The Setting

There are more than 20 National Heritage Areas in the United States today, each created by an individual act of Congress. Heritage Areas provide a mechanism to link communities and sites based on geographical or thematic connections, thus providing a way to work across traditional political boundaries to protect, enhance, and promote a region. In the eastern portion of Pennsylvania, the Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor has served as a conduit for locally driven preservation and tourism efforts for nearly 10 years.

In the 1820s, entrepreneurs in eastern Pennsylvania began developing a series of canals to work in tandem with the Lehigh and Delaware rivers to transport anthracite coal from the region’s coal mines to major markets such as New York City and Philadelphia. In the early days, these canals offered an efficient and cost-effective mode of transportation. Before the Civil War, mule-drawn boats carrying tons of coal, lumber, building stone, lime, and produce steadily plied the canals and lock systems of the Delaware Division of the Pennsylvania Canal and the Lehigh Coal and Navigation System.

Communities grew around the canals to serve its workers and travelers. Canalers and community residents traded goods and services. In time, larger support industries developed around these young towns, including Bethlehem Iron Company (later, Bethlehem Steel Corporation).

Immigrants, mostly from Europe, flocked into the region to seek their fortunes, and hamlets became towns and businesses flourished—for a time. But with the advent of railroads, canal transportation became less cost effective and business on and around the canals began to decline. On October 17, 1931, the last paid mule-drawn boat traversed the Delaware Canal while privately owned boats continued along the Lehigh for a few more years.

Thereafter, the lower canal corridor became known as the Delaware Canal and Roosevelt State Park and the Lehigh system disappeared almost entirely. Throughout the next few decades, as canal waters turned stagnant or dried up altogether, so did business on and near the canal. Although the park received an annual operating budget, it didn’t have a constant income to maintain the locks, canal walls, and towpath. The canal system deteriorated, became a dumping ground in some places, and was literally built over with roads in others and, in Bristol, even a school. Seeking employment, residents of the northern coal region migrated south to Levittown—the famed planned suburban community —and Fairless Hills, or commuted over an hour each way into the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton region.

Thus, the canal corridor, which stretches from Wilkes-Barre in the northeast to the tidewaters of Bristol in the southeast—a region that once contained abundant natural resources, a region steeped in history with structures representing human grown and habitation for 6,000 years, a region of bucolic countryside, rugged mountains, lush valleys, and communities that should be thriving— suffered continual losses of people and industry over the last half century.

Remaining residents watched as the backbone of their communities eroded and decayed. Some of them knew that action had to be taken to prevent total reclamation of a once thriving commercial and transportation route by the forces of nature, and they began to rally around the canals.

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