The Delaware Canal

by Marie Murphy Duess

  In his search for the Northwest Passage in the Americas, independent explorer Captain Thomas Yong of England sailed up the Delaware River as far as the falls, near what is now called Morrisville. Captain Yong spent time exploring the fertile river valley and making friends with the Lenni-Lenape, who were the first inhabitants in the region. His Native American friends told him of great mountains beyond the falls—the same mountains that would provide anthracite coal and feed the Industrial Revolution 150 years later—and in a report to King Charles, he promised to find a way to move beyond the falls and explore farther up the river. His promise was never to be kept because he left the Delaware Valley to continue exploration on the Hudson River and did not return.

  When William Penn first arrived in America and staked out the land that was granted to him by King Charles II, his mode of transportation from Philadelphia was by boat. He was greatly impressed with the area he called “Buckinghamshire,” where his country home, Pennsbury Manor, was built. It took five hours for visitors to Pennsbury Manor to travel back and forth from Philadelphia by river, and the unpredictable currents could make it a difficult trip. Yet, because of the lack of decent roadways, the Delaware was the easiest way to travel locally.

  The time it took to travel on the Delaware by a boat similar to William Penn’s depended upon the wind and the strength of the men who were onboard to row when there was no breeze. Homesteads—also called plantations—along the Delaware in colonial days provided stone docks along the river so that boats could stop to discharge passengers in safety.

  Ferries were established to provide crossings between New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Colonists wanted accessible water supplies for their settlements, and many of the sales from William Penn’s earliest records show that immigrants purchased tracts of land along the rivers, streams and feeder creeks first. Later purchasers chose tracts between streams. Major waterways were used to transport produce and manufactured goods to Philadelphia and New Jersey, and so boats, canoes and barges were found cluttered along the shores of the Delaware. A Pennsylvania law was enacted in March 1771 that declared:

  When the improvement of the navigation of rivers is of great benefit to commerce, and whereas many persons have subscribed large sums of money for this purpose…the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers shall be common highways for the purpose of Navigation.45

  Eventually, sawmills sprouted up in the dense hardwood forests of the countryside, and the trees were cut along the Delaware and floated down to the city, at first individually and then tied together to make rafts.

  The first raft consisted of six pine trees, or logs, 70 feet long and to be used for masts for ships then building at Philadelphia. A hole was cut through the end of each log and the logs strung on a pole, called a “spindle,” with a pin through each end of the pole outside the logs, to prevent them spreading apart.46

  The travel of log rafts through the numerous falls and rifts was extremely dangerous. Raftsmen took their lives in their hands every time they embarked down the river anywhere north of Philadelphia. Dangers along the Delaware included Foul Rift above Easton, an obstacle course of falls a mile below New Hope called Wells Falls, the Scudder’s Falls and a nine-foot fall over a length of thirty-five hundred feet at Trenton Falls, all of which were major impediments in navigating the river.

  According to W.W. Davis’s History of Bucks County, two men, Mr. Skinner and Mr. Parks, successfully navigated the first raft to Philadelphia over the falls, and upon arriving in Philadelphia unscathed, Skinner and Parks were heralded as heroes. Mr. Skinner, who was the “captain” of the raft, was called “Lord-High-Admiral of the Delaware” until his death.47 The height of river rafting was between 1835 and 1850. In 1873, there were reportedly thirty-eight mills at twenty-three locations between Easton and Morrisville.

  Durham boats were first used to transport cargo on the Delaware River before the canal was built. General George Washington used these boats to cross the Delaware on that infamous Christmas night before the Battle of Trenton. Courtesy of the Washington Crossing Historic Park, administered by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

  Work boats, like this shovel dredge, kept the canal waters at a safe depth. Maintenance on the canal was ongoing throughout the season. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Canal Society Collection, National Canal Museum, Easton, PA.

