Union Canal: Water Over the Mountain

Before railroads, Pennsylvania moved goods by water, and the Union Canal was the answer to a geographic riddle. Swatara Creek fed a reservoir at Big Dam in Swatara Gap, about four miles northeast of here. From that reservoir a branch canal carried the water southwest to a Water Works station, where engineers raised it by water wheels and steam pumps, then pushed it through a feeder tube to the summit level near Lebanon.

From there the canal descended eastward toward Reading and westward toward Middletown, connecting the Susquehanna and Schuylkill rivers. Chartered in eighteen eleven and completed in eighteen twenty-eight, it was among the earliest canals in the United States. Mule-drawn boats moved coal, grain, and iron across a landscape that had no other practical route.

The Union Canal operated for more than half a century before the railroad made it obsolete.