Phillipsburg: Western Gate of the Morris Canal
Near Allentown, New Jersey
Phillipsburg sits on the New Jersey bank of the Delaware River directly across from Easton, Pennsylvania, and for nearly a century it served as the western gateway of one of the engineering marvels of the young republic. In the early eighteen thirties the Morris Canal reached Phillipsburg, the western end of a waterway that eventually ran about one hundred seven miles from the Delaware to Jersey City on the Hudson. Coal from Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley rolled in by cable ferry from Easton, entered the canal's eastern locks, and floated all the way to the ironworks of New Jersey.
The canal operated until nineteen twenty-four, carrying the raw materials of the industrial age across the spine of the state. Phillipsburg itself was formally incorporated as a town in eighteen sixty-one, but its character had been shaped decades earlier by the commerce that flowed through it.
