The Schuylkill and Susquehanna Navigation Company was a limited liability corporation founded in Pennsylvania on September 29, 1791.Pennsylvania Statutes accessed at Internet Archive Reprint of 1990 volume.
The company was founded for the purpose of improving river navigation, which in the post-colonial United States era of the 1790s meant improving river systems, not canals. In this Pennsylvania plan, however, two rivers, a large river, the Susquehanna and a smaller one, the Schuylkill, were to be improved by clearing channels through obstructions and building dams where needed. To connect the two watersheds, the company proposed a summit level crossing at Lebanon, a length of almost between the two rivers. The completed project was intended to be part of a navigable water route from Philadelphia to Lake Erie and the Ohio Valley.
History 18th century
The original engineering concept developed by the Society and the navigation company was to build a canal up the Schuylkill River to Norristown, improving the Schuylkill River from there to Reading. While from Reading, the canal was to extend to the Susquehanna River via Lebanon. This would have required a four-mile summit crossing between Tulpehocken and the Quittapahilla with an artificial waterway connecting two separate river valleys; namely the Susquehanna and the Schuylkill watersheds. Its successful completion would have made the middle reach, the first summit-level canal in the United States. The term refers to a canal that rises then falls, as opposed to a lateral canal, which has a continuous fall only. In this case, the proposed canal at 80 miles in length would rise over from the west at the Susquehanna River to the summit and then fall over to the Schuylkill River to the east. It was to be the golden link between Philadelphia and the vast interior of Pennsylvania and beyond.
This proposed summit crossing offered a severe test of 18th-century engineering skills, materials and construction techniques. For both designing and operating a water-conveyance transportation system through an area where sinkholes are common, and surface water is scarce. Ultimately, the 1794 engineering concept was flawed, as the water supply for the summit crossing was inadequate and the technology for minimizing supply losses was still another century away. While the 1794 construction was never completed, the company's successor, the Union Canal, was faced with the same challenges of sealing the canal bed to conserve water. The summit crossing was never able to handle the canal traffic. Even with two reservoirs constructed at the summit as feeders to the canal, the Union Canal still required pumped water from a waterworks at the junction of Swatara Creek and Clarks Run and later from a second waterworks on Furnace Creek on the Quitipahilla. At the first works, there were four pumps necessary to provide summit water, but only two could be powered by river water. The other two had to be powered by Cornish steam engines, a technology available in 1828 when the canal opened but not in 1791.
Despite all of these problems, in 1791, the enthusiasm for this venture was such that it didn't seem at all impossible that Pennsylvania would have succeeded in securing the commercial prestige which the Erie Canal captured for New York. By 1795 however, the navigation company's project was a commercial failure. The result was that with the onset of the Erie Canal still some thirty years into the future, Philadelphia lost the early initiative in water transportation. Despite Philadelphia and Pennsylvania's "heroic efforts" to hold their share of the internal trade which in 1796 was forty percent more than New York; by 1825 with the opening of the Erie Canal, Philadelphia's trade was forty-five percent less than New York.
New York City's rise to preeminence among American cities was an important development, but was not a foregone conclusion. At the time the Schuylkill and Susquehanna Navigation Company was chartered, Philadelphia was the leading American city; its residents, as well as others, generally expected it to take on more of a metropolitan role as the nation became independent, and prepared the city for that role. Instead, Philadelphia slid into second place. By 1807, New York was the acknowledged commercial capital of the nation; by 1837, it was the American metropolis. Philadelphia's dismal failure to build the "golden link" thirty years before New York opened the Erie Canal was a major factor in that slide into second place.
The idea of uniting the Schuylkill and Susquehanna rivers by a canal was first proposed and discussed by William Penn in 1690.Engineering Record, Building Record and Sanitary Engineer, Volume 40, Charles Frederick Wingate, McGraw Publishing Company, 1899 Accessed at Google books on July 30, 2016Bishop, Avard Longley. The State works of Pennsylvania. Vol. 13. Tuttle, Morehouse & Taylor Press, 1907. Penn's plan, conceived a few years after he had founded Philadelphia, was to make "a second settlement" on the Susquehanna River, similar in size to that of Philadelphia itself. He made this plan, titled "Some Proposals for a Second Settlement in the Province of Pennsylvania" public in England in 1690.Swank, James Moore. "Progressive Pennsylvania: A Record of the Remarkable Industrial Development of the Keystone State, with Some Account of Its Early and Its Later Transportation Systems, Its Early Settlers, and Its Prominent Men." JB Lippincott, 1908. Accessed at on July 31, 2016. The route envisioned by Penn was a road up the west bank of the Schuylkill to the mouth of French Creek near present-day Phoenixville, heading west to the Susquehanna via present day Lancaster and a Susquehanna tributary, Conestoga Creek. Although Penn first proposed the project of continuous water transportation from the Delaware to the Susquehanna, he did not call for the building of a canal.
