The Delaware Canal

by Marie Murphy Duess

  Josiah and Erskine called the workers back and produced more parcels of nails with one fire than they ever had with the softer bituminous coal. Not certain if it was more an accident than an actuality, they used the anthracite again with the same result. Savvy businessmen that they were, they recognized an opportunity and decided to lease a coal mine so that they would have ready access to the anthracite. They also proposed that a canal on the Schuylkill River would provide a better means of transporting the coal. Erskine’s father wrote legislation to authorize the improvement of the river, designating the company the Schuylkill Navigation Company, but unfortunately Josiah had made enemies because of the tolls he had charged after the first improvements he had made on the Schuylkill. Eventually the company was approved, but only on the proviso that Josiah had nothing to do with it.

  In 1815, the factory was severely damaged by a fire, and Josiah and Erskine were forced to take on another partner, Joseph Gillingham, who provided the finances they needed to repair the buildings. Gillingham became disenchanted, however, when there were more problems and setbacks than profits.

  Josiah and Erskine continued to move forward despite the problems they faced. When their original bridge across the falls collapsed, they built a wire suspension bridge for pedestrians that is believed to be the first wire suspension bridge in the world.16 They then moved on to the Lehigh coal mine prospective. Josiah visited the area with his additional new partner, George Hauto, a man who presented himself as being well connected with wealthy Americans and Europeans.

  At this time, the Lehigh Coal Mine Company was almost dormant, and White, Hazard and Hauto leased the property for “one ear of corn a year, if demanded by the LCMC.”17 They knew there was a great deal of work ahead of them before they could make the venture a success. First, the rough road from the mines, along which wagons had difficulty moving the coal over the mountain to the river, had to be repaired. Then, even more problematic, there were still many improvements that needed to be made on the Lehigh.

  They purchased more land to improve the road. Then the Pennsylvania legislature in effect gave them the entire river on the proviso that they would complete the improvements. The authority was extensive, but so were the risks. In the legislative act, they were given authority to do just about anything they wanted to make improvements, providing they start the work on the lower part, from Easton to Mauch Chunk, within two years and finish within seven. This gave them the land and the river—but they didn’t know where the money would come from to follow through when Hauto proved not to be an effective fundraiser.

  Finding that some investors felt more comfortable with the mining aspect and others with the transportation piece, they formed two separate companies: the Lehigh Coal Company and the Lehigh Navigation Company. Most investors held stock in both, but not equally. Many seemed to prefer the navigation company, since Josiah had a proven track record in improving waterways and because improvements in the river would be valuable even if the coal mining failed. No one had much confidence in the partners’ ability to fix the mountain road.

  They raised the money they needed, set up camp and went to work on the river first. Josiah White wrote in his journal:

  We began our work on the River with thirteen hands at the mouth of Nesquehoning Creek, the dividing point between the Upper and Lower sections of our planned Navigation. Later we rigged some scows fourteen feet wide by thirty five feet long for the eating and lodging of our then seventy hands. Another scow was rigged as kitchen and bake house. We called the fleet “Whitestown on Lehigh.” It was our design to make the river navigable with small wing dams and channel walls, so as we moved from one site to another we carried all with us, until our season ended when winter froze us still in the ice.18

  Working side by side with his employees, sometimes waist deep in the river, Josiah devised a series of dams that had a central section that collapsed, creating what came to be called “bear trap” locks (because whenever curious onlookers asked what the engineers were working on, they were told “bear traps”). By turning a lever that opened a valve, the water escaped through the gates of the lock—or artificial dam—and raised the water in the next section, and the boat or ark could continue on to the next segment (called a sluice). These dams were durable and capable of handling large tonnage.

  With the Lehigh River improvements made, the two companies were joined and became the Lehigh Coal and Navigation (LC&N) Company. The company delivered 364 tons of anthracite to Philadelphia in 1820.

  The First Railroad

  To correct the issues with the road, Josiah White, together with his best friend and partner, Erskine Hazard, conceived of and designed the first gravity railroad. Coal cars were placed on rails and lowered by gravity from the mines to the river, which was nine miles away. Mules were then used to draw the empty cars back up to the mines. To conserve the animals’ energy, they were put on specially built cars that carried them down the mountain along with the coal and, in order to save time, they were fed on those cars. Many years later, Josiah’s nephew claimed that the “Switchback Railroad,” as it was called, wasn’t only the first railroad, but had the first dining car as well.19

  Josiah White’s Switchback Railroad was used to bring coal from the mines to the awaiting coal boats, and it became one of America’s premier attractions and its first “roller coaster.” Courtesy of Pennsylvania Canal Society Collection, National Canal Museum, Easton, PA.

  Josiah’s plans became the model for future railroad construction. He designed the rails of wood with an iron plate rail, and the track was bound by crossties. It would be easy and inexpensive to build and easy to repair. Twelve miles of tracks were laid over a period of four months, supplemented by four miles of branch roads to the different mine entrances.

