The Lehigh Canal
Glendon, Northampton County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
This canal's 47 miles from Mauch Chunk to Easton were constructed 1827-1829. Here the Lehigh Canal connected with the Delaware Canal to Philadelphia, and with the Morris Canal to New York. Vital to the transport of anthracite coal and to the rise of the anthracite iron industry, the Lehigh Canal was in full operation until 1932, and in partial operation 10 years longer. This section was fully restored, 1976.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Dug between 1827 and 1829, the Lehigh Canal ran 47 miles from Mauch Chunk to Easton, where it met the Delaware Canal to Philadelphia and the Morris Canal to New York. It was a vital artery for hauling anthracite coal out of Pennsylvania's hard-coal region, fueling the rise of the anthracite iron industry that powered the young nation's growth. The canal ran in full operation until 1932, and this restored section reopened in 1976.
Why it matters
The Lehigh Canal helped launch America's industrial economy by moving the anthracite coal that heated cities and fired the furnaces of early heavy industry.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the late 1820s, the young United States was hungry for fuel and for ways to move it. The land around the Lehigh River in eastern Pennsylvania sat atop one of the world's great deposits of anthracite — a hard, clean-burning coal that was hard to ignite but, once lit, threw off tremendous, steady heat. The problem was never finding the coal. It was getting it out of the mountains and down to the cities that needed it.
Rivers were the highways of the age, but the Lehigh was shallow, rocky, and unreliable — fine for a spring freshet, useless for steady commerce. So engineers and investors did what the era did best: they built a better waterway alongside the natural one. Between 1827 and 1829 they dug a canal running some 47 miles down the valley, with locks and dams to tame the drop in elevation and keep boats moving in a controlled, navigable channel year-round.
This was the canal age in full swing, the same generation that produced New York's Erie Canal. For a brief, ambitious window before the railroads took over, Americans believed the future would float — that prosperity would arrive by mule-drawn boat along ditches carved through the countryside. Here in the Lehigh Valley, that belief paid off in coal.
People & events
The great actors here were not generals or presidents but the boatmen, lock-tenders, and mule drivers who made the system run. A loaded coal boat did not power itself; it was pulled by mules or horses walking a towpath along the bank, guided by a driver — often a boy or a young man — while a steersman worked the tiller. At each lock, a tender opened the gates and let the water lift or lower the boat step by step down the valley.
The canal's real purpose was to knit together a larger network. At its lower end it met other waterways: one route carried boats and cargo onward toward Philadelphia, and another connected across New Jersey toward the New York market. A boatload of coal dug in the mountains could, in stages, reach the doorsteps and factories of the two biggest cities on the eastern seaboard. That connection is what turned a regional ditch into a piece of national infrastructure.
The work of digging it was hard and hand-powered — picks, shovels, black powder, animal muscle, and the labor of crews who moved enormous quantities of earth and stone in just a few years. The result stayed in service for a remarkably long time. The canal ran in full operation for roughly a century before the traffic finally faded, and it lingered in partial use even after that — a working relic outlasting the age that built it.
Its place in the American story
It is easy to picture America's industrial rise as a story of steel mills and skyscrapers, but before any of that there had to be fuel. Anthracite was the fuel that bridged the gap between a nation of wood fires and a nation of coal-fired industry. It heated homes in growing cities, and — crucially — it fed the furnaces that made iron.
The rise of the anthracite iron industry was one of the hinges of early American manufacturing. Iron made with hard coal helped supply the rails, machinery, and structures that a fast-growing country demanded. Moving the coal cheaply and reliably was the precondition for all of it, and canals like this one were how that movement first became possible at scale.
So a quiet channel in the Pennsylvania countryside belongs to a much larger arc: the moment when the United States stopped merely farming and trading and began to industrialize in earnest. The canals would soon be overtaken by the railroads they helped make necessary — but for a critical stretch of years, the water carried the weight of a nation's ambition.
If you visit
What survives here is a restored stretch of the old canal, brought back in the 1970s, so you are looking at a working piece of engineering rather than a plaque in a field. Walk the towpath and imagine a mule leaning into a rope, a heavy boat gliding silently behind it at a walking pace — the whole system moved about as fast as you can stroll.
Look for the shape of the thing: the long, level ribbon of water, the earthen banks, and any surviving locks or lock structures that show how boats were raised and lowered. That flatness is the point. Every gentle grade you don't notice was a problem the builders had to solve with dams, gates, and patience.
This is a fine anchor for a slow day in the Lehigh Valley, where the coal-and-iron past is written into the landscape. Come on foot or by bike, give yourself time to walk a length of the towpath, and let the quiet do its work — it's hard to believe a place this peaceful once helped power a country's furnaces. Check locally before you go, since access and hours along restored canal sections can vary.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Nearby & related markers
Delaware Canal
Williams Township, PA · est. 1949
Just below the highway runs the channel of the Delaware Canal, the towpath waterway that once carried anthracite coal and freight along the Delaware River. Here stand Locks No. 22 and 23, the final lift locks in the 60-mile run from Bristol up to the Lehigh River at Easton. In the canal era, such locks stepped boats up and down the changing elevations, letting mule-drawn barges move heavy cargo before the railroads took over.
Pennsylvania Canal
Williams Township, PA · est. 1949
The Pennsylvania Canal was an ambitious system of state-built public works meant to bind Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Lake Erie together with water. Its Delaware Division, running from Bristol to Easton, was begun in 1827 and operated by the state from 1831 to 1858 before passing to private owners who ran it until 1931. In 1940 the corridor was preserved as a state park, saving a rare working relic of the internal-improvements era.
Delaware Canal
Durham Township, PA · est. 1949
Here at Lock No. 21, one of twenty-three lift locks numbered from Bristol to Easton, the Delaware Canal carried boats over Cooks Creek by aqueduct. The nine aqueducts along the route floated both water and freight across the streams feeding the Delaware River. In the canal's heyday, mule teams plodded the towpath hauling coal and goods through this quiet stretch of Bucks County.
Robert H. Sayre
Bethlehem, PA · est. 1993
In the decades after the Civil War, Bethlehem was reshaped by the twin engines of railroading and iron, and Robert H. Sayre stood at the center of both. As the driving force behind construction of the Lehigh Valley Railroad and a founder of the Bethlehem Iron Company, he helped turn the Lehigh Valley into one of the industrial powerhouses of Gilded Age America. His wealth flowed back into the community through a hospital, a church, a girls' school, and the young Lehigh University he helped charter.