In 1762, Philadelphia merchants petitioned the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly to commission a project for the passage by water up the west branch of the Susquehanna River with an intervening portage to a navigable branch of the Ohio River. In 1769, another petition to the Assembly requested that then Province make the Juniata River navigable down to the Susquehanna River. Both petitions were unsuccessful, but neither mentioned canals as an essential element for the proposed improvement.
In 1769, the American Philosophical Society with Benjamin Franklin as its first president was organized with six standing committees, one of which was on "Husbandry and American Improvements".Volume 1769-1774. (1885). Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 22(119), 23-94. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/982528 One of the first projects the committee looked at in February 1769 was a canal between the Chesapeake and Delaware bays using the Chester River in Maryland and Duck Creek, near Smyrna, Delaware some south of the present location of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal (C&D Canal). In March, the committee was tasked with preparing a "scheme of application" for the Philadelphia merchants for defraying the expenses of conducting a route location ("proper levels") for the canal as well as construction costs. In April, the committee discussed a more northerly route using the Bohemia River, a tributary of the Elk River with headwaters extending into Delaware using Drawyers Creek.
In June, this route was reported being feasible only with locks, as the cost of constructing a clear passage from river to river was too great. That same month, Thomas Gilpin, a member of the merchant committee, submitted an alternative "plan of a canal and elevation" using the original southerly route along the Chester River and Duck Creek. In April 1770, W. T. Fisher produced a map of the several canal routes proposed for connecting the Chesapeake and Delaware bays.
In August 1771, the committee then became aware of the prospect of joining the Susquehanna and Schuylkill Rivers by means of a canal. One of the key features of that survey was its emphasis on the middle ground or summit level, roughly miles between the headwaters of the Quitapahilla, near Lebanon, and those of Tulpehocken, near Myerstown. The survey was conducted by Dr. William Smith, Provost of the College of Philadelphia, John Lukens, Esquire, Surveyor General of the then Province (now State) of Pennsylvania, and John Sellers. Samuel Rhoads, a Philadelphia architect, vice-president of the Society and colonial mayor of Philadelphia, had also been on the survey with Rittenhouse and company.Stapleton, D. H. (1984). William Weston, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, and the Philadelphia plan for internal improvements. (Cutcliffe, Stephen Hosmer. ed. Science and technology in the eighteenth century.) Bethlehem, Pa. Rhoads had been impressed with the "... apparent practicality of a canal on the Tulpehocken-Swatara route. But, he asked Franklin, whether it was better to dig a canal, or just to dam up the rivers and creeks to provide for navigation?"
The same year, the Society recommended the third route for a canal. The Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly then appointed a committee of its own to survey the Susquehanna, Schuylkill, and Lehigh Rivers and in 1773, David Rittenhouse delivered its report.8 Pa. Arch., viii, 6609–10, 6748, 6853; Brooke Hindle, David Rittenhouse (Princeton, 1964), pp. 94–6.Accessed at on August 18, 2016. Nothing became of this work due to the coming of the Revolution.David Rittenhouse Papers accessed at on August 18, 2016. In total, the Society sponsored studies of three routes to the connect Philadelphia with the Susquehanna Valley: one by canal across the Delmarva Peninsula (1769-1771), the second a paved road from the Susquehanna Valley to a river port south of Philadelphia and the third (1773) a canal using the Schuylkill and Susquehanna Rivers and their tributaries, the Tulpehocken and Swatara creeks.
The project became the goal of the Society for Promoting the Improvement of Roads and Inland Navigation organized in 1789 with preeminent wartime financier Robert Morris as president, David Rittenhouse, William Smith and John Nicolson. The Society petitioned the General Assembly to again survey the river routes, only this time the State acted upon the recommendations.
In the spring of 1790, the General Assembly passed a resolution on March 31, 1790, that authorized river surveys.Baer, Christopher T. "A General Chronology of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company Predecessors and Successors and its Historical Context." Archived from the original on (2007), updated May 2015.Accessed at on July 31, 2016. Governor Thomas Mifflin commissioned Timothy Matlack (1736–1829), Samuel Maclay (1741–1811) and John Adlum (1759–1836) to survey the Swatara, West Branch of the Susquehanna River, Allegheny River, French Creek with a portage to Lake Erie, the Kiskiminetas/Conemaugh to Stony Creek, the future site of Johnstown, with a second portage to the Frankstown branch of the Juniata and then down the Juniata to the Susquehanna River and onto Harrisburg.
Mifflin also appointed other survey teams: Commissioners Samuel Boyd, Bartram Galbraith and Thomas Hulings, reported on January 30, 1790, a major obstruction to the navigation of the Susquehanna River: "Conewago Falls, about 14 miles above Wright's Ferry, the great obstruction and barr to the wealth and population of our Western Country, is at present the grand object. We are clear that a canal is the sure and safe way of effecting a good navigation for boats to pass and repass.". Commissioners Reading Howell (1743-1827), Frederick Antes (1764-1801) and William Dean, to survey the upper Delaware with a portage to the Great Bend on the Susquehanna, the North Branch, the upper Lehigh with a portage to Wyoming, and the upper Schuylkill and Little Schuylkill with a portage to the Lehigh or Susquehanna.