Main Line of Public Works
The Main Line of Public Works was a package of legislation passed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1826 to establish a means of transporting freight between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. It funded the construction of various long-proposed canal and road projects, mostly in southern Pennsylvania, that became a canal system and later added railroads. Built between 1826 and 1834, it established the Pennsylvania Canal System and the Allegheny Portage Railroad.
Later amendments substituted a new technology, railroads, in place of the planned but costly canal connecting the Delaware River in Philadelphia to the Susquehanna River. The route from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh remained a patchwork of canals and railroads until the Pennsylvania Railroad was built in the 1850s.
Historic Background
Trans-Appalachian settlement had begun in earnest during the latter years of the French and Indian War. Following the war, the British government made several agreements, primarily with the Iroquois, which resulted in official policies to curb the expansion of settlement in the colonial West. This was one of many British policies that created support for the American Revolution along the American frontier for those hoping to emigrate into the Ohio Country, and also for East Coast seaboard populations that were blooming in the pre-industrialization period.After the 1779 Sullivan Expedition broke the power of the Five Civilized Nations of the Iroquois towards the end of the American Revolutionary War, settlement became viable from the lower Susquehanna Valley to Upstate New York as far as Lake Erie. The U.S. was able to claim trans-Appalachian territories from the Ohio River to the lower Great Lakes, and west to Minnesota and Wisconsin.
As the Revolutionary War wound down in the 1780s, many family groups moved west, establishing scattered settlements from below the Wyoming Valley across the near west into the retreating western frontiers and the lands of the old Ohio Country. In the early 1800s, the new farms established along the moving frontier west of the Appalachian mountains were being connected back to Atlantic seaboard cities by turnpikes, canals, and other transportation infrastructure works funded mostly by private funds or local governments. By the 1810s the population west of the mountains was exploding. Regional transport hubs were established in Brownsville, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Detroit, and New Orleans. The markets of this burgeoning population were targeted by the business class of Philadelphia and New Jersey.
The War of 1812 exacerbated a difficult energy crisis. Bituminous coal imports from Liverpool, England ground to a halt under an 1812 embargo, cutting off a major industrial fuel source for most American factories at that time. Simultaneously, residential heating fuel in the Philadelphia region was already becoming scarce and more expensive due to over-logging of the local forests on the eastern seaboard. These mounting fuel shortages would motivate Pennsylvanian lawmakers, industrialists, and residents to better exploit local coal resources in the decades during and following the war.
Previous interior transportation projects
On March 31, 1790 the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed a resolution that authorized several river surveys, following petitions from the Society for Promoting the Improvement of Roads and Inland Navigation. These surveys confirmed that several rivers within Pennsylvania were suitable for improvement into navigations. In 1791 following the results of the surveys, an appropriation was made by the state of Pennsylvania to improve the Lehigh River. With the expectation of a soon-to-be-navigable Lehigh River, the Lehigh Coal Mine Company was founded in 1793 and subsequently purchased of land in the Mauch Chunk region of the Pennsylvania Coal Region. They created a road from their Mauch Chunk mining operation to the bank of the Lehigh River. However, the state of Pennsylvania did not use public funds to improve Lehigh River, and the Lehigh Coal Mine Company was not successful in shipping its coal down the rough and unimproved Lehigh.At the outbreak of the War of 1812 the foundries of Philadelphia suddenly lacked the inexpensive bituminous coal previously imported from England. Philadelphia industrialists were pressed for some solution to their foundries' fuel needs. During the war, an employee of Pennsylvania industrialist Josiah White had devised a method of burning "Rock Coal" properly in an effort to better exploit the relatively untapped coal resources within the local Pennsylvanian interior. White began buying shipments of local anthracite where he could, including two shipments from the Lehigh Coal Mine Company which had survived the trip down the Lehigh River. Pressure by various groups would encourage the Philadelphia Legislation to incorporate the Schuylkill Navigation Company on March 8, 1815. The Schuylkill Navigation Company was chartered to improve the Schuylkill River into the Schuylkill Navigationin 1815. The aim was to reliably connect the Coal Region in the Pennsylvanian interior to major cities on the coast, the industrial works near them, and their ports. White was one of the incorporators of the Schuylkill Navigation Company, however he would distance himself from the project when the project's backers took to quarreling over the best way to proceed. Ultimately the Schuylkill Navigation project was underfunded and work progressed slowly. Other major coal-carrying canals were completed first, including the Lehigh Canal in late 1820 and the Erie Canal in 1821 in New York. By mid-decade canal projects and some railroads were being proposed, organized, chartered, and built in Pennsylvania and other northeast seaboard states.
