Union Canal: Pennsylvania's Inland Waterway

For more than fifty years this canal was one of Pennsylvania's essential commercial arteries. The Union Canal, in use from eighteen twenty-eight into the eighteen eighties, linked the Schuylkill River at Reading with the Susquehanna River at Middletown, giving boats a continuous water route across the heart of the state. Goods traveling to or from Philadelphia came by way of the Schuylkill Navigation, then transferred here, then continued west.

Remains of the canal's locks can still be seen east of this spot. The canal was a marvel of early American engineering, but the railroads made it obsolete before the end of the nineteenth century. At its closing it had moved coal, lumber, and other goods for more than half a century, quietly threading commerce through the Pennsylvania countryside.