  In the 1700s, Robert Durham designed a boat that was sturdy enough to carry iron made at the Durham Furnace to the markets in Philadelphia and beyond. These flat-bottomed boats were built with sides that were twelve to fourteen feet from the boats’ ends, which tapered in to glide easily through the water. They measured approximately sixty feet long by eight feet wide and forty-two inches deep and could carry a load of seventeen tons while traveling downstream and two tons when moving upstream. In time, they were employed to carry not only pig iron and ore from the Durham Furnace and Mills, but also grain, whiskey, flour, corn and other products to and from the region. The Durham boat required a crew of at least three men to operate it, and they used twelve- to eighteen-foot “setting poles” to steer the boat going downstream and to push the boats upriver. Later models were fitted to use oars. These boats played a major role in one of the most important battles of the Revolutionary War. They were the method of transportation used by General George Washington to deliver his troops across the Delaware on Christmas night in 1776 before winning the Battle of Trenton. There are several Durham boats at Washington Crossing Historic Park on display, and they are still used in the annual reenactment of that infamous crossing every Christmas.

  Arks were also built to transport goods—primarily anthracite coal—on the Delaware. Built in Mauch Chunk in 1806 by a man named William Turnbull, the first ark was loaded with three hundred bushels of coal and successfully floated down to Philadelphia, where the ark was then broken up and sold for lumber. Subsequent arks were rectangular boxes 20 to 25 feet long and 16 feet wide connected by hinges so that a chain of arks, as long as 180 feet, could be assembled quickly. But transportation by ark wasn’t always successful. They were easily damaged by jagged, jutting rocks along the river, and they would become stuck in low water and couldn’t continue on their journey until the water in the river rose to safe levels.

  Boats on the canal were called snappers, stiff boats, packers, flickers, chunkers and scows, but they should never be called barges since, unlike barges, the boats on the Delaware Canal had steering mechanisms that the boatmen used with great skill. Courtesy of Historic Langhorne Association.

  Arks were costly—especially to the forests surrounding Mauch Chunk—since they could not make a return trip upriver. The five-man crew that navigated the arks downriver returned to Mauch Chunk by foot, carrying the nails and joints with them so that they could be used for new vessels. According to Michael Knies’s book, Coal on the Lehigh, as many as thirteen men built twelve arks of six or seven sections in one week.

  There were also boats called “flickers” that were used before the Delaware Canal was built. R. Francis Rapp, who built boats in Erwinna from 1858 to 1882, tells us in “Lehigh and Delaware Division Canal Notes”:

  After the Lehigh canal was built, a smaller boat, called a “Flicker” was used, these were let out of the canal at an outlet lock at Easton into the Delaware River and floated down as far as Bordentown, where they entered the Delaware and Raritan canal by an inlet lock and proceeded thence to New York. This could only happen at reasonably high water and was impossible at low water…These so called flicker boats were only used before the building of the Delaware Division canal, after which the present day canal boats were used and the flickers given up.48

  Soon, a new kind of boat would become the standard for transporting goods and products to Philadelphia, one that wouldn’t need to fight the currents and navigate the falls.

  Canalboats

  With the conversion of the Lehigh Navigation and the Delaware Division Canal into a two-way system, allowing boats to travel upstream as easily as downstream, and t
he decrease in lumber due to the denuded forests, the arks that were being used had to be redesigned. The new boats were constructed to fit through the many locks along both systems. The eleven-foot width of the locks on the Delaware Canal dictated that the boat be no wider than ten and a half feet.

  Before long, boatyards sprouted up along the canal, from Bristol to Easton. The new boats were diverse, and they were called by different names, sometimes humorous, often after heroes and virtues—names such as Sabbath Rest, the To and Fro, May Flour, Ladies Friend and Star of Bethlehem. The Molly-Polly-Chunker was made famous in the ending years of the canal age when a group of people that included Louis Tiffany made a trip to Mauch Chunk from Bristol. There were packers (built by Asa Packer), flickers, chunkers (any boat built in Mauch Chunk), stiff boats, bullheads, scows and hinge boats, and there was even a “beer” boat. But make note: there were no barges. It is important that we understand, when discussing the Pennsylvania canals, that the vessels used to transport coal, lumber, ore and produce were not barges.