  The gravity railroad quickly became a tourist attraction, and the company decided to allow a local businessman to run “pleasure carriages” during the off times. He charged a toll of fifty cents to strangers, twenty-five cents to Mauch Chunk residents and all LC&N employees could ride for free. Approximately 50 percent of the profits were given back to the company. And so Josiah White’s first railroad also became the country’s first roller coaster.

  With an elevation of 664 feet and 2,322 feet long, it offered spectacular views from the top of Mount Pisgah of the Lehigh River and the mountains surrounding it. It was so popular that special excursions from New York and New Jersey brought people to see it and experience the thrill of what could easily be called a “runaway train ride.” It wasn’t until 1884 that an amusement park roller coaster was created and introduced to American society at Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. Until that time, Mauch Chunk’s Switchback Railroad was the only one of its kind.

  Mauch Chunk (now called Jim Thorpe) became a wealthy town as more people came to work in the mines and on the arks that brought the coal to major markets. The company erected 120 dwellings and buildings, including a hotel, a store, a schoolhouse and two iron furnaces. There was one tavern—governed by strict rules and controlled by the company (which had a strong Quaker influence). Even the physician was an employee of the company.

  During the years that Josiah was involved in the establishment of the LC&N, the improvements of the river and the building of the gravity railroad, he spent many long months away from his family. Elizabeth had given birth to five children: Josiah Jr. (who died at the age of five of yellow fever), John, Rebecca, Solomon and Hannah, all of whom stayed with their mother in Philadelphia while Josiah worked in Mauch Chunk. In letters written by him and to him, collected in Josiah White: Quaker Entrepreneur by Norris Hansell, we are able to take a peek into what this brilliant man thought and felt, and it is clear that despite his many accomplishments and bitter disappointments, he took great comfort in his relationship with his family and dearly loved his wife and children.

  When old enough, Josiah’s son Solomon became an apprentice in the LC&N. Josiah was very pleased and wrote to his wife:

  I find Solomo
n useful here. I have no doubt his service here will be of as much use to him as any he might experience in another situation. Now is the time for him to learn. I trust he is in his place.20

  Sadly, Solomon took ill when he was nineteen and died. Josiah pulled back from his work and affairs in the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, except in times of necessity. For a man who wrote many letters and kept a constant journal, it wasn’t until three years later that he even mentioned the passing of his beloved son. In a letter to his wife in 1834, he talked about his inspection of the mines and Room Run, where his son had spent the last few months before his death.

  It is pleasing to see folks here and things do look so natural here. It would all be wholly pleasant were it not for past recollections, which these circumstances so keenly revive. Our bright prospects have been cut off by an infinite wisdom which does not err.

  I trust he in his innocence has passed to a better condition than if he had stayed with us and fulfilled any expectations.

  Therefore our loss is his gain.21

  In his later years, Josiah White, always a deeply religious and committed Quaker, turned to his faith, and with many of his inventions proven worthy and his industrial endeavors running smoothly, he committed his life for the greater good. He was a prolific writer and began devotional exercises that are remarkable in their beauty and illustration of faith. When informed about a devastating flood on the Lehigh River during October 1841 that took out most of the Lehigh Navigation Canal, Josiah wrote in his devotional exercises:

  O Lord, help me to feel, as it in very deed is the truth, that all worketh together for good that cometh from thy unerring hand, and this affliction I know is from thy hand. Oh, let me beg of Thee to permit this apparent misfortune to drive me close to Thee as the only rock of safety, as the only sure abiding-place against all storms and all disappointments; and above all things to seek peace in Thee.22

  Josiah was a great believer in the value of education and was always bothered by his own lack of formal schooling. An abolitionist, he believed that it was as important to educate ex-slaves in literacy and trade as it was to free them. This opinion extended to Native Americans and underprivileged children in general. He devised a plan for schools based on three important principles: 1) manual labor, “to keep the body healthy and allow a liking for productive labor”; 2) literary education, “to emphasize the useful over the ornamental”; and 3) spiritual education, “as it may make possible that a person will be a more valuable citizen of the world.”23 He implored the Indiana Yearly Meeting (a Quaker community) to take a role in establishing two schools, one in Indiana and the other one in Iowa, which they did.

  Josiah White died on November 15, 1850, at the age of seventy. His wife, daughters, son-in-law and nephew John J. White carried out his instructions, especially those involving the two schools. At the time of his death, his daughter Hannah wrote, “One of our boldest champions of right order was removed by death leaving a delicate family to mourn his loss.”24

  His closest friend and confidant, Erskine Hazard, remained the manager of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company.

  The Brawn of the Lehigh Mines

  Anyone familiar with working in the coal mines understands what author Zane Grey meant when he wrote, “Writing was like digging coal. I sweat blood.”

  They started before dawn, moving from the dark of the early morning to the dark of the tunnels that brought them into the bowels of the earth. All of them were dressed in overalls and rubber boots and wore caps on their heads. And when the day was over, they left the mines to return home, as black as the coal they mined. Most of them were immigrants. They came from Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Hungary, Poland and Germany. Before 1842, there were no labor laws and no unions to protect them.