Josiah White turned instead to an alternative route down the Lehigh and Delaware rivers, believing that Lehigh coal was high quality and that the Lehigh Coal Mine Company could be secured cheaply, despite the more difficult waterways of the Lehigh. White and his business partners approached the failing LCMC, and after discussion "obtained the lease of their properties for a period of twenty years at an annual rental of one ear of corn". White and partners then approached the Philadelphia Legislature and successfully incorporated the Lehigh Navigation Company in March 1818, giving the company the rights to construct the Lehigh Canal. The Lehigh Navigation Company would go on to construct the initial leg of the planned route, which would later be known as the Lower Lehigh Canal, from 1818 to late 1820 using private funding.
In 1823, White proposed creating a navigational canal that would allow deep keeled coastal ships to reach docks and pickup and transship coal down the Lehigh Canal to Easton, Pennsylvania. White then sought a source of coal, finding the mines of the failing and unreliable Lehigh Coal Mine Company in 1815. White surveyed the Lehigh river, decided the improvement project was feasible, and returned to lease the operations of the Lehigh Coal Mine Company and improve navigability on the Lehigh River. The first 60 miles of canal route White proposed followed the Delaware River from Easton to the Philadelphia suburb town of Bristol, and would later become the Delaware Canal. White did not have control over the Delaware River portion of the project, which was initially constructed by the State of Pennsylvania.
By 1818, White had obtained the legal permissions "to ruin himself" fixing up the Lehigh, founding the Lehigh Navigation Company and using a quasi-lock of his own design to construct what is now known as the Lower Lehigh Canal between 1818 and 1820. The works had made sufficient improvements by late 1820 to deliver 365 tons of anthracite coal to Easton — by 1825 the annual anthracite tonnage had climbed to over per annum. White's ventures firmly established anthracite as a reliable inexpensive fuel and proved that once-treacherous inland Pennsylvania waterways could be engineered into profitable industrial shipping routes.
A couple years later, the legislature declined another offer by the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company which had built the Lehigh Canal with private funds. LC&N was unquestionably one of the most innovative companies of the era, driving the mining, transportation and industrial development of Pennsylvania by example, implementation, and by funding quite a few projects, as well. This new proposal was to build—at the companies expense— the project that would become their version of the eventual Delaware Canal built by the states engineering managers a few years later. The route was nearly the same, but the Delaware Canal as the state built it had numerous engineering flaws, including locks both too short and unpaired locks LC&N's experience and expertise would have mitigated. LC&N had started coal flowing to Philadelphia using short squared-off blocky barges it called coal arks, but in 1822-23 was already re-doing the upper four locks on the Lehigh Canal to support a steam powered tug pulling boats over built to support two way traffic with full locks. By 1825 the volume of coal coming down the Lehigh & Delaware to Philadelphia was becoming huge and problematic — LC&N was rapidly over logging the forests feeding the Lehigh to build boats for the one way trip. The extra expenses of the lack of a tow path canal for the sixty miles Easton-Philadelphia was very costly to LC&N, and the state's Delaware Canal attempt when opened in 1832 was five years later than promised and didn't work; the State had to hire Josiah White to repair its major deficiencies, then needed LC&N's expertise to operate it. LC&N ended up running both canals into the 1930s, and retained the rights to the Lehigh until the 1960s. While some problems were fixable, the Delaware Canal's lock's design was always a costly economic problem until the Canal became the parkland and current haven for pleasure boats.
White and Hazard made the offer in return for a break on tolls, and even included an offer to operate the system at cost—the state garnering all the tolls. This offer too was declined, and in 1827 in a separate amending act, the state authorized the Delaware Canal, which was delayed for a few more years costing LC&N many dollars, until it was finally dug alongside, and generally in sight of the Delaware River between Easton down river to Bristol. When completed in 1832 by the state it also didn't work—having leaking issues and water supply problems like those that plagued the Union Canal and Schuylkill Navigation, and the state needed to hire Josiah White to fix it before it became fully usable in 1834. Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company would operate the Canal into the 1930s, and controlled its resources and those rights attained on the Lehigh until the 1960s when they reverted or conveyed back to the state.
As Philadelphia saw improved commerce on the Lehigh and Schuylkill Rivers, though in 1824 both systems needed further development, a larger interconnected canal system was envisioned by New Jersey and Pennsylvanian businessmen operating in the city. While these businessmen urged local government officials to construct more canals, the same officials were also continually reading the press coverage around the building of the Erie Canal - construction updates, works designs and engineering feats - which was expected to massively boost the economy of New York City. Philadelphia's luminaries were vying with other coastal cities to become the United States' most important and influential port, as the country's population expanded westward to the Ohio Country and Northwest Territory regions. Constructing additional canals would also improve urban access to clean-burning anthracite coal; eastern cities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey had already consumed much of the eastern forests for heating fuel. Additional canals would improve access to the newly-opened Coal Region in Northeastern Pennsylvania: the initial mines in the Panther Creek Valley, a further extension of the Lehigh Canal up to White Haven, and a railroad connecting that upper canal with the coal sources in the Wyoming Valley.