  According to Lance Metz of the National Canal Museum:

  It’s an insult to the people who piloted the boats. A barge has no rudder and is simply pulled along by mules. The boats used on the Delaware Canal needed strength and skill to maneuver them and it was hard work.

  They were built to withstand rugged wear and tear. Steam-bent, hand-cut, white oak planking was joined with hand-forged spikes to the ribs and framing. The boats’ cargo areas contained false bottoms, with lining planks over the ribs and air space of about five inches. They were designed so that coal could be shoveled out easily and bilge water pumped out when necessary. The life of a canalboat could be twenty-five to thirty years.

  The Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company boats were distinctive. Painted a deep chestnut brown called Spanish brown and trimmed with white, every company boat was marked on each side of the bow with the company logo, a large white circle with a dark center. The label “L.C. & Nav. Co. No.” followed by a number assigned to that particular boat was painted across the stern. The captains of these boats were hired by the LC&N.

  The company also operated mud diggers or shovel dredges that removed—or redistributed—the sediment deposited by streams and storm water so that the canal was kept at a six-foot depth in the middle. In addition, there were work scows and carpenter boats that repaired the banks and the locks.

  Privately owned boats also worked the canal, and instead of being numbered, they were named by their owners, usually after wives, mothers, daughters or sweethearts. The only rule on the canal was that there would be no duplication of names.

  One of the most successful men to benefit by the discovery of anthracite coal and the building of the canals on the Lehigh and Delaware was Asa Packer. Mauch Chunk had become the wealthiest town in the United States at that time. More than fifty citizens of Mauch Chunk had a personal wealth of $50,000, which is the equivalent to $1,000,000 now.

  Packer, who was born in Mystic, Connecticut, in 1805, apprenticed as a carpenter to his cousin in Susquehanna County. He saw an advertisement for a coal boat captain on the Lehigh Canal and he applied. Within three years, he was assigned a second boat with his brother-in-law. His fleet grew, and he decided to return to carpentry to build coal boats and canal locks for the Upper Lehigh Canal. His boatyard produced closed-hatch, sixty-ton coal boats that were known as “packer” boats. With the profits from his boatyard, Packer purchased coal lands and soon controlled a share of the coal market. By 1850, he was the richest man in Mauch Chunk.

  Additional boatyards were located in Easton, Uhlertown, Erwinna, New Hope and Bristol. Michael Uhler was a merchant who opened a general store in Allentown initially. When the store burned down and he suffered a great monetary loss, he moved to Uhlersville. He opened another store and began a limestone business after purchasing thirty acres of limestone property in Northampton County—only a half mile from Easton. He had eight large kilns to manufacture lime along the canal bank and had an annual output of 250,000 bushels.

  Limestone was an important industry in the Delaware Valley. Lime was used as farm fertilizer and in masonry cement, and limewater also had uses, such as whitewashing barns, chicken houses, fences and other structures. Uhler’s kilns supplied most of the farms in the region that purchased lime products. He also established a gristmill on his property that produced flour and feed.

  He built and owned twenty-five of his own boats to deliver his lime along the Delaware Division, Morris and Delaware and Raritan Canals, and he built and repaired boats for others. Uhler’s industries kept as many as one hundred men employed year-round. In the early twentieth century, men who worked for the boat builder earned forty cents an hour, and a foreman could make as much as fifty-eight cents an hour. At that time, it took about two hundred days to build a boat.

  In “Lehigh and Delaware Division Canal Notes,” Rapp proudly discusses the boats he built at his boatyard in Erwinna.

