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Episode 3.3 - Canal Boat Families, Mules, and More in the D&L Corridor
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[National Heritage Areas Podcast Episode 3.3: Canal Boat Families, Mules, and More in the D&L Corridor]
[Music]
Peter: Hello, this is Peter Samuel. I’m the National Heritage Areas Program Manager in the Northeast Region of the National Park Service. And I’m here with Jules Long. Hi, Jules.
Jules: Hi, Peter. We have a fun episode coming up. We were just visiting the Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor, located in eastern Pennsylvania.
Peter: The Delaware & Lehigh, we call it the D&L [Corridor].
Jules: The offices are located at the National Canal Museum.
Peter: Right.
Jules: In between the Delaware Canal and the Delaware River. And that’s really what the heritage area focuses on, is telling the story of the canals. They also have tons of trails—recreation, bikes, running, walking, casual exploration.
Peter: Yeah, they’ve been doing amazing work. I think it’s, what, over 150 miles of trails eventually when they connect them all up.
Jules: Yeah, yeah. And their getting close.
Peter: That will be a great experience. Yeah. We were there on a beautiful day. And I think one of the first things we saw when we got out of the car were the mules.
Jules: Yeah. They were—they were pretty cool. I am an animal person.
Jules: For the podcast, I interviewed Martha Capwell Fox, the historian for the [National Heritage] Area.
Peter: Yeah. The really interesting thing, I think, is what drove the whole canal system was anthracite mining.
Jules: Yeah, she talks about how it really began the Industrial Revolution here in Pennsylvania. I think there are some regional debates about where the Industrial Revolution began, but down here the coal really kind of jumpstarted that kind of work.
Peter: Yeah.
Jules: Martha tells us a lot about that, and about the canals, and how they work—and also the mules, of course, because they’re great. And if you haven’t seen them, check out the pictures at the website that goes with the podcast at NPS.gov. [more at https://www.nps.gov/articles/nhapodcast3-3.htm]
Jules: And I also talked to Dennis Scholl, who is the education manager, and he’ll tell us some more about the fieldtrips, the programs, what they do. They have a couple of different types of programs. The two fieldtrips are based on the Tales of the Towpath for elementary school students. And that is a book that D&L has put together. It’s an entire curriculum that kids follow: social studies, writing and reading, social studies, put together.
Peter: It’s a great way for kids to really get exposed to history at a young age.
Jules: Yeah, it’s an award winning program. And pretty cool stuff.
Peter: Yeah.
Jules: Alright, we’ll get started.
[musical interlude]
Jules: This is Jules, I'm here in Easton, Pennsylvania, and I'm sitting down with the historian of the [National] Heritage Area here. Can you introduce yourself?
Martha: My name’s Martha Capwell Fox and I'm the historian and the archives coordinator for the National Canal Museum and the Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor.
Jules: Now, Martha, when I walked up to the museum, I saw something very different. I saw two mules, and they were pulling a rope that was attached to a boat full of school kid on a canal….
Martha: Yes.
Jules: What is that?
Martha: The mules are our favorite boys, Hank and George. They are pulling our canal boat, the Josiah White II. We are very fortunate to have the only fully restored section of the Lehigh Navigation, an actual functioning canal section about two and a half miles long.
Jules: Very cool.
Martha: Because of the canals, this part of Pennsylvania—the Lehigh Valley—is where the American Industrial Revolution began.
Jules: Wow.
Martha: The cool thing about where we are right now, and the reason that the Canal Museum is located here in Easton, is that beginning in about 1834 or so, Easton became the only place in the United States where three canals came together. So for a bit of time, Easton was the hub of the energy transport network in the United States.
Martha: It’s kind of a step-by-step story. The canals were built to carry anthracite coal from the mountains in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Martha: In fact, all of this started because in the early 19th century, the United States was actually experiencing its first energy crisis. The fuel that was short at that point in the early 1800s was wood. It's hard to believe, when you look around and see the forests and the woods, that in the early 1800s this had basically all been clear-cut. And wood was becoming very expensive and so that was a problem for people to heat their houses and to cook with. And it was also a huge problem for people who were attempting to do things like make iron.
