G.P.H.S. Past Project Information
The North Branch Canal
Summary by Mark Dziak
The Riverfront Park in Pittston may be awakening a new wave of interest in the rivers running through the city, but it isn't the first time people saw the tremendous potential of the Susquehanna. On May 22, the Greater Pittston Historical Society sponsored a presentation by Attorney F. Charles Petrillo about the North Branch Canal, a manmade waterway which nearly 200 years ago ran alongside the river. With a slide show and detailed talk, Petrillo took an audience at the Overlook Professional Center (formerly Pittston Hospital) on a tour of the long-gone canal which once was a mainstay of life in the Greater Pittston area.
The North Branch Canal, Petrillo said, became a "water highway of transport" in the middle of the nineteenth century. Built almost entirely by immigrant German and Irish workers, the canal was essentially a long, shallow ditch which was filled with water to allow boat passage. The North Branch section connected Northumberland with Pittston, and then merged into other, longer canal systems to transport anthracite coal from Lackawanna and Luzerne counties to major cities like Harrisburg, Philadephia, and Baltimore.
The idea for the canal system was conceived in the 1820's, when the rise in industry made clear a need for new, efficient transport systems. At the time there were no railroads in our area, and early tests with steamboats were generally disastrous. Inspired by the success of New York's Erie Canal, and concerned that the Erie would take business away from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania legislators chose to build their own canal transport system. Sadly, the venture was doomed from the start by political head games and mismanagement. Where New York had built a main canal first and then many small branch canals, Pennsylvania politics required the construction of all necessary canals at once, which was inefficient and ruinously expensive. The entire state essentially went bankrupt over the canal project, Petrillo said, but by 1834 an extensive canal system did exist in our area.
The ships navigating the rivers and canals came in many shapes and sizes. The most practical was the lumber raft, which was simply felled timber strung together and floated downstream. The coal ark, a crude, flat-bottomed boat, was developed in Plymouth and Wilkes-Barre around 1912 to transport local coal downstream; two-thirds of the coal arks that attempted to navigate south of Harrisburg were wrecked in rocky shallows.
A more sophisticated and successful ship was the hand-pulled Durham boat, which could travel upstream as well as downstream, and was usually used to send coal and agricultural products to Harrisburg and bring manufactured goods back to the Wyoming Valley. The final type of ship to brave the local waters was the packet boat, which usually carried mail and passengers.
The canal system wasn't complete in and of itself; to be efficiently used, it required other manmade structures and waterworks. Among these were water-filled bridges known as aqueducts which carried the canal over rivers or low ground. Locks, gated areas where water levels could be changed to raise or lower ships, were set up and managed by wealthy, politically connected locktenders who ran businesses from feed shops to hotels out of their stations. Dams were also necessary in that they diverted riverwater into the canals, and created artificial lakes that could allow ships to move further inland, closer to the coal fields.
Like modern highways, the canal system operated on a toll system. Ships were required to periodically steer into weigh stations, and their captains would be taxed according to the type and weight of their cargo. State administrators expected that the toll money would be enough to pay for the construction and maintenance of the canals, but due to the mismanagement of the project, it did not. The state never made a profit from its canal systems.
In 1834, when the North Branch Canal, connecting Northumberland with Pittston, was completed, the area became for a brief time preoccupied with the local rivers and canals. Towns like Port Griffith and Port Blanchard got their names from their relationship to the canal; in turn, many river boats were named after local places, including Susquehanna, Wyoming, Pittston, Wilkes-Barre, and Plymouth.
Steamboats thrived on the river from 1830 to 1850, but these years were full of hazard. Three ships carried the name Susquehanna from 1825 to 1883, and each one was wrecked by either inhospitable waters or freak explosions. The last of the Susquehanna boats blew up in 1883 with such force that its anchor was found years later in a mine (the anchor was subsequently taken to Texas by a miner as a souvenir, but later returned to Wilkes-Barre.)
In the 1840's, the canal was extended northward to the edge of New York. This 100-mile extension was funded by taxpayers, but the final link between Pennsylvania and New York was privately constructed by the politically connected Hollenback family, which demanded separate tolls from ships and increased their fortunes tremendously.
In March, 1865, a flood destroyed the canals of Greater Pittston. The state government, weary of the entire venture, washed its hands of it and sold the land to the rapidly growing railroad companies. Within a few years, the remnants of the canals had been, as Petrillo said, "filled in and tracked over." Railroads, capable of transporting larger loads year-round, dominated instantly. The canal system was never revived locally.
Steamboats continued to transport people and goods along the rivers until 1902, when they were supplanted by trolleys. Most local boats were sold, converted to housing, abandoned in canal beds, or sent to serve in the canals in other regions. Today, isolated sections of wood- and stonework from the defunct canal system are all that remains, along with photographs and memories of this unique era.