more shares of stock. The LCMC set the price of coal at eighteen to twenty-one shillings per bushel at Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton, and twenty-one to twenty-six per bushel in Philadelphia.

  This Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company stock certificate shows the images of Josiah White and Erskine Hazard. Courtesy of Pennsylvania Canal Society Collection, National Canal Museum, Easton, PA.

  In 1794, the company officially began production, with orders to transfer the coal to the Lehigh Valley by raft or flat-bottomed boat. But its progress faltered and the success it anticipated was not realized. Due to the expense of trying to improve its mines, the road and the river, the LCMC had to ask for a thirty-dollar levy on shares, and that levy resulted in delinquency by John Nicholson, Robert Morris and a number of other stockholders. The company could no longer afford to expend money on finding ways to improve the Lehigh River.

  Transporting the coal over the treacherous and unpredictable waters of the Lehigh River proved even more difficult than the LCMC had imagined. Several attempts to clear the Lehigh had failed. Unable to incorporate, and with its stockholders suffering financial setbacks, the company was failing. There was a demand for anthracite during the War of 1812, and the company continued to float the coal downriver whenever it was navigable, but not with financial success. Coal was continuously lost on the twisting and wild river, and the company couldn’t turn a profit. In 1818, the property was leased to Josiah White, Erskine Hazard and George F.A. Hauto, entrepreneurs of the Lehigh Navigation Company.

  The Genius of Josiah White

  Josiah White was the “idea man” of the nineteenth century, and his ideas led to ventures that were sometimes successful and sometimes failures. The implementation of his inventions may have failed from time to time, but the concepts were usually found to be solid.

  Born in Mount Holly, New Jersey, in 1781, Josiah White and his three bothers were reared by their mother, Rebecca, after the death of their father, John White, a storekeeper and mill owner. Both his grandfather and father were steadfast Quakers who wouldn’t even sell cotton in their store since it was made through slave labor. The elder White, also named Josiah, was a leader in the community who owned a tavern, kept school for Quaker families and was an apothecary, tending to the ill with local plants and herbs. Upon the death of John, Rebecca ran the mill and store, but she found that she was always struggling to support her sons. There was very little money for education, and the boys needed to work as soon as they were old enough.

  When he was fifteen years old, Josiah was apprenticed in a hardware store in Philadelphia. By the age of seventeen, he was in complete charge of the store, priced the goods and kept the books. By twenty-one, he owned his own hardware store and made himself a promise: by age thirty he would be worth $40,000.14

  He married Catherine Ridgeway, who died only two years later at the age of twenty. His sadness at her death overshadowed the fact that he had surpassed his financial goal even before the age of thirty, and he sold the hardware business to his younger brother, Joseph, and a friend, Samuel Lippincott. Josiah traveled for a while and lived a quiet, solitary life until he met and married his second wife, Elizabeth. They established their home in Philadelphia, and then Josiah purchased some property on both sides of the Schuylkill River that was located near the falls and included water power rights to the river at the falls.

  Josiah, tired of being “retired” at the age of twenty-nine, invested his fortune and borrowed another $20,000 to build the first dam on the Schuylkill and lease the water power to mills in Philadelphia. It was eighty feet long and seventeen feet wide, and instead of building the walls against the current, he constructed them to lean with the current, thereby lowering the water pressure on the dam.

  It functioned well and stood strong against the annual ice floes, but the commercial rental of the water power and the collection of tolls didn’t cover the expenses of the improvements. A father of one little girl now, with a second child on the way, he worried about
his financial security and started a nail mill that had two purposes: it would provide income for the family and would prove that his water power was valuable. His invention of a machine that rolled and molded iron into nails caught the attention of Ebenezer Hazard, the first postmaster general of the United States and the founder of the Insurance Company of North America.

  Hazard believed that the United States needed to attain economic independence from England and Europe through its own development of industrial power, and he was greatly impressed with the young inventor. He introduced Josiah to his son, Erskine, and this would be the beginning of a lifelong partnership and friendship.

  Erskine was Princeton educated, and his intelligence matched Josiah’s. Together they built the nail factory and a wire factory, with a patent for both the nail-making machinery and a wire-rolling machine. They were determined to convince the commonwealth and the government that water power and water navigation would prove to be important to the growth of the country. In a letter published in the Democratic Press, Josiah wrote, “Machinery is powerful. By using machines driven by waterpower, a single individual can do the work of at least three.”15

  Josiah and Erskine became acquainted with anthracite coal during the War of 1812, when supplies of British and Virginia coal were cut off. They purchased the “Lehigh coal” when it arrived in Philadelphia on arks, and because of their inexperience with the hard-to-ignite anthracite, they worked for hours one night trying to make a fire in the furnace. Frustrated, they and their millworkers slammed the furnace doors closed and left the mill. One of the workers had forgotten his jacket, and when he went back to get it, he was surprised to find the door of the mill was hot to the touch. Inside, the furnace was glowing.