The Union Canal was a towpath canal that existed in southeastern Pennsylvania in the United States during the 19th century. First proposed in 1690 to connect Philadelphia with the Susquehanna River, it ran approximately 82 mi from Middletown on the Susquehanna below Harrisburg to Reading on the Schuylkill River.
History 18th century
Construction began in 1792 during George Washington's administration, but financial difficulties delayed its completion until 1828. Called the "Golden Link," it provided a critical early transportation route for shipping anthracite coal and lumber eastward to Philadelphia. Closed in the 1880s, remnants of the canal remain, most notably the Union Canal Tunnel, a hand-built engineering marvel that is the oldest existing transportation tunnel in the United States. The tunnel is a National Historic Landmark.
The idea of uniting the Schuylkill and Susquehanna rivers by a canal was first proposed and discussed by William Penn in 1690.Engineering Record, Building Record and Sanitary Engineer, Volume 40, Charles Frederick Wingate, McGraw Publishing Company, 1899 Accessed at Google books on July 30, 2016Bishop, Avard Longley. The State works of Pennsylvania. Vol. 13. Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Press, 1907. Penn's plan, conceived a few years after he had founded Philadelphia was to make "a second settlement" on the Susquehanna river, similar in size to that of Philadelphia itself. He made this plan, titled "Some Proposals for a Second Settlement in the Province of Pennsylvania" public in England in 1690.Swank, James Moore. "Progressive Pennsylvania: A Record of the Remarkable Industrial Development of the Keystone State, with Some Account of Its Early and Its Later Transportation Systems, Its Early Settlers, and Its Prominent Men." JB Lippincott, 1908. Accessed at on July 31, 2016. The route envisioned by Penn was a road up the west bank of the Schuylkill to the mouth of French Creek near present-day Phoenixville heading west to the Susquehanna via present day Lancaster and a Susquehanna tributary, Conestoga Creek. Although Penn first proposed the project of continuous water transportation from the Delaware to the Susquehanna, he did not call for the building of a canal.
The canal scheme was first proposed by the Society for the Improvement of Roads and Inland Navigation organized in 1789 with preeminent, wartime financier Robert Morris as president, David Rittenhouse, William Smith and John Nicolson. Reprint of 1990 volume. In 1791, the Society presented proposals to the State of Pennsylvania proposing to connect the Atlantic seaboard with Lake Erie. This Pennsylvania plan was before the creation of New York's Western and Northern Inland Lock Navigation Companies in 1792. The New York plan took the first steps to improve navigation on the Mohawk River by constructing a canal between the Mohawk and Lake OntarioCalhoun, Daniel Hovey. The American civil engineer: Origins and conflict. Technology Press, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960. but that effort with private financing was insufficient. In the Pennsylvania plan, the Society proposed a canal route, 426 miles in length connecting Philadelphia with Pittsburgh by a canal. One part of this project was a canal segment up to the Schuylkill River to Tulpehocken Creek to a summit-level canal near Lebanon and thence by way of the Quitapahilla and Swatara creeks to the Susquehanna River.
This action resulted in the formation of the Schuylkill and Susquehanna Navigation Company incorporated on September 29, 1791,Mitchell, James Tyndale, et al. The Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania from 1682 to 1801. Vol. 6. No. 1759-1765. Clarence M. Busch, State Printer of Pennsylvania, 1899. McCarthy, William D. "Building the Beaver and Lake Erie Canal: The politics of public improvements in Pennsylvania, 1783--1845." (2003): 3324-3324. to open a communication between the Schuylkill and Susquehanna rivers from Reading on the Schuylkill to Middletown on the Susquehanna with Robert Morris as the president of companies.
The original engineering concept developed by the Society as well as the navigation company's charter had been to build a canal up to the Schuylkill Valley to Norristown, improving the Schuylkill river from there to Reading; while from Reading a canal was to extend to the Susquehanna, via Lebanon. This would have required a four-mile summit crossing between Tulpehocken and the Quitipahilla with an artificial waterway connecting two separate river valleys; namely the Susquehanna and the Schuylkill watersheds. Its successful completion would have made the middle reach, the first summit-level canal in the United States. The term refers to a canal that rises then falls, as opposed to a lateral canal, which has a continuous fall only. In this case, the proposed canal at 80 miles in length would rise 192 feet over 42 miles from the west at the Susquehanna river to the summit and then fall 311 feet over 34 miles to the Schuylkill river to the east. It was to be the "golden link" between Philadelphia and the vast interior of Pennsylvania and beyond.Breck, Samuel. Sketch of the Internal Improvements Already Made by Pennsylvania: With Observations Upon Her Physical and Fiscal Means for Their Extension; Particularly as They Have Reference to the Future Growth and Prosperity of Philadelphia. M. Thomas, 1818.
