Coal & Canals

Coal, Canals, and the American Industrial Revolution: 1790-1840

By Martha Capwell Fox

The discovery of anthracite coal in northeastern Pennsylvania in the late 18th century and the subsequent development of efficient navigation systems, specifically canals, to move the coal to markets, were pivotal developments in American history.  The result was the advancement of American iron making from charcoal to mineral fuel, which triggered the Industrial Revolution in the United States, beginning in eastern Pennsylvania.

Anthracite is purer, harder, and has a higher carbon content than any other coal; thus, it burns hotter, cleaner, and longer than any other solid fuel. It is vastly superior to the fuels—wood, charcoal, dung, peat, straw, and soft coals—that humans had used for millennia. When anthracite’s energy was finally tapped,   chemistry, metallurgy, industry, and agriculture—and all of American life—was changed forever.

“The importance of coal in American industrialization cannot be overstated,” writes Walter Licht in Industrializing America.¹ Anthracite coal from Pennsylvania—one of the handful of places in the world where it can be found—almost completely displaced water, wood, and charcoal as America’s energy sources in less than two decades in the middle of the nineteenth century. This set the nation on course for the explosion of economic, industrial, and social changes that altered the landscape not only of Pennsylvania, but of the entire United States.

First, the challenge of moving anthracite from the remote, thinly populated, and virtually roadless mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania to market had to be met.

A team of six horses or mules could pull four or five tons in a Conestoga wagon driven by one teamster, while two mules or horses could haul a hundred tons floating on a canal boat with a crew of two.  With luck, a wagon could cover 15 miles a day. A canal boat moving at an average speed of two miles an hour could travel 36 miles during an 18-hour day.

These simple comparisons make it clear why canals began to replace roads as the principal transportation routes in the 1820s. The Lehigh Navigation—the combined canal ditch and slackwater river system that linked Mauch Chunk and Easton—was the first efficient and  commercially successful transportation route between the anthracite coal fields of northeastern Pennsylvania and Philadelphia.

This was the final ingredient needed to make anthracite the most popular fuel in the northeastern U.S. and, more importantly, the first step to the industrialization of America. The anthracite-carrying canals finally made it possible for the United States to advance beyond the “backward state of the technology of the American iron industry,” wrote Alfred D. Chandler in 1977, where charcoal-fueled furnaces were “producing small amounts by ancient techniques.”²

Discovery and the Beginning of the Anthracite Trade

Anthracite was discovered in Pennsylvania at several sites and various times during the 18th century, but the first real development of a mining and transportation process did not begin until the 1790s. In 1791, Philip Ginder brought a sample of coal he had found on Sharp Mountain (now Summit Hill) to a local entrepreneur and landowner, Colonel Jacob Weiss. Weiss reasoned that if anthracite from this location could be easily mined and brought down the Lehigh River to the Delaware and thence to Philadelphia, where there was a growing market for coal.

Wood—essentially the nation’s only energy source other than water power–was becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. As the population clustered along the coasts grew, demand for wood for construction, heating, cooking, and making into charcoal to fuel iron furnaces increased rapidly, resulting in scarcity and rising prices. The 42,000 residents of Philadelphia began to use bituminous coal as an alternative, importing over 1,000 tons a year from Britain, as well as smaller quantities from Virginia’s highlands.³

Weiss formed the Lehigh Coal Mine Company in 1792. The anthracite was so close to the surface, the first mine was an open quarry that yielded about 268 tons of anthracite every twelve-hour workday.   Hauled to the Lehigh, it was loaded on to boats called “arks” and floated down the Lehigh to the Delaware River. But Weiss’ Lehigh Coal Mine Company was unprofitable for two reasons. First was the high loss rate of the arks on the wild and unpredictable Lehigh. Second, the coal that did arrive in Philadelphia lacked ready customers, as most residents did not have stoves that could handle anthracite fire’s high temperature. Consequently, the Lehigh Coal Mine Company stopped mining and shipping coal by 1798.

When the U.S. and Britain went to war in 1812, the British blockade of the US coast cut off British and Virginia bituminous. By April, 1813, the price of a bushel had more than tripled., and Philadelphians looked for alternatives. This attracted the attention of entrepreneurs, including Weiss’ nephew, Jacob Cist, who were mining anthracite in the Wyoming Valley. With no direct water route between their mines and the city, they began hauling wagon loads of coal over 120 miles of rough, narrow roads.  The trip took a week and each wagon could haul only two tons of anthracite, which was not enough to begin to meet the demand. (By this time, stoves that could contain anthracite’s high heat, had been invented.)

