History
The Schuylkill Navigation Company was chartered in 1815 to build a series of navigation improvements in the Schuylkill River. A waterway of 108 miles (174 km) was completed in 1827 linking Philadelphia to Port Carbon in the anthracite coal fields or the Coal Region of Pottsville. Combining 62 miles (100 km) of separate canals, often referred to as "reaches", with 46 miles (74 km) of slack water pools, the Schuylkill Navigation used 92 lift locks to overcome a difference of 588 feet (179 m) in elevation between its terminal points. The Union Canal, built between 1821 and 1828, connected with the Schuylkill Canal at Reading; the two canals combined to make a water link between Philadelphia and the Susquehanna River at Middletown. This route competed with and became secondary to the east–west divisions of the Pennsylvania Canal on the Main Line of Public Works between Philadelphia, Harrisburg, and Pittsburgh. The Schuylkill Canal also featured the first transportation tunnel in America. The Auburn Tunnel, a 450 foot (137 m) bore through a hill near Auburn, was completed in 1821, but due to increased traffic, canal modifications turned it into an open-cut by 1857.
Due to its ability to transport bulk cargoes and provide water power, the Schuylkill Navigation transformed the towns of Reading, Norristown, and Pottsville into early manufacturing centers. By using the Delaware River and the Delaware and Raritan Canal, manufactured products and anthracite from the Schuylkill Valley could also reach New York Harbor. The Schuylkill Navigation system quickly assumed a monopoly position in the transportation of anthracite coal from the coal mines of Schuylkill County to Philadelphia. By 1841 the Schuylkill Navigation was annually transporting over 737,517 tons of cargo. However, in 1841 the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad was completed as a competing means of transporting coal from the Schuylkill anthracite fields to Philadelphia. A rivalry between these two forms of transportation soon developed.
Read more about this topic: Schuylkill Canal
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“You that would judge me do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)