Coal Boats – Packer Boats – Packet Boats – Tugboats – Steamboats – Dredges – Barges – Scows
For an overview of the craft that worked the Navigation, you can read Larry Whyte’s “Boats of the Navigation” here. You can learn more about some of the individual boats by reading the stories below.
For the 2025 Schuylkill Navigation Bicentennial, 350 bumper stickers were produced, representing 35 true historic boat names. Below are examples of the stickers and some stories about the boats.
Sticker concept, research, and design by John Bambrick (Schuylkill County), Vernie Noecker (Berks County), and Sandy Sorlien (Philadelphia County). Project funded by The Awesome Foundation “On the Water” initiative.
Mariner of Phila. is shown below at its home port, Schuylkill Haven, at Dam 7 and Lock 13.
Boats were named for boat owners and their family members, noted local citizens, Civil War generals and national heroes, officials of the SNC, birds and other animals, US States and other places, and personal visions.
One of our favorite boat names is Petrel, a pelagic bird certainly never glimpsed on the inland waterways of Pennsylvania. Along with Celestial Empire, Ocean Wave, Atlantic, Dolphin, and the high status of the Florida conch shell as the boatman’s horn, Petrel speaks to the dreams of boatmen to reach not just tidewater, but the open sea.
The Atlantic of Trenton NJ, shown below in 1891, was a Schuylkill-style canal boat that operated on the Delaware & Raritan Canal.
Below: Looking downstream, the steam tug Dolphin approaches Jackson’s Lock 48, the Reading Canal Outlet. The pilot house of Dolphin now resides inside the C. Howard Hiester Canal Center at Berks County Heritage Center.
Wreck Boat #2, below, bears the ownership label P&RRR which indicates a post-1870 photograph. 1870 was the year the Reading leased the Navigation and started rebranding it the Schuylkill Canal on its maps. The wreck boats were steam-powered to move fast to respond to emergencies, without concern for churning up water that could damage banks of canals. Steam for regular canal boats had been available in the 1820s but its use was generally avoided for that reason.
In 1859, the year of most tonnage carried, there were 1400 boats operating on the river. Mostly were anthracite-carrying coal boats, towed by mules as far as 100 miles. Frederick W. Fraley, the sixth President of the Schuylkill Navigation Company, naturally had a boat named after him. Maybe both of the above: who else would have been the SNC’s Big Potato?
Below is Catfish, a steam tug, towing a work scow and a dredge on the Girard Canal of the Schuylkill Navigation. Almost from the beginning of the Navigation in the early 19th century, coal waste piled up in the channels and behind dams and had to be continually dredged.
Below: Shark of Phila. photographed in New Haven, CT, around 1900.
The aptly-named Pioneer was the first boat to make a through trip to Philadelphia when the upper and lower divisions of the Navigation were temporarily connected at Reading on December 3, 1824. Canal historian Stuart Wells explains why that’s not the Bicentennial date.
According to historian Harry Rinker, “The Reading Steamboat Association, comprised of city officials and members of the common and select councils, owned the City of Reading [below]. The vessel was sixty-seven feet long and cost three hundred and fifty dollars to build.”
Below: Coal barge Bruce in the Blue Mountain Dam pool with a team of three mules and their driver-rider. The light (unloaded) boat is heading upstream toward Port Clinton and the Schuylkill Gap. In the background is the Blue Mountain, southernmost of the Appalachian ridges of the Coal Region. Other water gaps through the Blue Mountain include the Susquehanna, Swatara, Lehigh, and Delaware.
Below: Alice Matilda of Phila., in Schuylkill County around 1884, is in dire need of repairs.
Below: Among the coal barges rotting in this canal graveyard along Port Clinton Avenue above Hamburg were the Item (named for a local newspaper), Maude, and Gwynne. The Gwynne was built in 1881 in Philadelphia and was listed at 107.25 gross tonnage.
The following “Return of Boats” reports from 1859 are typical of those that ran almost daily in The Reading Times during the navigation’s open season. Some of our 2025 Adopted Boats are highlighted.
Many of the sticker names (including War Eagle) came from the following list, already nicely selected by H.C. Wilson from the 1870 Reading Railroad lease of the SNC. [You can read Wilson’s full article here.]
The newspaper note below, looking back 90 years to an 1881 wreck of a canal boat named “Clarence,” ran in the Pottsville Republican in 1971.
The following sad story about the boat “Wandering Boy” first ran in The Miners’ Journal in 1891, and was reprinted all over the country.
To read the happy ending to Tommy’s saga and other versions of his story, visit this page on Richard Nagle’s “Schuylkill Haven History” website, and scroll down to 1891 articles. This site includes many other lively 19th century articles about canal boats and the coal trade, and even some that focused on the business of the SNC, like the story below about a “breach of a contract of affreightment.”
In the big scheme of things, the Schuylkill Navigation Company was a business that hoped to make boatloads of money for its stockholders–so the bottom line was all about:
More boat images and stories can be found in Harry L. Rinker’s classic book The Schuylkill Navigation: A Photographic History. It is out of print but sometimes pops up on eBay.
Finally: How many boats can fit in a lock? Pictures from then and now.
To learn much more about the history of the Schuylkill Navigation, visit the SNC Bicentennial page at WaterHistoryPHL, or join the SNC Facebook group.