Martha: There were a lot of educated Americans who realized this, too. Among them were people from Philadelphia, and they were the first ones who attempted to mine anthracite coal up in the counties that are now Carbon County, Luzerne County, and Schuylkill County. Anthracite is hard coal, as it's sometimes known, and it makes a very, very hot fire because it's very high in carbon. And so it was cheap and it was effective, and people loved it.
Martha: Anthracite’s not common. It's only found in a few places. But the world's largest single deposit is in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Jules: Right here.
Martha: Exactly. Right here. Then they needed a way to get it to market. And the only way to move coal in those days was by water. The trouble there with trying to move stuff by water was that the rivers that were the closest to the coal mines, the coal fields, were not navigable.
Martha: Once the Erie Canal was completed, in 1825, that was really the first time that there was enough engineering knowledge in this country to build canals. So with the Erie completed, the two men in Philadelphia who had bought the coal fields up in what's now Carbon County—they were named Josiah White, and Erskine Hazard was his partner. Josiah White devised a way to make the Lehigh River navigable. But they still weren't willing to take the chance on going into this business because lots of people had to tally lost all their money in the anthracite business for the previous like 20 years. So they went to the Pennsylvania Legislature in Harrisburg, and they said: ‘Look, if we can move this coal down to places where people can use it, it's going to be good for the United States, it's going to be good for Pennsylvania, it’s going to be good for our company; so you have to help us. You're going to give us the Lehigh River.’ And the Legislature said, ‘Oh sure, take the river. You can have the rights to all the water power, you can have the rights to the tributaries, you can have the rights to the land on either bank. You know you're going to lose your money. We'll get the river back in nothing flat.’ Well, the Lehigh remained the only privately owned river in the United States until 1966, from 1818.
Both: [laughter]
Martha: So with a river in hand and a coal mine up in Carbon County, they started to bring the coal down and ship it down the river. Then after the Erie [Canal], as I said, that led to the building of the canals—the navigations, actually, because the rivers was incorporated in the navigation. And so that was completed in 1829. After that, they began to move literally tens of thousands of tons of coal. They weren't the only company, but that was what kicked off the easy transportation of the coal. Basically what they did by making this incredibly high-energy source of fuel available to this country was to transform the energy economy of the United States from a wood-based system to a coal-based system in about 20 years. By the time of the Civil War, the Northeast was this manufacturing powerhouse. There was a tremendous amount of iron goods and other products being made.
Martha: It didn't take too long before people started making steam locomotives and train tracks; they had some advantages in terms of speed. But, nevertheless, the canals, particularly the Lehigh and the Delaware system, persisted all the way through the 19th century and well into the 20th century. Because they were still an economical way to carry heavy, bulky cargo, like stone and coal and things like that.
Martha: So it was pretty remarkable and it stayed that way right up through the 1920s. The boats never were powered. They were always towed by mules. They had no electricity. We actually have film that was shot in the late 1920s on the Delaware Canal. Apart from the fact that every once in a while a car goes by, it could be 1868 instead of 1928. Because it's exactly the same way. Mules, no power, just pulling along at their two and a half miles or so.
Jules: Yeah.
Martha: The interesting thing about the way the system worked here in this part of Pennsylvania was [that] the boats in the 19th century were largely run by families.
Jules: And these were the canal boats?
Martha: These were the canal boats, yes. You know, a 90-foot or so long canal boat pulled by mules. Very often had a whole family aboard as the crew. Some people owned their own boats, but it was more common for people to lease a boat for a season from the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company.
Martha: The father of the family—most likely the father, the top man of the family—would be the person who only would be able to sign a lease agreement with the canal company in the 19th century.
Jules: Yeah, women didn’t have the right to do that.
Martha: Women’s didn’t have the right to do that. The dad was the captain. Probably did most of the steering. Kept track of what they delivered. You had to keep a log, you know, what you were carrying, obviously where it was delivered, if you paid tolls, collected tolls, paid money, whatever. So that meant that these people had to be at least basically literate.
