Noteworthy

A Tale of Ambition, Struggle, and Ingenuity: Charting the History and Marvel of the Union Canal Tunnel in Lebanon.

Bob Frye/ Lebtown News

The Union Canal was not, by most any measure, a success. It took decades longer than planned to build, engendered anger among some landowners, was ill-suited to meet its intended purpose almost from the get-go, and passed into oblivion even faster than most of its counterparts as the world changed around it. But what a wonder it produced.

A Remarkable Feat of Engineering

Most canals parallel one river or stream. The Union, though, connected two, running cross-country from Reading on the Schuylkill River to Middletown on the Susquehanna.  Along the way, near Lebanon – the high point, or summit, of the route – it passed not over or around rough terrain, but through it. Laborers bored out the Union Canal Tunnel at a time when the tools of the trade were star drills, sledgehammers, picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, and black powder. A good week’s progress was five lineal yards. 

“Now of course it was 15 feet high and wide enough for canal boats, so it wasn’t a 1-foot hole through there,” said Ed Martel, a volunteer historian and narrator who leads canal tours through Union Canal Tunnel Park, owned by the Lebanon County Historical Society since 1950. “There was a lot of solid rock. You’re talking about limestone. So it was backbreaking work, no doubt.  “The conditions in the tunnel would have been pretty darn difficult for the mostly Irish immigrants who were responsible for the construction of much of the canal.”

Not surprisingly then, it took two years – from 1825 to 1827 – to complete the tunnel. When finished, though, it was “an astounding engineering marvel, for quite some time the longest transportation tunnel of any kind in the country,” said Martha Capwell-Fox, historian with the National Canal Museum in Easton.

The Union Canal’s Historical Significance

Today it remains the oldest existing one. As such, it’s National Historic Landmark and a National Historic Civic Engineering Landmark. And yet, “The Golden Link,” as the canal was called for connecting two rivers, flopped, if not right away and not entirely. William Penn, for whom Pennsylvania is named, first suggested its construction in 1690. It took about 100 years, though, for anyone to act on his vision. 

Building the Union Canal

S&S Canal Co. began work on the project – digging nine miles of canal and building five locks – but went bankrupt in 1790. Follow-up work by other would-be builders proceeded in fits and starts over the next two decades, in part funded by the sale of $100 lottery tickets that ultimately paid out $33 million.

Still, it wasn’t until 1819 that the Union got real legs under it. Even then, that was only because Pennsylvania lawmakers forced two competing canal builders to merge, or form a “union,” guaranteed investors a 6 percent return on their money, and fought off lawsuits to take enough private land – in the first use of eminent domain in the country’s history – to make it all happen.

When it finally opened in 1827, the Union – like all canals – served as one part of a water-based interstate highway system of sorts.  “Before the Union Canal opened, it would take you three weeks to get from Philadelphia to Harrisburg,” Martel said. “When the Union Canal opened, you could get from one to the other in less than five days. We could do it in two and half hours now, but at that time, that was revolutionary.”

Coal, Canals, and the War of 1812

Canals served to move all kinds of goods, as well as people, on occasion. One product predominated, however, in part because of how the War of 1812 sparked America’s first energy crisis. According to information from the American Canal Museum, that conflict made it difficult to move bituminous coal around the country.

“By the 1820s, most of the impetus for canal building was to move anthracite, particularly to Philadelphia, which was the biggest market in the whole of North America,” Capwell-Fox said.  That was an arduous task.

Before canals, the most common way making bulk shipments of any kind was in Conestoga wagons. Pulled by six horses or mules over fairly primitive roads, though, they had a maximum capacity of 5 to 10 tons, said Richard Hill, senior curator of the Military, Political and Industrial History Section at the State Museum of Pennsylvania. Canal boats – towed by a single mule guided by a teenage boy or girl – could carry up to 50.  “By displacing water with boats, you can carry a much heavier load,” Hill said. “You’re not going to carry it very fast, but canals are definitely more practicable.”   

Overcoming the Challenges of Canal Transportation

Yet canals where not without their own challenges. Maintenance was costly and difficult as many had to be lined with clay to keep them full. Drought could mean less than enough water to float boats, too; floods could bring too much. They sometimes froze in winter. 

The Union Canal in particular suffered from its east-west route. Boats traveling west had to climb 311 feet in elevation between Reading and Lebanon, Capwell-Fox said. Those traveling east from Middletown had to climb 192.  Such “summit” canals are rare exactly for that reason, she added. Because “water doesn’t flow uphill,” canal engineers had to build pumping stations, dams and locks – which raised and lowered boats to step them up and down as needed – along the way.  “But locks are what slow you down on a canal. And on the Union, in 81 miles, there were 93 locks,” Capwell-Fox said. “So it was really insane.” For comparison, she said, the 68 miles of the Delaware Division Canal from Easton to Bristol has just 24 locks.

Those locks were also indicative of another problem on the Union.  “When they built the Union Canal, they built it as cheaply and as quickly as they could,” Martel said. “And so they didn’t built it deep enough and wide enough, and most importantly, they didn’t build the locks big enough to accommodate the larger canal boat that were going to be in use around the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal.” In short, though it sometimes had 100 boats a day plying its waters, it just couldn’t compete with other operations. 

The Evolution of Transportation: Railroads Replace Canals

The Union’s owners tried to adjust, eventually taking the locks from 8.5 feet wide and 75 feet long to 17 feet wide and 90 feet long, but that was too little too late, especially in the face of the one thing that killed canals everywhere: railroads. With their emergence, industry suddenly no longer needed to locate operations along a water source, to catch flowing water to power machinery and move products, Hill said.   

“The canals are sort of the last hurrah of what might be called the pre-industrial age,” he added. “You’re pulling boats with mules. But then the railroads come along and they’re using steam engines. That’s the big transition. The first steam engines are stationary and they’re used to pump out mines and that sort of thing. But once they become mobile, that’s really where the industrial revolution takes off, when you harness steam and can tap the chemical energy that’s held particularly in coal.”
In the end, the Union lasted into the 1880s, at which time some parts of the tow path were taken over by railroads, others were abandoned, and still more were reclaimed by the farmers who lost land to make it possible in the first place, Martel said. 

The Significance of the Union Canal Today

If that was an inglorious end for an operation that produced, with its tunnel, such a lasting monument to determination and ingenuity, it was predictable, too. “It was an ill-conceived venture and it didn’t last very long,” Campbell-Fox said. “It had such a short life because wasn’t economically feasible.”

But that doesn’t make it any less interesting as a piece of local history, Martel said. “The truth is, the Union Canal Tunnel was really an engineering marvel because there wasn’t a lot of that type of construction going on then,” he said. “It’s something truly unique.”