Canal age
Various parts of the world have had various canal ages; the main ones belong to Egypt, Ancient Babylon, and the historical empires of India, China, Southeast Asia, and mercantile Europe.
In the Thirteen Colonies in 1762 legislation was passed supporting in the colonial-era Province of Pennsylvania to improve navigation on the Schuylkill River through Philadelphia.
[c] From the first days of the expansion of the British colonies from the coast of North America into the heartland of the continent, a recurring problem was that of transportation between the coastal ports and the interior.
This was not unique to the Americas, and the problem still exists in those parts of the world where muscle power provides a primary means of transportation within a region.
George Washington led a partly enduring effort to turn the Potomac River into a navigable link to the west, sinking substantial energy and capital into the Patowmack Canal from 1785 until his death fourteen years later.
While in Canandaigua debtors' prison, Hawley began pressing for the construction of a canal along the 90-mile (140 km)-long Mohawk River valley with support from Joseph Ellicott (agent for the Holland Land Company in Batavia).
As energetic men all along the Atlantic Plain now took up the problem of improving the inland rivers, they faced a storm of criticism and ridicule that would have daunted any but such as Washington and Johnson of Virginia or White and Hazard of Pennsylvania or Morris and Watson of New York.
Concurrently, the predecessor of the Erie Canal was begun in New York State and in New England, Connecticut and Massachusetts were looking at a few waterways needing better navigability.
[d] Josiah White and partner Erskine Hazard needing fuel for their wire mill and nail factory at the falls of the Schuylkill fought this plodding method of incremental improvement for years.
On the settled eastern seaboard, forest decimation created an energy crisis for coastal cities, but the lack of water- and roadways made English coal shipped across the Atlantic cheaper in Philadelphia than Pennsylvania anthracite mined 100 miles away.
For more than a century, they had provided Europe with inexpensive, reliable transportation, and George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and other founding fathers believed they were the key to the New World's future.
President Thomas Jefferson called it "a little short of madness" and rejected it; however, Hawley interested New York Governor DeWitt Clinton in the project.
Efficiently, the nonstop smooth method of transportation cut nearly in half the travel time between Albany and Buffalo moving day and night.
[10] The best examples furnished with carpeted floors, stuffed chairs, and mahogany tables stocked with current newspapers and books served as sitting rooms during the days.
Inspired in part by the news of the Erie's technological achievements, the privately funded Lehigh Canal was an achievement brought about by the energy needs of two visionary industrialists, the politically connected Erskine Hazard and his older partner Josiah White, who together built the Lehigh Canal and the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company, founding towns, mines, and building economically productive mining and transportation infrastructure from a wilderness in Eastern Pennsylvania south and west of the Poconos in the anthracite creating folded ridges of the Ridge and Valley Appalachians.
[n 1] It was used to carry anthracite gathered to the central Lehigh Valley to the urban markets of the northeast, especially Philadelphia, Trenton, New Jersey, and Wilmington, Delaware, but supported new growth industries in Bristol, Pennsylvania, Allentown and Bethlehem.
Leveraging of innovation and immense self-confidence, the Company founders With the discovery of large surface deposits of anthracite coal, the Lehigh Coal Mine Company (LCMC) was formed in 1792 to secure the mineral rights to vast areas of wilderness west of the Lehigh River ranging beyond to the outcrops atop Sharpe Peak of Pisgah Ridge near present-day Summit Hill, Pennsylvania.
Inspired by the energy shortfall during the blockade of the War of 1812, the LCMC sent a large expedition out in 1813, which started down the river in spring of 1814 with five arks laden with coal.
The LCMC board in its disgust confirmed the unreliability of the fuel source when they let it be known they planned no further risky expeditions as too costly, giving White and Hazard the idea of purchasing the rights to operate the mining company.
In the fall of 1814 they mounted an expedition to survey the Lehigh's problems and those of the coal mine and transportation needs for getting its output to the River reliably and regularly.
The lower Lehigh Canal improvements were initially designed and engineered by LC&N founder Josiah White[7][f] after they'd very quickly become disenchanted with the decisions and strategies of the Schuykill Canal's board of directors,[7] so by the winter of 1814 were very interested in exploring the option of getting coal from Lehigh valley down to Philadelphia the more than 100 miles (160 km), one way or another.,[7] but by late 1822 just as anthracite was achieving early acceptance and the skepticism was waning[g] the drain of building sacrificial 'Coal Arks' for every load delivered to the docks of Philadelphia in 1822 as the LC&N operations were just hitting stride was already a worry to the managing board of directors.
[11] By mid-1822, managing director Josiah White was consulting with Canvass White, a veteran designing engineer of New York's Erie Canal locks, and by late 1822 had shifted construction efforts from bolstering and improving the one-way system begun in 1818 with ambitious two-way dams and lock construction capable of taking both a steam tug and a coastal cargo ship all 45.6 miles (73.4 km) from the Delaware to the slack water pool at Mauch Chunk in present-day Jim Thorpe.
