The Schuylkill Navigation Company maintained a system of canals, locks, dams and slackwater pools that followed the river from coal country in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania down to the Fairmount Dam and locks in Philadelphia. The system, built in the second decade of the 19th century, is now defunct, but pieces of its infrastructure still exist. Many of these pieces are included in Inland, a book of photographs by Sandy Sorlien (a PWD consultant) with historical essays by several Navigation experts.
I accompanied Sandy on several of her explorations for this book, and never failed to be amazed by the remnants of this important infrastructure—including several dams and many canal locks—that still stand after almost two hundred years. The best example is the restored Lock 60 in the Schuylkill Canal Park in Mont Clare, just across the Schuylkill from downtown Phoenixville. And PWD is now doing work on the lock at Flat Rock Dam, in the city’s Shawmont neighborhood, aiming to restore flow to the Manayunk Canal.
This scrapbook was given to the PWD Historical Collection by Sandy Sorlien, who received it after the Port Clinton (Pa.) Transportation Museum shut down and dispersed its collection. It contains a record of the material received at one of the landings on the Schuylkill Navigation, from 1933-1941, compiled by Herbert Ritter; and a collection of newspaper clippings collected by Reuben Ritter between 1918 and 1924. By the time this scrapbook was compiled, traffic on the navigation system was slight, most of it having moved over to railroads long before.
Three sample pages from the newspaper section of the scrapbook.