Inland: The Abandoned Canals of the Schuylkill Navigation

Although Sandy Sorlien’s striking photographs of the nineteenth-century Schuylkill Navigation Company (SNC) canal are the primary focus of this beautiful, oversized (11 × 9 inch) hardcover volume, the book also provides a wealth of valuable information for scholastic researchers, canal enthusiasts, and anyone who is fascinated by Pennsylvania’s industrial heritage. The 108-mile long SNC canal was completed in 1825 to transport anthracite from the mines of northeastern Pennsylvania to the ports of Philadelphia and the markets availed by the Atlantic coast. The system paralleled the Schuylkill River from its headwaters in central Schuylkill County to its confluence with the Delaware River at Philadelphia. Following a brief, poetic foreword penned by Harvard University’s John Stilgoe, a specialist in the history of landscape development, the book includes four chapters, an afterword, and an appendix that describes each of Sorlien’s ninety-six stunning photographs in detail.Upon opening the cover, the reader is immediately engaged by an informative map of the entire SNC route. The image, which identifies the locations of the canal system’s locks, tunnels, dams, and aqueducts, stretches across four entire pages. Cleverly, the western (upper) half of the canal route is depicted on the inside front cover and the facing page, while the eastern (lower) half appears on book’s final page and the inner side of the book’s back cover.In the introduction, subtitled “Bushwacking from Coal County to Philadelphia,” Sorlien describes how she became interested, intrigued, and enthralled by the remains of the abandoned canal that passed through southeastern Pennsylvania. To facilitate the telling of her story she incorporates many of the historic images, etchings, and maps that informed her research and guided her overland explorations. Over a period spanning nearly a decade Sorlien traveled the entire canal route while painstakingly documenting the canal remnants she encountered (such as locks, lockhouses, tunnels, and sections of canal prism) with the gorgeous photographs that appear in this book’s fourth chapter.In the second chapter, entitled “Byways of the Schuylkill River Valley,” Mike Szilagyi, a former Trail Project Manager for the Schuylkill River Greenways (SRG), summarizes the history of the Schuylkill Navigation. Construction began in 1816, ensuing simultaneously from the western and eastern ends, and was completed with convergence of the two halves at Reading in 1825. Before long, this canal, like most within the state, struggled to compete with the newly built railroads, which, unlike the canals, could operate through the winter unhindered by the ice that caused canals to close for the season. The 1869 flood caused by the Saxby Gale put the final nail in the coffin of the struggling SNC and foreshadowed the company’s lease of the entire canal system to its rival, the Reading Railroad Company, the following year. With the continued expansion of the railroad system in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the few functioning sections of the SRN that remained were finally abandoned in 1925, and in 1945 most of the company-owned canal right-of-way was deeded to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.Prospects for the preservation of the former canal improved in 2000 with the establishment of the Schuylkill River National Heritage Area (SRNHA), which includes the SNC canal as a significant contributing element. Today the SRNHA is managed by the Schuylkill River Greenways Association (SRG) whose mission “is to connect residents, visitors and communities to the Schuylkill River and the Schuylkill River Trail by serving as a catalyst for civic engagement and economic development in order to foster stewardship of the watershed and its heritage.”1 When complete, the SRG will provide a 120-mile network of multi-use paths and water trails that will provide a system of off-road from Philadelphia to Frackville in northcentral Schuylkill County.The book’s third chapter, entitled “The Puzzle of Conflicting Accounts,” details many of the frustrations that Sorlien faced while conducting her research, frustrations that are shared by many historic researchers. To name just a few: over its years of service the locks and dams were periodically modified, altering their dimensions and materials of construction; the terms used by nineteenth-century canal engineers and later historians are often inconsistent, causing confusion; the names and numbering systems used to reference specific landmarks changed through time; the dates of specific events occasionally differ; and the distances between features cited on maps and in texts are often incongruous. As a result, some of the answers to questions posed by Sorlien are left wanting. As a consulting archaeologist with nearly four decades of experience, I have shared in all of Sorlien’s frustrations while conducting research on Pennsylvania canals and ironworks.In the fourth chapter, simply entitled “The Plates,” Sorlien’s ninety-three succinctly captioned full-page photographs are presented in five sections, organized by county, from the headwaters in the west to the outlet in the east. The five sections begin with Schuylkill County locks 1–27 and end with the Philadelphia County locks 68–72. The eighteen-page appendix entitled “Notes on the Photographs,” which provides a fascinating, highly detailed backstory for each photograph, should not be overlooked.The book’s two-page afterword, subtitled “The View from Tidewater,” is written by Karen Young, the Director of the Fairmount Waterworks Interpretive Center, a hands-on science and environmental educational center established by the Philadelphia Water Department in 2003. Young notes that the lower portion of the Schuylkill River is unusual in that is it a tidal waterway, with a normal rise and fall of about six feet, twice a day. The Fairmount Waterworks, designed by Frederick Graff, was built between 1812 and 1815 to provide clean water to the citizens of Philadelphia. Established on the east bank of the Schuylkill River near its confluence with the Delaware and operated until 1909, the waterworks was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1976 for its both its engineering and architectural traits. In this brief section Young describes the negative impacts that industry has had on the tidewater region of the Schuylkill River, and the painstaking cleanup efforts that began with the 1937 Pennsylvania Cleans Streams Law and continue to this day. In closing she emphasizes the importance of the ongoing environmental stewardship provided by SRG, the Fairmount Water Works, and other organizations in preserving the Schuylkill watershed and celebrating its history.This beautiful book is not only a valuable resource for scholars of the SNC but also the perfect coffee table book for the canal enthusiast or person interested in the evolution of eastern Pennsylvania’s industrial landscape.