The Lehigh Canal: Coal, Water, and the Birth of Industry
Near Allentown, Pennsylvania
Stand near the Lehigh River in Allentown and you are standing at what was once one of the busiest commercial corridors in the eastern United States. The canal that ran alongside this river was the reason Allentown grew from a small inland town into an industrial city, and the reason that eventually, it would need to find something else to be.
The story begins with anthracite coal. In the mountains to the northwest, near a place called Summit Hill, miners had been digging out what locals called stone coal for decades. The problem was getting it anywhere useful. Roads were impassable in winter and barely passable in summer. Mule trains were slow and expensive. What the region needed was water.
In eighteen twenty, Josiah White and Erskine Hazard formed the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company and began the project that would reshape the valley. They built a canal running the length of the Lehigh River from Mauch Chunk, now Jim Thorpe, all the way to Easton, where the Lehigh meets the Delaware. The canal was rebuilt for two-way traffic in the late eighteen twenties.
The canal passed directly through Allentown. Boats loaded with anthracite floated downstream through a series of locks and slackwater pools, heading for Philadelphia, Trenton, and the coastal cities hungry for cheap fuel. The traffic was extraordinary. By the eighteen fifties, the canal carried more than a million tons of coal per year.
Allentown grew up around that traffic. Mills, furnaces, and warehouses clustered along the towpath. Workers arrived. Families settled. The canal made the valley legible to capital, and capital followed.
The railroads that arrived in the eighteen fifties did not immediately kill the canal. For a few decades, rail and water competed. But by the eighteen eighties the canal was losing, and by the nineteen forties it was abandoned entirely. What remains are fragments: old towpath walks, lock ruins in Lehigh County, a museum in Easton dedicated to the canal's memory. The river is cleaner now than it was then. The cargo is gone.