Martha: The mother of the family probably also helped with that sort of job, where she could. She also helped to steer the boat. And then the thing that's amazing to me is that they're in a ten and a half foot wide boat with a ten by eight foot cabin underneath it. She also did everything that a mom would do on land. You know, fed everybody; tried to keep them reasonably clean, which couldn't have been very easy; took her turn steering—because we have a lot of pictures of women at the tiller—and kind of acted as the family doctor too, and also a sort of the family vet. Because the mules belonged to the people. You leased the boat, but you had to buy the mules from the Lehigh Coal & Navigation. You also had to provide all your harnessing, your towing gear, ropes, things like that. So that meant that people took good care of their mules, because it was like having a car. But the other thing that's sort of funny when you think of that, the mules being like your car, is that nowadays we wouldn't hand our cars over to our eight-year-olds. [laughter] In the 19th century, a tremendous amount of the responsibility for taking care of the mules rested with the kids. So from the time they were, like, maybe seven or eight, they were the ones who, you know, got up at in the morning at 3:00, 3:30—because the canal opened at 4:00—and cleaned the mules, harnessed them, fed them, checked their hooves to make sure that there was nothing in their shoes or in the soft part of their hooves You know that would keep them from from walking comfortably, brought them out on the towpath, hitched them up to the boat, then off they went. And they did this for an 18-hour day.
Jules: Wow. So the kids were the mule whisperers.
Martha: Yes, the kids were the mule whisperers.
Jules: Yeah. I'm just thinking of the kids pulling those mules. And the mules I saw outside, they are huge. They are big animals.
Martha: Yes.
Jules: Is that how big they would have been historically?
Martha: They may or may not have been. Our previous team was a lot smaller than Hank at George.
Jules: Even if they weren't—I mean, horses are a lot bigger than kids.
Martha: Yes, horses are a lot bigger. Mules are really a unique story. The thing is with mules is that they are ideally suited to this kind of work because they are, pound-for-pound compared to horses, they're stronger. They actually eat a bit less and they are capable of longer sustained work. What we like to say is that although the saying is “stubborn as a mule,” we like to say it’s “smart as a mule.” Because with a mule, if they are too hot, too dehydrated, too sick, too injured, too “anything” to interfere with them being able to work, and maybe possibly even endangering their lives or their ability to work, they will stop. And you cannot make them go again until you fix the problem.
Jules: Smart mules.
Martha: Smart mules. Exactly The other thing about mules, which is sort of funny, too, is that no matter how hot or thirsty they are? They will not attempt to go in the water.
Jules: Yeah, one of the guides outside was telling me that the mules won't step in the puddles.
Martha. They will not step in a puddle. It is hilarious to watch an 1100-pound mule very carefully almost tiptoe around a puddle. We do have a little bit of film in that 1928 film and a handful of pictures of mules walking through the water on the sides of some of the aqueducts down on the Delaware Canal. But I think that was just a matter of repetition, but I can't see Hank and George ever doing that.
Jules: Maybe Hank and George are a little bit spoiled?
Both: [Laughter]
Martha: Oh, Hank and George are the luckiest mules in Pennsylvania, if not the United States.
Martha: From the stories that we've read about people, especially when people started out with a mule team when they were children—people were very attached to their mules. And on this canal they did take care of them. Because if, you know, the mules don't go, you don't go.
Jules: Yeah.
Martha: You don't go, you don't deliver your stuff, you don't get paid.
Martha: We have pictures around here of a couple of people who we know who they are, and there they are in, you know, 1905, 1910, with their mule, you know, at a pretty young age .
Martha: It was a kind of a peculiar way of life. But especially in the 19th century, when you think about it, even though it was it was not an easy life but , you know, but, you know, where would you rather have your kid? Would you like them out in the fresh air and sunshine, where you can see them, or do you want them in a coal breaker? Or a mine, worse, even worse? Even though even the factory kids were working in the mines in the mine.
Jules: That’s true. Yeah, because kids were working in the mines.
Martha: Or a factory.
Jules: Ooh, yeah.
Martha: Factory work wasn’t safe. And even a family farm was not necessarily the safest place to be. And so, you know, from that standpoint, I mean the family was together and so it was a family enterprise. It did not allow for a tremendous amount of opportunity for education. But those kids actually did get to go to school because the canal closed around the end of November and didn't open until the end of March or early April because they would drain the canals. You can't let ice buildup on the canals because it's bad for the banks and the locks and all the structures.
Jules: Oh, okay. The ice would destroy it.
Martha: Plus the fact that you're not going to drag a boat through icy water, you know.
Jules: Yeah.