  Miners and their families lived in what were called Patch Villages. These villages were laid out by class of mine workers, with the mine bosses and supervisors living at the head of the streets in larger, more comfortable houses. The miners’ cabins weren’t much more than matchstick houses, with two rooms, a kitchen area down and a garret upstairs where children slept. These cabins did little to keep out the rain and cold. The unskilled workers slept in worse conditions, in shacks sometimes filled with so many people that they had to sleep in shifts. And they paid a fairly high rent for this housing, which was taken out of their pay.

  Although this book is about the Delaware Division Canal, it is important to touch on the story of the miners when talking about the transportation of the coal after it was dug out of the mountains. The narratives are intertwined, for without the first there would not have been the need for the latter; and possibly, without the brave men and little boys who descended sometimes more than a thousand feet deep into the ground with picks and shovels, the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible. It was best said by a coal miner in 1874:

  [M]illions of firesides of rich and poor must be supplied by our labor…the magnificent steamer that ploughs the ocean, rivers and lakes, the locomotive, whose shrill whistle echoes and re-echoes from Maine to California, the rolling mills, the cotton mills, the flour mills, the world’s entire machinery, is moved, propelled by our labor.25

  The youngest of the miners were the “breaker boys”—children who worked in the building where coal was broken and sorted. They were as young as five years old, and according to Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s book, Growing Up in Coal County, their hours at work were possibly the hardest and definitely the most heartbreaking.

  The breaker boys sat in chutes below where cars filled with coal were tipped and the contents poured into a machine that pushed the coal down toward the boys. As the coal tumbled down the chutes, a blanket of black coal dust covered the children. They wore handkerchiefs over their mouths to try to keep from breathing in the dust and chewed tobacco to keep their mouths moist. (Again, these are children as young as five years old!) They worked from seven in the morning until six or six-thirty at night with very few breaks, separating slate and rock from the coal, hunched over their work all day without backrests to give them support. They weren’t permitted to wear gloves because it interfered with their sense of touch and their fingers swelled and bled until they hardened with calluses.

  The breaker bosses oversaw the little boys’ work, usually with a club or broomstick against their backs if they slacked off or missed pieces of slate or rock. Sometimes, if the children resisted and protested because of the abuse, they were literally whipped back to work.

  The work at the breakers was no less dangerous than the work going on below ground. Children’s fingers were amputated in the conveyors; others fell down the chutes and became buried in coal or fell into the crusher where the coal was being ground along with their little bodies.

  In John Spargo’s exposé, The Bitter Cry of the Children, he describes the atmosphere of the breaker:

  Within the breaker there was blackness, clouds of deadly dust enfolded everything, the harsh, grinding roar of the machinery and the ceaseless rushing of coal through the chutes filled the ears…I was covered from head to foot with coal dust, and for many hours afterwards I was expectorating some of the small particles of anthracite I had swallowed.26

  Boys as young as five years old worked in the breakers, one of the most hazardous jobs in the mines. Courtesy of Robin G. Lightly, Mineral Resources program manager, Bureau of Mining and Reclamation, PA Department of Environmental Protection.

  As they got older they were “promoted” to work inside the mines, in the damp, cold, dark and rat-infested underground chambers. But that was okay—they longed for the day. Bartoletti quotes a miner named Joseph Miliauskas, who reflected on what it was like to work as a breaker boy: “When I got down into the mines, that was paradise.”27

  “Nippers” were the youngest, around eleven years of age, and they tended the heavy wooden doors in the gangways. They were usually the first to hear the creaks and groans that would alert them to the danger of collapse, and it was their responsibility to
warn the others.

  “Spraggers” controlled the speed of the mine cars as they rolled down the slope—again one of the most dangerous jobs in the mines since they could be run over by the fast-moving cars when they reached down to apply the breaks. These boys lost arms, legs and their lives.

  Miners descended into the dark, dank mines before dawn each morning. Courtesy of Robin G. Lightly, Mineral Resources program manager, Bureau of Mining and Reclamation, PA Department of Environmental Protection.

  The mule drivers collected the coal in cars pulled by mules, and they could work as many as a six-mule team in the narrow passages of the mines. Although it wasn’t the most pleasant job, it did afford them the opportunity to move about the mines from cavern to cavern, and it was one of the most sought-after jobs among the younger miners. Their responsibility was to get their cars full by quitting time, and if the work wasn’t done, they stayed until it was. Miners were paid by the weight of the cars they filled, so it was important for the spraggers and the mule drivers to make certain that no coal was spilled or lost from the cars.

  If they did the job right, they were promoted again and labored beside their fathers, brothers and uncles, working on the face of the walls of the mountains. They shared the same risk as the men, sometimes standing for hours in dank air with water up to their ankles, knowing that at any moment the roof could collapse or poisonous gas could escape. At the end of the day, they were brought back to the surface of the earth, exhausted and covered in black coal dust that was embedded in their skin.

  Coal dust would embed itself into the skin of the miners, sometimes permanently. Courtesy Istockphotos.com.

  It was the backbreaking work of men and little boys in the mines that helped to fuel the Industrial Revolution. Courtesy of Robin G. Lightly, Mineral Resources program manager, Bureau of Mining and Reclamation, PA Department of Environmental Protection.