Jacob Cist had inherited an interest in the dormant Lehigh Coal Mine Company and turned his attention to developing the Company’s properties and the water route.  During the spring of 1814, he and his partners managed to navigate several loaded coal boats down the rivers to Philadelphia. But again, many sank amid the rocks and the cargoes that did reach Philadelphia fetched prices that were only half the company’s costs. The War ended in late 1815, and once again, bituminous coal could be shipped to Philadelphia from both Great Britain and the Chesapeake, effectively ending any market for anthracite and curtailing the enterprise.⁴

But two other daring entrepreneurs were already on the scene. They were among the most innovative of America’s early transportation and industrial pioneers and their achievements would play a large role in the Lehigh Valley’s contribution to the American Industrial  Revolution.

White, Hazard, and the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company

Josiah White and Erskine Hazard were Philadelphia businessmen who had purchased anthracite from the resurrected Lehigh Coal Mine to fuel their wire works at the Falls of the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia. Their first major contribution was the accidental discovery of how to use anthracite in a large-scale manufacturing capacity, which no one had yet done in the United States.

After failing to get their first load of anthracite to ignite, their  mill workers closed the door of the furnace. When one returned a few hours later to retrieve a forgotten coat, the furnace was glowing red hot. Josiah White was summoned and immediately reasoned that the closed furnace had created the conditions of a controlled draft, which allowed the anthracite to reach a high-enough temperature to combust.⁵

This was anthracite’s secret: it needs a controlled amount of air from underneath to ignite and burn. And when it burns, it gives off temperatures that had never been possible before. America, and the world, was on the brink of a revolution in metallurgy and chemistry.

White and Hazard immediately recognized the economic potential of anthracite coal as an industrial fuel. Their factory was located on the Schuylkill River, the shortest route between Philadelphia and anthracite deposits that had been discovered in the upper Schuylkill Valley. They played a role in organizing the Schuylkill Navigation Company in 1815, but were forced out by other capitalists who saw this proposed canal system as a waterway to the developing west instead of merely a route to ship anthracite to Philadelphia. Thwarted in their original intentions, White and Hazard turned their attention to the Lehigh coalfields to supply the Philadelphia  market.

In 1817, White and Hazard leased (and soon purchased outright) the 10,000 acres of land owned by the Lehigh Coal Mine Company for an annual fee of one ear of corn; in return, after three years they were required to send 40,000 bushels of coal annually to Philadelphia.7  Then they secured the passage of state legislation giving them the right to improve the navigation  of the Lehigh River in 1818. In fact, this gave White and Hazard virtual ownership and monopoly control of the Lehigh River.

The sweeping provisions of the act gave White and Hazard comprehensive rights to use and alter the river and its resources, including taking stone, gravel, and trees; to make any dam, lock, or other navigation devices; to enter and occupy all land necessary for contracting locks, sluices, canals, towpaths or other devices; to make bridges or fords; to collect tolls and duties on the navigation system so long as it was at least twenty feet wide and eighteen inches deep; and to use, sell, or rent the water or waterpower to any person, to be used in any way they thought proper. This made for a lot of bitterness and jealousy among White and Hazard’s future business rivals. More immediately, it gave them a deadline: these rights would be forfeited if the lower navigation was not completed in seven years, and the upper, which would connect the Lehigh and Susquehanna Rivers, in twenty years. ⁶

During 1818–1819, White and Hazard built a wagon road paved with stone, linking the Lehigh Coal’s quarry with the Lehigh River at the mouth of Mauch Chunk Creek. This was the first road in the U.S. with a standard declivity, that is, to have been built with a nearly uniform slope, instead of following the ups and downs of the terrain. (This later greatly facilitated the construction of the Gravity Railroad, the first real railroad in the U.S.)⁷ They brought a crew of workers with them, eventually building houses that became the town of Mauch Chunk, now Jim Thorpe.

White improved the navigation of the Lehigh River by inventing hydrostatic or “bear trap” dams. These low dams had collapsible sections that were normally held upright by the hydraulic pressure of the water. When the wickets (small iron doors controlled by upright rods that extended above the dam) alongside the section were opened, the water pressure was released, the section collapsed, and an artificial flood was created. This flood carried loaded coal arks from the pool behind the dam, over the now-flattened section, and then downstream to the pool behind the next bear trap dam.⁸

Despite floods, droughts, and the primitive wilderness conditions of the upper Lehigh Valley, White and Hazard completed their descending navigation on the Lehigh in 1820. Within a year they had established a profitable and growing coal trade with Philadelphia.

The Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company (LCN) was incorporated in 1822. Its descending navigation system on the Lehigh River was the first commercially successful transportation link between the anthracite coalfields and Philadelphia. It immediately made large quantities of anthracite available cheaply, which in turn stimulated increased consumption and spread the use of anthracite among Philadelphia’s residents and industries. Lehigh anthracite was exported from Philadelphia by coastal shipping companies to New York and New England, a trade that further stimulated the demand for anthracite.⁹

With the coalfields open and an efficient—though one-way—transportation system in place, White, Hazard, and their anthracite were poised to launch a revolution.

Anthracite corners the market

Anthracite proved to be its own best advertisement. It made a hot, long-burning, clean   fire and gave off very little smoke—a strong selling point in Philadelphia.  Better yet, anthracite was much cheaper than wood for heating. A.D. Chandler records that the head of the Pennsylvania Hospital reported in 1825 that his annual heating costs went from $3,200 to about $2,100 after switching to anthracite.

Metal workers found that a ton of anthracite could do the work of 200 bushels of charcoal, which resulted in significant cost savings: a bushel of charcoal, weighing about 32 pounds, was 6 to 8 cents per bushel (thus, 200 bushels cost $16), while anthracite cost $7.50 to $8.00 a ton. Anthracite’s high heat and efficiency also made it preferable and cheaper overall than Virginia bituminous coal.¹⁰

For more than five years, the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company had a virtual monopoly of the Philadelphia anthracite market. The Schuylkill Navigation system did not commence operation until 1825, when it brought 5,306 tons of anthracite to Philadelphia. during that year. The same year, the LCN delivered 28,393 tons of anthracite there. ¹¹

The following year, the two systems delivered more than 35,000 tons to Philadelphia for use in the city itself and for export to New England and New York.

By the mid-1820s, the only factor limiting the complete dominance of anthracite was getting even more of it to the people who wanted to use it. Demand had been created by the introduction of stoves and fireplace grates that could handle the high heat of burning anthracite without melting or cracking. All that was lacking was an adequate supply of anthracite at affordable prices; this was solved by the constructing the two-way Lehigh Navigation.

Construction of the two-way Lehigh Navigation

The extremes of both depth and current in the wild Lehigh River severely limited the size   and capacity of boats carrying the coal. In 1826 the LC&N commissioned Isaac Chapman to map the Lehigh River as the first step in constructing a two-way canal-and slackwater navigation.

Begun in the late spring of 1827, the rebuilt Lehigh Navigation system was a civil engineering triumph when it opened on June 26, 1829. Ingeniously designed, it was an unprecedented construction achievement, completed far ahead of schedule and under budget. Under the direction of canal engineer Canvass White, who trained on the Erie Canal construction, the workers followed the terrain, digging the canal ditch into the adjacent hills where possible; this effectively made the hills the berm bank (opposite the towpath bank) of the canal. They dug only half the depth needed, and piled up the excavated earth to build the towpath bank high enough to provide the need six feet of depth. They then lined the resulting ditch with natural clay that had been “puddled”—mixed with water that was then pressed out—a technique White had learned observing road building in Britain. This minimized the loss of water through leakage, a problem that plagued some other nineteenth-century canals.

White incorporated the Lehigh River as both a navigation route and a water source for the canal. Eight timber-and-rock dams converted sections of the river into slackwater pools, deep enough for loaded boats to traverse. The pools combined to make up 10 miles of the Lehigh Navigation’s 46-mile route between Mauch Chunk and Easton and provided. a steady source of water for the ditch sections of the canal, which were   60 feet wide at the top and 45 feet at the bottom. Boats passed between the slackwater pools and canal sections through 8 guard locks.

Forty-eight lift locks let the boats overcome the 355-foot elevation difference  between Mauch Chunk and Easton. The locks were of unprecedented size:  locks numbers one to four immediately downstream from Mauch Chunk were 30 feet by 130 feet. The remainder were 22 feet wide (enough for two boats side-by-side) and 100 feet long.

At its completion in 1829 the Lehigh Navigation was the largest-capacity towpath canal in America, capable of handling mule-drawn boats that carried over 200 tons of anthracite. Unfortunately, this waterway was never able to reach its full potential because the connecting Morris and Delaware canals were built to much smaller dimensions.¹²

Construction of the Delaware Canal

On October 27, 1827, construction began on the Pennsylvania Canal system’s Delaware Division Canal, the only section that did not connect with the rest of the system. By 1829 over 53 miles of the planned total length of 60 miles were completed. The canal’s northern end in Northampton County was just south and east of the mouth of the Lehigh River.