Martha: Those children at least got the chance to get some basic education. And we know from oral history that was done in the 1960s and 70s with the last of the people who had lived and worked on the canals that that particularly folks on the boats, as well as locktenders, tended to keep this job in families for generations.
Jules: So the locktending families, these are the ones that were living in houses next to the [canal] locks and they helped out with the locks? What was that process?
Martha: Okay, well, they actually ran the locks.
Jules: I'm from a place where there are no canals and so to me canals in general are brand new, but also the idea of a lock with the water filling to raise the boat up—it's just so new to me to watch.
Martha: Locks are basically water elevators. And we also had a very unique system on this canal of the way the lock mechanisms work. On most historic canals, the locks are opened and closed by means a balance beams—long, long, heavy pieces of lumber. And basically what you have to do to open or close the locks is to lean on them and then swing them. But on this canal, a canal engineer, whose name was Edwin Douglas, invented a rack and pinion system that involves a bunch of gears. The gear system is attached to the top of the lock. So even women and—not tiny kids, but, you know, 10 to 12-year-old children can actually open and close lock gates, even when they weigh like six or seven tons, because of the rack and pinion system. So that meant that on this canal, rather than a canal company employing three or four big guys at every lock, they could install families in their locktender houses. It didn't pay much, but it got you a house. Locktending wives and mothers tended to be able to do other things so that they could make some extra money, and also help service the folks who were living on the canal boats, like taking in laundry, for instance.
Martha: Again, you know, the father of the family would be the official employee but the whole family would be there and then they could share the duties of maintaining the lock. And that was pretty demanding too. Because like I said the canal opened at 4:00 a.m and it closed at 10:00 p.m. at night. So at the height of the canal era, in the 1850s, there were 2,000 boats on this canal network of the Lehigh, the Delaware, and the Morris.
Jules: Wow.
Martha: That's a lot of boats.
Both: [Laughter]
Martha: And that's a lot of people showing up at every lock all day long and into the night.
Martha: you know, it was a very unusual way of life. But people did—did do it for, you know, many, many years.
[musical interlude]
Dennis: My name is Dennis Scholl. I'm the education manager for the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor.
Jules: So I saw a bunch of kids outside the museum today when I came. They were clearly on a field trip. What kind of field trip was that?
Dennis: They are students who are studying Tales of the Towpath curriculum in the classroom. This is a curriculum we developed approximately 10 years ago. They've read their story book they've done lessons about the canal and life in the 19th century and today they are here to experience parts of it.
Dennis: Their activities include a ride on the Josiah White II canal boat. This is probably the first time any of them has been on a canal. They hear a lot of anecdotal information about life on the canal, things lock tenders would have done, responsibilities that the children would have had when they get off the canal boat they break into four groups and go to four lesson sites there is a lesson site on geology and blacksmithing, where they learn about the importance of iron and how it was made and then get a hands-on blacksmith activity and go home with a little iron rod that becomes an S hook that can hold their clothing or knapsack or whatever they want to hang on it. They go to “Canal Life,” where they learn how to wash clothes like kids did in the 19th century, and they blow a conch shell which was the horn of sorts a natural horn that was used on the boats to announce a boat's presence at a lock . They also get to harness a mule if time allows we have two large life-size fiberglass mules and harness sets and they work in teams and learn the responsibilities that their 19th century counterparts would have had. The final lesson is simple machines where they get an idea of how the canal was built, basically using shovels and picks and wheelbarrows—human and animal power back in those days so it's a pretty full day. By the time they get back they will have many visual experiences that they can tap into as they read the rest of their book
Jules: Now I know you have another location where you do other educational programs?
Dennis: Freemansburg was a very important canal town back in the 19th century. It's a really good field trip. A lot of good information through hands on activities about the life of children living in a locktender’s family in the canal days. They get to do everything there, make sauerkraut, explore at the grist mill ruins for artifacts. And we do find a lot of stuff down there. We find coal, which is a treasure to them, almost as important as a diamond. We have them go inside the locktender’s house—it's one of only two remaining on the Lehigh Canal system. So they can see what life was like in a small building, where the family might have been upwards of 10 to 12 people with all the children. And they learn what kids of their age would have done at 3:00 in the morning when they got up to get the canal boat captain's mules ready for a day out on the towpath. They learn how to harness the mule, they would learn how to groom the mule and get it ready for the boat captain. So all in all they're getting a very good look at the life of a ten-year-old kid back in the 1850s.
