Pennsylvania Canal

The Pennsylvania Canal, sometimes known as the Pennsylvania Canal system, was a complex system of transportation infrastructure improvements, including canals, dams, locks, tow paths, aqueducts, and viaducts. The canal was constructed and assembled over several decades beginning in 1824, the year of the first enabling act and budget items.

Enacted while railroads were in their infancy, the Pennsylvania Canal was designed to create a canal system that was capable of carrying heavy ships carrying bulk goods, connecting the major metropolitan cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and reaching the new growth markets in the developing Northwest Territory over the Ohio River, now known as the Midwestern United States.

The Pennsylvania Canal was updated in 1837 to reflect the experience of twelve years of toddler-railways, The term was also applied to railroads and new canals to be added to the state transportation system. The Main Line of Public Works and the Pennsylvania Canal system topped 2,100 feet (640 m) in elevation by erecting the Allegheny Portage Railroad, which used a system of five inclines and five planes on each side of the Eastern Continental Divide at Cresson Pass in Cambria County to actually haul wheeled flat cars, which had halved canal boats placed on them, up and over the Allegheny Front and connect Pittsburgh to the Susquehanna River. When finished in 1834, the trip from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh could be made in three to five days, weather conditions depending.

In the fifty years before 1830, the new west was settled and steadily growing as people poured westwards along the various Emigrant Trails into the Midwest to destinations on a million new farms and towns throughout the watershed of the Mississippi Valley towards the lands organized in the Northwest Territory.

The goal of the enabling acts was to enhance commerce and lower transportation costs between east and west, better joining the trans-Allegheny region to the eastern seaboard; this was a commercially motivated act with an eye towards servicing the growing markets of the new fast growing western settlements (Midwest) to the manufactories of the East.

Provision was made in the later legislation to tie in and even extend privately built canals such as the Lehigh Canal, not technically part of the Pennsylvania Canal system, and link them and the state's infant railroads to the public system and add to its value. The canal linking Philadelphia to the Susquehanna River, the proposed Pennsylvania Canal from Philadelphia to the Wright's Ferry landing in Columbia, Pennsylvania, was overtaken by technological events. Instead of pouring money into building a ditch, permission was sought by the investors to use its 82-mile (132 km) right of way to replace it in the Main Line of Public Works scheme by a railway, a new developing technology, which resulted in the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad (1834).

Since they were built above ground, railways were easier and cheaper to build, since no ditches needed to be dug with human muscle power, nor did they require feed waters to be located and aqueducts built to provide them. The plan also included a visionary scheme to build a ramp system which would roll canal boats over the Allegheny Mountains at an elevation over 2,100 feet (640 m) through the broad uneven saddle of Cresson Pass.

Though most of the canals no longer have any function, some segments retain value as historic and recreational sites. Both the Delaware Canal and the lower Lehigh Canal were kept busy into the tough financial years of the Great Depression.