Early 19th Century Beginnings
The history of Boathouse Row begins with the construction of the Fairmount Dam and the adjacent water works. The Dam was built in 1810 as part of a lock at the Falls of the Schuylkill to transport coal downriver. The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company would become heavily involved in the improvements. The dam initially submerged the rapids, and later developments transformed the Schuylkill from a tidal river into a slack water river that resembles a very long freshwater lake. The placid man-made surface was ideal for ice skating in winter and rowing in summer. In 1835, the first regatta took place between the Blue Devils and the Imps Barge clubs. The excitement from the race sparked the formation of several barge clubs, many of them short-lived.
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Famous quotes containing the words early, century and/or beginnings:
“...he came towards them early in the morning, walking on the sea.”
—Bible: New Testament, Mark 6:48.
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“Let us, then, take our compass; we are something, and we are not everything. The nature of our existence hides from us the knowledge of first beginnings which are born of the nothing; and the littleness of our being conceals from us the sight of the infinite. Our intellect holds the same position in the world of thought as our body occupies in the expanse of nature.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)