Jules: Yeah, sounds like a really great hands-on experience. That sounds really fun.
Dennis: It’s definitely a lot of work, but fun.
Jules: Yeah? What do you enjoy the most about it?
Dennis: The sauerkraut experience.
Jules: Yeah?
Dennis: We focus on sauerkraut because that is one of the primary foods that people who lived in these locktender’s houses, who were primarily Pennsylvania Germans. The kids learn about food preservation. You know, today they're so used to opening a refrigerator and getting out what they want or going to a grocery store. That wasn't the way it was back then. The people who lived at the locktender’s houses were poor. They had their own gardens to grow their own fresh produce, and they bartered with neighbors to get meats and milk or cheese. But the concept of keeping these food products fresh—food was stored in root cellars back in those days, which is brought out in Tales of the Towpath, but until they [students] get down there and they understand, ‘Hey, there was no electricity here. Oh my gosh, no refrigerator, no freezer. Where did they keep this stuff?’ So we cover the food aspects, we tell them how food was preserved, they get up and help us shred the cabbage, they help us pack the containers with it and get it ready for about six weeks of fermentation. They learn the scientific principles behind that. They take a tour through our 19th-century garden.
Jules: Very fun. What kind of impacts does this experience have on these kids?
Dennis: So it's exposing children to history. We feel that if they don't have a grasp of history, they're not really going to understand the growth of their communities, the growth of society, and where we are as Americans today. So with Tales of the Towpath, we felt we were providing a good solid local history curriculum that focused on the story of the D&L Corridor [Delaware & Lehigh NHA], and that is the building of the canals and the transportation of anthracite coal to the markets. It's well received. The kids get to do a lot of hands on stuff with this curriculum. The teachers like it because it’s local history. And that the districts are sticking with it—to have a social studies curriculum in a district for ten years is unusual, and we're very happy to say that ours has withstood the test of time.
Jules: That's great, especially that you worked with teachers so much. I hear that you're working on another project as well
Dennis: We are, we’re in our fourth year. So cultural ecology of eastern Pennsylvania is hopefully the next curriculum of impact that we come out with.
Jules: That's excellent. Thanks so much for sitting down with me today Dennis and sharing all of these cool educational programs that the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor is working on.
Dennis: Oh, you're very welcome, Jules.
[musical interlude]
Peter: Wow, that was super interesting.
Jules: Yeah, hope you enjoyed all the mule talk.
Peter: Oh, I love hearing about Hank and George.
Jules: I had to cut out a lot of that because we spent a lot of time talking about the mules, I won’t lie.
Both: [laughter]
Peter: But you know they are pretty interesting. And Dennis, he’s really done amazing work up there with the Tales of the Towpath.
Jules: Yeah, they do a great job with their education programs.
Peter: They’re also looking at expanding the curriculum into high school and college.
Jules: Yeah, we didn’t have a lot of time to talk about that, but they are working on that new curriculum. They’re testing it right now. Talking about the history all the way from the Lenni Lenape people, the Native Americans, and how the landscape has changed, how the science works in the region, these places the students are experiencing.
Jules: And they work hard on the trails. And lots of great trails that everyone can enjoy. And everyone is also welcome to visit the National Canal Museum.
Peter: It’s got its own park around it, so it’s a great location.
Jules: Yeah, it’s nice for a stroll just to look around, you can watch the canals, or you can take your own canal boat ride and can go inside the museum as well. They also have different art exhibits that are fun to check out.
Peter: Great. Well, thanks a lot, Jules.
Jules: Thank you.
[musical interlude]
Jules: The interviews in this episode were recorded onsite at the Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor office at the National Canal Museum in Easton, Pennsylvania. We’d like to thank James Farrell for producing our theme song. Hope you enjoyed the episode!
[music]
Description
In Episode 3.3 of the National Heritage Areas Podcast, Jules visits the Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor to learn about life on the canals of eastern Pennsylvania in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and about the many exciting educational programs of the Corridor.
Duration
25 minutes, 41 seconds
Credit
NPS Northeast Region
Date Created
06/28/2019
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