Water for the canal came from the Lehigh River. The dam that the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company had built across the mouth of the Lehigh River at Easton (creating the slackwater pool that reached back to the Lehigh Canal’s outlet at South Easton) diverted water into the Delaware Canal. A guard lock and feeder near the Easton dam linked the Lehigh Navigation and the Delaware Canal.

Bristol, on the Delaware River in Bucks County, was the southern terminus of the Delaware Division. Nine river miles upstream from Philadelphia, it is below the Delaware’s fall line, was accessible to coastal and even ocean-going ships. Bristol had boasted shipyards and a flourishing wharf and warehouse trade since the eighteenth century.

By 1830 the Delaware Division Canal was declared to be finished—despite the fact that the Lehigh water diverted by the dam at Easton could not fill the full length of the canal. This alone was a significant problem, but because the Canal Commissioners had chosen the fastest, cheapest design and building option every time, shoddy construction and poor engineering meant the canal would not hold any water at all. Banks breached and leaked, locks fell in, and aqueducts collapsed. The Delaware Division Canal soon became a stagnant, unusable ditch.

Repair attempts failed. With great difficulty, one boat loaded with anthracite finally reached Bristol in 1832. In desperation, the Commonwealth appointed Josiah White, assisted by Louis S. Coryell, to supervise rebuilding the entire canal.  White and Coryell re-engineered the waterway, finally getting it fully watered it by designing and building a waterwheel pumping system to feed water from the Delaware River into the canal at New Hope. (This system put 3,500 cubic feet of water per minute into the canal and functioned successfully until 1923.) By the end of 1832, White’s able management and engineering skills had put the Delaware Division Canal into working order. With the completion of a weigh lock at Easton in 1833, the canal was ready to be placed into commercial operation. The first year with a full boating season was 1834.

But the Delaware Division still had much less carrying capacity than the Lehigh Navigation. The original 23 lift locks of the Delaware, a mere 11 feet in width and 95 feet in length, were only half the width of the lift locks of the Lehigh Navigation. This small size of lock, adopted on the recommendation of engineer and architect William Strickland, infuriated White and Hazard. White and Hazard had constructed the Lehigh Navigation to allow the passage of boats carrying 200 tons of cargo; the small size of the lift locks on the connecting Morris and Delaware canals meant that the Lehigh Navigation was in effect limited to half of its designed capacity.¹³

Despite this, by 1836 the Delaware Division was the only part of the Pennsylvania Canal system that made money, thanks to the ever-growing volume of anthracite coming down the Lehigh Navigation, headed for Philadelphia. This made the problem of the Delaware Division’s smaller locks ever more vexing. But not only was the Canal Commission reluctant to spend the money to enlarge the locks, there was also the problem of how to supply the greater amount of water in the canal that larger locks would require.

The issue became moot when two destructive floods, one in January 1839, and the second on April 8 the same year, struck the Lehigh and the Delaware. Many of the Delaware Division’s aqueducts were severely damaged or destroyed. The wooden locks, already wearing out after only nine years in operation, also sustained major damage. The Canal Commissioners decided to use the destruction as an opportunity to enlarge the locks, but the Commonwealth was in severe financial straits due to the Panic of 1837.  The LCN and the Beaver Meadow Company both had major interests in resuming coal ships, so both firms paid for the rebuilding of the canal. The Delaware Division reopened later than usual on May 14, 1839, and suffered one two-week shutdown later, but nevertheless, the tolls collected that year were $26,000 higher than the previous one. ¹⁴

The next year—1840—was to bring the most momentous change of all to the counties in the valleys of the Lehigh and the Delaware.

Construction of the Lehigh Navigation’s Upper Grand Section

Work began on the northern extension of the Lehigh Navigation, called the Upper Grand Section, through Lehigh Gorge in 1835. This allowed the LCN to tap the expanding coal mines of both the Eastern Middle Coal Field and the Wyoming Valley, while fulfilling a provision in the Company’s state charter that stipulated a connection with the Susquehanna River. Overcoming the elevation 600-foot elevation change between White Haven and Mauch Chunk involved building 29 massive timber-and-rock crib dams and 29 locks in under 26 miles of the Lehigh. Some of these locks were huge buttressed stone structures that were capable of raising and lowering boats an unprecedented 30 feet.