This proposed summit crossing offered a severe test of 18th-century engineering skills, materials and construction techniques. For both designing and operating a water-conveyance transportation system through an area where sinkholes are common, and surface water is scarce. Ultimately, the 1794 engineering concept was flawed as the water supply for the summit crossing was inadequate and the technology for minimizing supply losses was still another several decades into the future. By 1796, however, the navigation company's project was a commercial failure. The result was that with the onset of the Erie canal still some thirty years into the future, Philadelphia lost the early initiative in water transportation.Hartman, J. Lee. "Pennsylvania's Grand Plan of Post-Revolutionary Internal Improvement." The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 65.4 (1941): 439-457.
Despite the termination of construction in 1796, the company managed to forestall foreclosure on its property and constructed works.Baer, Christopher T. "A General Chronology of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company Predecessors and Successors and its Historical Context." (For the period of 1800-1809)- Archived from the original on (2007), updated May 2015.Accessed at on August 30, 2018.
19th century
In 1802, the company had to fend off such an attempt and was only successful in holding onto its property and water rights through the sale of excess property, often whole farms were sold. Although originally set to expire in 1801, the company's corporate charter was extended in 1806 to 1820. In 1807, Charles Gottfried Paleske (1758-1816) was elected to the Board of Directors of the company and working with James Milnor, Robert Brooke, Isaac Roberdeau, and John Scott walked "... the line of the Schuylkill & Susquehanna Navigation Company from Kruitzer's plantation where the canal ends to the end of the summit near Kucher's mill, about 9 miles; find the work in good condition including the five locks at Ley's, and the bridges decayed or collapsed ..."
In 1808, Paleske was elected president and Joseph S. Lewis as treasurer. In 1809, the company's directors appointed a committee to draft articles for a merger with the Delaware and Schuylkill Canal company which was submitted to the State legislature. In 1810, William John Duane, writing as "Franklin" advocates for reviving the Schuylkill and Susquehanna Navigation company as part of a scheme for a canal route to Lake Erie instead of the Ohio Valley Baer, Christopher T. "A General Chronology of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company Predecessors and Successors and its Historical Context." (For the period of 1810-1814)- Archived from the original on (2007), updated May 2015. Accessed at on August 30, 2018. in a series of letters in his Aurora and in his published letters, "To the People of Pennsylvania Respecting the Internal Improvement of the Commonwealth by Means of Roads and Canals."Powell, H. B. (1969). Coal, Philadelphia, and the Schuylkill. Lehigh University, Ph.D., 1968 Economics, history
With the establishment of constitutional government in 1789 following the American Revolutionary War, the financial condition of the country improved.Martin, Asa Earl. "Lotteries in Pennsylvania Prior to 1833." Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 47.4 (1923): 307-327 Accessed on November 25, 2019 at PSU.edu While credit was more plentiful than it had been for a half-century and the population growing ..."came increasing and insistent demands for ... improved transportation facilities." Regular tax revenues to the State were insufficient and could only be remedied by what seemed like at the time to be "abnormal increases in taxation." One remedy that had been used in the past was that of authorizing lotteries to raise funds, but only, for "important public purposes". In 1795, the State had authorized $400,000 for the Union canal's predecessor corporation, the Schuylkill & Susquehanna Navigation and Delaware and Schuylkill Canal companies. While there were numerous abuses of the lottery system in terms of complaints but the biggest problem was that of numerous "foreign" lotteries.
Until the passage of the act for the "entire abolition of lotteries" by the State of Pennsylvania in 1833, "(F)oreign advertisements were to be found in nearly every issue of the county and city newspapers. They were especially evident after 1820, 324 Lotteries in Pennsylvania Prior to 1833. when it was not unusual to find four or more different foreign lottery advertisements in a single issue of a paper. During the entire period they were probably three times as numerous as those of lotteries chartered by the Legislature of Pennsylvania. In a single issue of the Greensburgh Gazette, on May 12, 1826, advertisements for the Connecticut State Lottery, The New York Literature Lottery, Maryland University Lottery, Mr. Jefferson's Lottery, The Grand Consolidated Lottery (New York), and only one Pennsylvania lottery, The Union Canal Lottery. Similar illustrations from papers throughout the state might be given. Many brokers in nearby states ran advertisements regularly in the county papers in Pennsylvania." But most importantly, the result was that "...many Pennsylvania authorized lotteries remained uncompleted or underfunded for years." "The most striking illustration of this ...(problem with foreign lotteries) ... was the case of the lottery chartered in 1795 to raise $400,000 to aid in the completion of the ...(Schuylkill & Susquehanna and Delaware and Schuylkill Canals). After sixteen years, during which this lottery had schemes almost constantly before the public, only $60,000 of the $400,000 had been raised, due to the inability of the managers to sell their tickets."
The most important single lottery in terms of number of tickets and in the value of prizes in the early history of state lotteries was the Union Canal Lottery authorized in 1811 but it was to be managed by the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company and the Union Canal Company, respectively. The 1811 acts of authorization prohibited the use of any of the lottery funds as dividends paid to stockholders. The Union canal's incorporation permitted it to raise by means of a lottery $340,000, the exact amount that was left uncompleted by the predecessor companies in 1795.