The Delaware Canal (3 page)

William Penn (1644–1718), founder and proprietor of the colony King George II called Pennsylvania, was a Quaker and renowned diplomat and statesman.
Courtesy of Pennsbury Manor
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The Pennsylvania legislature authorized a lottery to raise funds for the completion of the canal in 1795, and although it was the most significant canal lottery in United States history, more prize money was given out than funds raised to give to the canal company for production and construction purposes.

The enthusiasm to build canals in Pennsylvania seemed to have declined after that. Then, when a very important discovery was made in the mountains of Pennsylvania, indifference to canals turned into necessity—and in the case of the Pennsylvania canals, necessity truly was the mother of invention.

Chapter 2

From the Bowels of the Earth

Raking Over the Coals

When William Penn invited Europeans to settle in his “woods” and promised the sort of freedom that most had never known or even dreamed of, they accepted. English Quakers, Scotch-Irish and Germans were the first to cross the Atlantic and step off the ships onto what they believed was the proverbial land of milk and honey. And in many ways, Pennsylvania fulfilled their hopes. The earth was rich and fertile, the fruit trees heavy with succulent offerings and there were more than enough game and fish to feed their families. Additionally, due to William Penn's fair and just treatment of the Native Americans, white settlers lived in peace with the Lenni-Lenape.

As more people arrived, they decided to settle beyond Philadelphia and the local counties, moving west and up into the mountains. Living in colonial America wasn't easy by any means, but the colonists' hearts were filled with hope and they were willing to work hard in this new home that held such promise for them.

Philip Ginder was one of them. A German immigrant, Ginder settled on Sharp Mountain (Mauch Chunk) and built his family a log cabin in the forest. But after this, the story gets a little confusing. One account relates that Ginder's family lived on the game he shot as a backwoods hunter. There came a year when the game became sparse. Ginder was on his way home one rainy evening, empty-handed, worrying that his family would starve because his hunting expedition had failed, and he stumbled on a large black rock. Upon inspection of the boulder, he suspected it might be the hard coal he had heard about from Native American stories.

In this account, Ginder took a portion of the coal directly to Fort Allen to Colonel Jacob Weiss, who in turn took it to Philadelphia to be inspected by three men—John Nicholson, the comptroller general of Pennsylvania; Michael Hillegas, the former treasurer of the United States; and a printer named Charles Cist, who was Weiss's brother-in-law. When they wanted to see the precise location in which Ginder found the coal, the backwoodsman first asked for help in filing forms through the patent office to obtain a small tract of land to build a mill.

Coal mined from the anthracite region of Pennsylvania.
Courtesy of Hillmann-Purcell collection
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In another story it is suggested that Philip Ginder was actually a prosperous farmer and already a millwright when he found the anthracite. He took it to a blacksmith, who put it in a fire, and they discovered that it burned hotter and longer than bituminous coal or wood.
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Ginder then went to Weiss with the discovery, knowing that the influential Weiss could expedite the forms through the patent office. In the end, and much to Ginder's dismay, it took so many years before he received his tract of land in 1797 that he was too old to clear it, and he sold it for 150 pounds of gold and silver.
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Although both historical accounts name Ginder as the person who discovered the anthracite coal that would contribute to the Industrial Revolution, the fact is that Native Americans in Pennsylvania had been using coal for many years for different purposes. A historian from a Moravian mission wrote about tobacco pipe heads that the Native Americans made from “black stone” that was easy to carve. In the 1950s, an oil company that was excavating an area near the Susquehanna River found the floor of a prehistoric Indian site. When the Society for Pennsylvania Archeology was called in to study the site, it found anthracite nuggets that had been rubbed on stone, presumably to make paint.
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However, it isn't clear if the Native Americans ever used coal as fuel.

By the late eighteenth century, finding ways to keep homes warm and inventing methods to advance industry—particularly iron production, which was necessary to the growing new country—was becoming a challenge. Fuel was provided by wood from the region's forests, but wood didn't burn hot for very long. Colonists heated their homes with the use of fireplaces, a method that wasn't ideal since the fires burned out quickly and a spark could cause fiery devastation. Many women and children were severely burned when their clothing caught fire in the large open hearths. Benjamin Franklin invented the cast-iron stove, which allowed people to warm their homes more efficiently and with less danger, yet the stove still required wood.

Charcoal, which was the distillation of wood to its carbon content, burned hotter and cleaner, but it was time-consuming and costly, especially for iron production. Although the woodlands of America were still dense in the 1700s, the high demand for charcoal would soon strip the forests, a problem England was experiencing for the same reason. It took the yield of approximately an acre of woodland a day to feed furnaces that produced iron.

Bituminous coal from Virginia was being shipped to Philadelphia's ports, but the British blockade during the War of 1812 drove up the price of Virginia's coal. It was clear to the colonists that finding an alternative method of heating homes and fueling furnaces for iron was becoming essential.

Anthracite coal is a metamorphic rock that is formed through the buildup and decay of plant and animal material, causing organic sedimentary rock to form. Compressed vegetation forms coal, and the longer and deeper it is buried, the higher the quality.

