When Pennsylvania began to attract settlers from Europe, most
lived in the southeastern corner, now Philadelphia. As these settlers moved
west across the state, first, they traveled by canoe or horseback, later with
wagons. They eventually had to travel over a high mountain chain, the Allegheny
Mountains. Getting over that mountain wasn’t easy. Most of you have seen on
television the trouble of traveling over the Rockies by covered wagon. Did you
realize that in the beginning the same trouble happened in the Allegheny
Mountains but in a lesser degree?
In the early 1800s, a new way to transport people and goods
became popular, the canal boat. Canals were hand-dug channels filled with water
for the boats. Mules or horse walking on a path beside the canal pulled these
boats.
The southern part of the state, specifically, York County,
first used a canal in 1797 for transporting goods. The large Erie Canal in New
York state appeared on the transportation scene in 1817. After that, canals began
to appear in Pennsylvania from one end to the other. One problem with
this source of transportation was a mountain. Canals worked well on flat
ground. How do you get a canal boat up a mountain?
First, ingenious men found a way to get the supplies from
the canal boats over the Allegheny Mountains. The device called the Portage
Canal revolutionized the canal boat industry. The newly improved steam engine,
only just becoming possible for moving boats and not yet able to move a
locomotive up a hill, became a means for pulling cargo up a hill.
What they did was place a steam engine at the top of the
steep grade. A heavy rope passed through a large pulley that ran with the help
of the engine. One end of the rope pulled up one car on a track while the other
end let down a car on another track. That way gravity and the steam power
worked together. Canal boats brought their loads to the bottom of the hill. The
contents had to be unloaded into the Portage Canal car, pulled to the top of
the hill, unloaded into wagons that took the shipment over a lesser grade to
the next portage canal that lifted it again. When the transport got to the top
of the mountain, the goods went down the other side the same way.
Later, men found a way to get the boats themselves over the
mountains. They made sectional canal boats that could be taken apart, put on
the Portage cars, carried over the mountain, and put together on the other
side.
Western Pennsylvania has preserved this bit of history at
the Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historical Site in Gallitzin. They have
rebuilt one of the engine rooms at the top of some remaining track to show
visitors how this process once worked. A nearby museum contains drawings,
photos, and models of the canal boat operation. Following are some pictures I
took at this site.
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| Reproduction of an Engine House |
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| Inside the Engine House |
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| Model of a Sectional Canal Boat on a Portage Canal Car |
