The Schuylkill Navigation Company


Book Description

"The articles which compose the body of the following pamphlet, were originally published as leading editorials in the North America."--Introductory note




Along the Schuylkill River


Book Description

The Schuylkill River got its name, meaning "hidden river," from Dutch settlers who discovered its mouth sequestered behind the Delaware River's League Island. It later became a river of revolutions. Along its banks Revolutionary War battles were fought, and George Washington's army famously camped at Valley Forge. Later the river helped fuel the Industrial Revolution with coal from Schuylkill County shipped to Philadelphia via the Schuylkill Canal. The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad began here and grew into the largest corporation in the world. The iron and steel industry flourished along its waters. The Schuylkill River Desilting Project of the 1950s was the first large-scale cleanup of its kind and helped usher in an environmental revolution. The nation's first public water supply was developed here, and its first zoo and university overlook the river.




Inland


Book Description

The Schuylkill River flows more than 100 miles from the mountains of the Pennsylvania Coal Region to 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: the Schuylkill Navigation. Some of it is literally buried in their own backyards.0Often 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 1816.0In the 1940s, as part of a massive environmental cleanup of the river, this important and influential infrastructure was largely dismantled - but not entirely.What happened to the rest of it?0Photographer Sandy Sorlien resolved to find out. Over the course of seven years, she traveled upriver repeatedly to bushwhack along the riverbanks and to row and paddle in the river itself.0Along with Sorlien's full-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.




Schuylkill Canal, The


Book Description

In 1825, the Schuylkill Navigation Company completed a waterway of 108 miles, linking Port Carbon to Philadelphia. The waterway, known as the Schuylkill Navigation but commonly referred to today as the Schuylkill Canal, consisted of a system of interconnected canals (often called reaches), locks, and slack-water pools to transport anthracite coal. Before that time, Philadelphia depended on the import of coal from Europe. The Schuylkill Canal was operational until 1931, around the time of the collapse of commercial traffic in the navigation. Only two watered stretches of the canal remain today: the approximately 2.5 miles of the original 3.5 miles of Oakes Reach between Oaks and Mont Clare and the one-mile reach in Manayunk. While these areas are no longer used for navigation, they are enjoyed recreationally by many in the surrounding communities.




A River Again


Book Description

In a short time, the Schuylkill went from being considered waters of "uncommon purity" to being this country's dirtiest river. That distinction resulted in the Schuylkill River becoming the focus of a precedent-setting river cleanup effort from 1947 to 1951.The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania hired a team of engineers to free the Schuylkill from the millions of tons of coal sediment that had filled its bed and raised its floodplain.The Schuylkill River Project Engineers dredged the river and trapped sediment in desilting pools, the kind of practices that river restorations are undertaken to undo today. But at the end of the project, the Schuylkill emerged A RIVER AGAIN.




Philadelphia's Pencoyd Iron Works: Forging Along the Schuylkill River


Book Description

"Established on the Schuykill River in 1852, Philadelphia's Pencoyd Iron Works was a global leader in structural steel and wrought iron for more than eight decades. ... Author Kevin Righter constructs the immense history of the Pencoyd Iron Works."--Back cover




Pennsylvania's Covered Bridges


Book Description

The result is a revised and expanded second edition, filled to the brim with color photographs and additional information about each of the 221 remaining covered bridges in the state."--BOOK JACKET.




Boathouse Row


Book Description

The history of Philadelphia’s Boathouse Row is both wide and deep.Dotty Brown, an avid rower and former editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, immersed herself in boathouse archives to provide a comprehensive history of rowing in Philadelphia. She takes readers behind the scenes to recount the era when rowing was the spectator sport of its time—and the subject of Thomas Eakins’ early artwork—through the heyday of the famed Kelly dynasty, and the fight for women to get the right to row. (Yes, it really was a fight, and it took generations to win.) With more than 160 photographs, a third of them in full color, Boathouse Row chronicles the “waves of change” as various groups of different races, classes, and genders fought for access to water and the sport. Chapters also discuss the architectural one-upmanship that defined Boathouse Row after Frank Furness designed the stunning and eclectic Undine Barge Club, and the regattas that continue to take place today on the Schuylkill River, including the forgotten forces that propelled high school rowing. Beautifully written and illustrated, Boathouse Row will be a keepsake for rowers and spectators alike.




The Grid and the River


Book Description

"A collection of essays examining how patterns of use and attitudes to green spaces within Penn's city plan and along the Schuylkill informed notions of place from the time of Philadelphia's founding to the formation of the modern Fairmount Park system in the mid-19th century"--Provided by publisher.




The Signature of All Things


Book Description

A glorious, sweeping novel of desire, ambition, and the thirst for knowledge, from the # 1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love, Big Magic, and City of Girls In The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction, inserting her inimitable voice into an enthralling story of love, adventure and discovery. Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as led by the enterprising Henry Whittaker—a poor-born Englishman who makes a great fortune in the South American quinine trade, eventually becoming the richest man in Philadelphia. Born in 1800, Henry’s brilliant daughter, Alma (who inherits both her father’s money and his mind), ultimately becomes a botanist of considerable gifts herself. As Alma’s research takes her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, she falls in love with a man named Ambrose Pike who makes incomparable paintings of orchids and who draws her in the exact opposite direction—into the realm of the spiritual, the divine, and the magical. Alma is a clear-minded scientist; Ambrose a utopian artist—but what unites this unlikely couple is a desperate need to understand the workings of this world and the mechanisms behind all life. Exquisitely researched and told at a galloping pace, The Signature of All Things soars across the globe—from London to Peru to Philadelphia to Tahiti to Amsterdam, and beyond. Along the way, the story is peopled with unforgettable characters: missionaries, abolitionists, adventurers, astronomers, sea captains, geniuses, and the quite mad. But most memorable of all, it is the story of Alma Whittaker, who—born in the Age of Enlightenment, but living well into the Industrial Revolution—bears witness to that extraordinary moment in human history when all the old assumptions about science, religion, commerce, and class were exploding into dangerous new ideas. Written in the bold, questing spirit of that singular time, Gilbert’s wise, deep, and spellbinding tale is certain to capture the hearts and minds of readers.