Anthracite is hard, with a bright black luster, and it burns without flame, smoke or odor. When burned, it gives off relatively little sulfur dioxide and provides intense heat.
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With the discovery of anthracite coal by Philip Ginder in the mountains of Pennsylvania, the young United States had found the alternative source of heat it needed, and the Industrial Revolution in America was launched.

The Lehigh Coal Mine Company

After Ginder brought the piece of coal he had found to Jacob Weiss, the group who inspected it—Hillegas, Cist and Nicholson—formed the Lehigh Coal Mine Company (LCMC) on February 21, 1792.
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With the incentive of a money-back guarantee, fourteen people took stock in the new LCMC. The board elected Nicholson as president; then it set rules and appointed committees to decide how to proceed with the mines. The LCMC acquired ten thousand acres of land, arranged for a road to be built from the mines to the Lehigh River and built a landing on the river. It also made arrangements to have the river improved for transporting the coal. All of this was more expensive than had been anticipated and necessitated the selling of more shares of stock. The LCMC set the price of coal at eighteen to twenty-one shillings per bushel at Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton, and twenty-one to twenty-six per bushel in Philadelphia.

This Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company stock certificate shows the images of Josiah White and Erskine Hazard.
Courtesy of Pennsylvania Canal Society Collection, National Canal Museum, Easton, PA
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In 1794, the company officially began production, with orders to transfer the coal to the Lehigh Valley by raft or flat-bottomed boat. But its progress faltered and the success it anticipated was not realized. Due to the expense of trying to improve its mines, the road and the river, the LCMC had to ask for a thirty-dollar levy on shares, and that levy resulted in delinquency by John Nicholson, Robert Morris and a number of other stockholders. The company could no longer afford to expend money on finding ways to improve the Lehigh River.

Transporting the coal over the treacherous and unpredictable waters of the Lehigh River proved even more difficult than the LCMC had imagined. Several attempts to clear the Lehigh had failed. Unable to incorporate, and with its stockholders suffering financial setbacks, the company was failing. There was a demand for anthracite during the War of 1812, and the company continued to float the coal downriver whenever it was navigable, but not with financial success. Coal was continuously lost on the twisting and wild river, and the company couldn't turn a profit. In 1818, the property was leased to Josiah White, Erskine Hazard and George F.A. Hauto, entrepreneurs of the Lehigh Navigation Company.

The Genius of Josiah White

Josiah White was the “idea man” of the nineteenth century, and his ideas led to ventures that were sometimes successful and sometimes failures. The implementation of his inventions may have failed from time to time, but the concepts were usually found to be solid.

Born in Mount Holly, New Jersey, in 1781, Josiah White and his three bothers were reared by their mother, Rebecca, after the death of their father, John White, a storekeeper and mill owner. Both his grandfather and father were steadfast Quakers who wouldn't even sell cotton in their store since it was made through slave labor. The elder White, also named Josiah, was a leader in the community who owned a tavern, kept school for Quaker families and was an apothecary, tending to the ill with local plants and herbs. Upon the death of John, Rebecca ran the mill and store, but she found that she was always struggling to support her sons. There was very little money for education, and the boys needed to work as soon as they were old enough.

When he was fifteen years old, Josiah was apprenticed in a hardware store in Philadelphia. By the age of seventeen, he was in complete charge of the store, priced the goods and kept the books. By twenty-one, he owned his own hardware store and made himself a promise: by age thirty he would be worth $40,000.
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He married Catherine Ridgeway, who died only two years later at the age of twenty. His sadness at her death overshadowed the fact that he had surpassed his financial goal even before the age of thirty, and he sold the hardware business to his younger brother, Joseph, and a friend, Samuel Lippincott. Josiah traveled for a while and lived a quiet, solitary life until he met and married his second wife, Elizabeth. They established their home in Philadelphia, and then Josiah purchased some property on both sides of the Schuylkill River that was located near the falls and included water power rights to the river at the falls.

Josiah, tired of being “retired” at the age of twenty-nine, invested his fortune and borrowed another $20,000 to build the first dam on the Schuylkill and lease the water power to mills in Philadelphia. It was eighty feet long and seventeen feet wide, and instead of building the walls against the current, he constructed them to lean with the current, thereby lowering the water pressure on the dam.

It functioned well and stood strong against the annual ice floes, but the commercial rental of the water power and the collection of tolls didn't cover the expenses of the improvements. A father of one little girl now, with a second child on the way, he worried about his financial security and started a nail mill that had two purposes: it would provide income for the family and would prove that his water power was valuable. His invention of a machine that rolled and molded iron into nails caught the attention of Ebenezer Hazard, the first postmaster general of the United States and the founder of the Insurance Company of North America.

Hazard believed that the United States needed to attain economic independence from England and Europe through its own development of industrial power, and he was greatly impressed with the young inventor. He introduced Josiah to his son, Erskine, and this would be the beginning of a lifelong partnership and friendship.