  Canal boats are about eighty-seven feet six inches long, ten feet six inches wide, and seven feet high midship with a shear of six inches bow and stern and carry about 100 tons of coal on a load. The No. 6 built in my boatyard at Erwinna in the year 1872 was loaded at Mauch Chunk and passed the weigh lock August 12, 1872, with one hundred and twelve tons of coal to New York. This being the largest record tonnage carried by any one boat through the canals from Mauch Chunk to New York. The same boat on September 30th, in the same year, carried one hundred and ten tons to New York, making a record that has never been broken by another boat.49

  One of the earliest independent canalboat operations was the Red Line Transportation Company out of Easton. It was organized soon after the opening of the Delaware Division Canal in 1836, and Captain Jacob Able was the president. These boats carried general merchandise instead of coal, with capacities from sixty to eighty tons.

  But it was the coal-loaded boats that took up the greater amount of the canal industry. The larger boats came in two sections, called hinge boats or “snappers,” and single boats were called stiff boats. They traveled approximately thirty miles a day, two miles an hour when full and four miles an hour when empty. They required a crew of at least two people, one to steer the boat and one to drive the mules. Very often, canal men brought their whole families aboard to live and work with them during the canal season. Some of them didn’t own homes except for their boats and lived on their boats even in winter when the canal was emptied for maintenance.

  Boats would move nonstop from four or five o’clock in the morning until ten o’clock at night, and mule drivers took breaks by riding on their mules. They would tie their wrists to the mules’ traces so they wouldn’t fall off if they fell asleep. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Canal Society, National Canal Museum, Easton, PA.

  Every boat was equipped with a stove—sometimes two, one on deck and one in the tiny cabin below—a barrel for water, a toolbox, a night hawker (headlight) and a pole. Poles had many uses, and there were different types: a bow pole, stern pole and hook pole. The hook pole was a multipurpose tool. A steel rod was inserted on one end of the pole with a hook at the other end. It could move a boat along a wharf, push or change the location of a boat and fish things out of the canal that may have fallen off deck (sometimes even people). Time was money, and once on the move, it was very rare for a boat captain to stop the boat for anything but entry into a lock, so the hook pole was also used by the mule driver to vault to and from the towpath onto the boat when he needed to get onboard to eat or when being relieved by another driver.

  In the early days of the canal, ten-plate stoves were used for cooking. Some boats had stoves made of sheet iron with a grate. Pans, coffeepots and other cooking utensils were placed on top of these stoves, which were located near the hinges. The captain of the boat would usually do the cooking.

  The steersman, while cooking, had to run from the cabin, to the stove, back and forth to the rudder, and set the table on the cabin deck, while the other man or boy was on the tow-path, after wh
ich he took the tow-path and the other man came on board and ate his dinner, the boat never stopping.50

  A capstan or windlass was a necessity on a boat. The device, shaped like a spool and usually made of wood, was mounted vertically in a bearing in the foredeck and was used to pull a boat off accumulated silt or other obstructions at the bottom or sides of the canal by turning a rope from an anchor.

  On the bow of every boat hung a “night hawker,” which was a lantern about twelve inches square with glass on three sides that burned kerosene. This was the headlight of the boat, and it lit the way during the dark morning hours and the blackness of late night.

  The cabins in the boats were built into the stern and were accessible by a set of steps similar to a ladder. They were usually eight by ten feet and seven feet high, only large enough to hold a stove, stool, two hinged bunk beds and a hinged table. When not in use, the hinged table and bunks fell against the walls to give the cabin more floor space. In slightly larger cabins, there may have been a cupboard. Women who lived on the boats sewed curtains for the tiny windows and used tablecloths to make the cabin feel homier. Oil lamps provided light in the cabin and sometimes pictures adorned the walls.

  To canal men, especially those who owned their own boats and didn’t lease them from the company, their boats were the center of their lives. It was a boatman’s home, his place of business and even where his children were born and sometimes died. Men as old as seventy and boys as young as sixteen could captain a boat. For many families, working the canal was a multi-generation business. For some it was all they knew. They played music, wrote poetry, traveled in the dark of early morning and late night, steered their boats under the oppressive heat of summer and shivered in the cold without protection from the elements as they steadily moved up and down the canal, stopping only when they had to. Their boats were their base—their heaven and their hell.