A rare photographic river trip revealing the once-celebrated but
now-hidden industrial landscapes of Pennsylvania that helped shape the
nation.
The Schuylkill River flows more than 130 miles from the mountains of the
Pennsylvania Coal Region to its confluence with the Delaware River. It
passes through five counties--Schuylkill, Berks, Chester, Montgomery,
and Philadelphia--and its valley is home to more than three million
people. Yet few are aware of the hidden ruins and traces left by a
pioneering 200-year-old inland waterway that opened in 1825: the
Schuylkill Navigation. Some of it is literally buried in their own
backyards.
Often called the Schuylkill Canal, this complex Navigation system
actually boasted twenty-seven canals. The first of the
anthracite-carrying routes in America, the 108-mile Navigation shadowed
the Schuylkill River for nearly all its length. It once had more than
thirty dams and slackwater pools, more than 100 stone locks, numerous
aqueducts, and the first transportation tunnel in the nation. They were
all built by hand starting in 1816.
During the 1940s, as part of a massive environmental cleanup of the
river, this important and influential infrastructure was largely
dismantled--but not entirely. Two short sections of the watered canal
get plenty of attention: the Oakes Reach at Schuylkill Canal Park near
Phoenixville and the Manayunk Canal in Philadelphia. Both are popular
recreational destinations. What happened to the rest of it?
Photographer Sandy Sorlien resolved to find out. Over the course of
seven years, she repeatedly traveled upriver from her home near the
Manayunk Canal, bushwhacking along the riverbanks and rowing and
paddling in the river itself. Armed with camera and binoculars, loppers
and trekking poles, nineteenth-century maps and modern satellite
imagery, and later abetted by local historians and an archaeologist, she
found all sixty-one lock sites and explored most of the canal beds. Her
photographs reveal a mysterious remnant landscape, evidence of an
extraordinary engineering feat that spelled its own demise. The water
pollution created by the coal industry, unregulated factory and
residential waste, and obstructive dams all but destroyed the river that
fed the Navigation. Clogged channels, railway competition, and repeated
flood damage meant the end of a way of life for the towns that boomed
along the canals, and only a few historians keep its memory alive.
Along with Sorlien's color plates and explanatory essays, Inland
features a selection of historic images, rare historic Schuylkill
Navigation Company maps, and early Philadelphia Watering Committee
plans. The book also includes a foreword by renowned landscape scholar
John R. Stilgoe, an essay on regional transportation history by Mike
Szilagyi, Trails Project Manager for the Schuylkill River Greenways
Natural Heritage Area, and an afterword by Karen Young, Director of the
Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center. A sweeping new Schuylkill
River map by Morgan Pfaelzer connects it all.
*
Inland* is the first book to present contemporary photographs from a
survey of the entire Schuylkill Navigation, becoming an essential
resource for future historians and a resonant visual history all its
own.