To speed locking time through these deep locks, chief engineer Edwin Douglas devised two innovations: the drop gate and the rack-and-pinion gearing system that came to be known as the “dog house.”   The bottom-hinged drop gate, installed at the upstream end of the locks, enabled boats to enter and leave locks quickly. The rack-and-pinion gear system was more efficient and took up much less room than the traditional heavy balance beams for opening and closing locks. Both devices were so successful they were rapidly introduced not only on the Lehigh and Delaware Canals, but by virtually all the canals in the Delaware Valley. ¹⁵

The Upper Grand sped up the opening of mining throughout the coal fields south of the Wyoming Valley.  Between 1837 and 1841 the Beaver Meadow, Hazleton, Sugar Loaf, and Buck Mountain coal companies began production. All of these mines shipped their coal to market via railroad connections to the Lehigh Navigation Company.

Anthracite shipped by these newer companies came close to matching the tonnage the LCN moved from its own mines. Of the total 267,826 tons shipped from the Lehigh region during in 1843, the LCN produced 138,826 tons; the Beaver Meadow Company, 54,729 tons; the Hazleton Coal Company, 44,579 tons; and the Buck Mountain Coal Company, 26,814 tons. An additional 34 tons were produced by small private mines.

The mines of the Beaver Meadow Company, the Hazleton Coal Company, and the Buck Mountain Coal Company were all located in the Eastern Middle Coal Field, a considerable distance from the Lehigh Navigation. The fact that all of these companies went to the expense of constructing connecting railroads to the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company’s waterway emphasizes the economic importance of possessing a direct water route during the 1840s to the Philadelphia market, where households and industries had become dependent on anthracite for heat and power.¹⁶

In Anthracite Coal and the Beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, Alfred Chandler wrote:

The opening of the anthracite fields thus provided the American Northeast with a constantly increasing supply of excellent coal at decreasing prices. Given the existing transportation methods, no other coal source was in a position to provide this massive increase at the same price. … Without anthracite coal, the economic developments of the 1830s and 1840s would have been very different. The history of the iron making, iron working, textile, mining, and other industries would not have been the same.

Nor would the economic history of many American states have been the same. Industrial location and industrial output would have been very different and international trade would have followed different times.¹⁷

All these feats of canal and railroad construction and engineering would have been significant in themselves: for giving birth to civil engineering in the United States and revolutionizing the nation’s transportation and commerce. But the anthracite coal they carried ignited an overwhelming change in America: the Industrial Revolution.

Making Iron with Anthracite

Though there were many expert iron makers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, every attempt to use anthracite coal to smelt iron ore had failed by the mid-1830s.  Educated Americans were well-aware that it was the use of coal and coke in metallurgy that had taken Britain to the heights of industrialization to that point. But both the technology and practical knowledge to do so was absent in the United States. The nation’s charcoal-fired furnaces were limited in both the quantities and quality of the iron they could produce.

White, Hazard and their fellow managers of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company were well aware that finding a way to use their anthracite coal, carried on their canal, to make iron was the way to expand their economic empire even further. “It is of the utmost importance to this Company that the business of making iron with anthracite coal should be established on the Lehigh as speedily as possible,” White wrote in 1832.¹⁸

Five years later, he learned from his nephew Solomon Roberts, that the “great object was accomplished” at an iron furnace at Ynescedwyn, Wales.

In November, 1838, Erskine Hazard and his son Alexander arrived there to discuss the costs of royalties on the patents for the process, which were held by the furnace owner, George Crane.  Remarkably, Crane offered the services of his iron master, David Thomas, who had perfected the combination of anthracite and the hot blast that was producing large quantities of high-quality iron faster than any other method.

On New Year’s Eve, 1838, Thomas signed a contract with the LCN to move to Pennsylvania for five years, to build and operate an anthracite-fired blast furnace at the LCN’s Lock 36 in Lehigh County, the present site of Catasauqua.  He broke ground for his furnace in August, 1839, and completed his task in eleven months.

Despite having to persuade Philadelphia’s Southwark Foundry to enlarge its own boring mill to produce the 60-inch cylinders for his blowing engines, as well as having to build an enormous canal-powered water wheel to drive them instead of the large steam engines he was accustomed to in Wales, and being surrounded by entirely German-speaking people, Thomas put the Lehigh Crane Iron Works’ first anthracite-fired furnace into blast on July 3, 1840

He made his first cast on Independence Day—five tons, which was more than a charcoal-fired furnace produced in a week.  For the first time in the United States, large quantities of high-quality iron could be produced quickly using mineral fuel.¹⁹

This was the birth of the American Industrial Revolution.

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