Beneath the green hills of northeastern Pennsylvania lay vast deposits of anthracite coal, the hardest, cleanest-burning coal on earth. The problem was getting it out. The Lehigh River, rocky and treacherous, was the only route from the coal fields to the markets of the coast. Taming that river would require vision, engineering, and an audacity that bordered on madness.
White and Hazard: Taming the Lehigh
In 1818, businessmen Josiah White and Erskine Hazard founded the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company with a seemingly impossible goal: to make the Lehigh River navigable from the coal fields of Carbon County to the Delaware River at Easton, some 72 miles downstream.
The Lehigh was no gentle waterway. It dropped hundreds of feet in elevation over its course, tumbling over rocks and through rapids that made conventional navigation impossible. Whites solution was brilliant: a series of dams and canal sections that would create slack-water pools connected by locks, allowing loaded coal boats to descend the river in a controlled manner.
Whites most ingenious invention was the "bear-trap lock", a system of wooden locks that could be opened to create a surge of water, flushing boats downstream through otherwise impassable sections. It was rough, dangerous, and effective.
The Black Diamond Highway
The canal was built in two sections over twenty years, eventually stretching 72 miles from the coal regions to Easton. At Easton, the Lehigh Canal connected to the Pennsylvania Canals Delaware Division and the Morris Canal, creating an interconnected waterway system that could deliver coal from the mountains of Pennsylvania to the cities of the entire East Coast.
The impact was transformative. In 1855, the peak year, 1.3 million tons of anthracite coal were delivered via the Lehigh and Delaware Canals. This coal, known as "black diamond" for its premium quality and the wealth it generated, fueled the furnaces, factories, and homes of a rapidly industrializing America.
The Canal Towns
Along the 72-mile route, canal towns sprang up at every lock and loading point. Mule teams walked the towpaths, pulling loaded boats downstream. Lock tenders lived in small houses beside their locks, operating the mechanisms day and night during the shipping season. The canal created an entire economy and way of life along the Lehigh River valley.
Flood, Railroad, and Decline
In 1862, a cascade of failing reservoir dams caused a devastating flood on June 4, damaging canal infrastructure and accelerating the shift from canals to railroads as the primary means of transporting coal. The railroads were faster, could operate year-round (canals froze in winter), and could carry far greater volumes.
Yet remarkably, the Lehigh Canal continued operating until the 1940s, about a decade after similar canals across the country had ceased operations. It was North Americas last fully functioning towpath canal, a testament to both the durability of White and Hazards engineering and the stubbornness of a tradition that refused to die.
Today, sections of the old canal towpath serve as hiking and biking trails, and the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor preserves the history of the waterway that brought the coal that built a nation. Walk the towpath on a quiet morning and you can almost hear the mule teams and the splash of water through the locks.
