Pennsylvania Canal: The Susquehanna Division
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
The Pennsylvania Canal's Susquehanna Division was built between eighteen twenty-seven and eighteen thirty-one, stretching forty-one miles from Duncan's Island to Northumberland along the river. In that distance it needed twelve locks, several aqueducts, the old Shamokin Dam, and the West Branch Towpath Bridge, an engineering undertaking of real ambition for its era.
The canal carried Pennsylvania's agricultural and industrial output to markets in Philadelphia and beyond, serving as the economic spine of central Pennsylvania for seventy years. It operated until nineteen oh one, when railroads made canal transport obsolete almost everywhere in America. The Pennsylvania Railroad had absorbed the business the canal once carried, crossing the same terrain faster and cheaper. If you look carefully along the river road here, you can still find traces of the old canal, stone lock walls and towpath grades, the ghost infrastructure of a transportation revolution that lasted barely seven decades before being eclipsed by the next one.
