Union Canal
Jackson Township, Lebanon County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
This canal was in use from 1828-1884. About .3 mile south at the Tulpehocken, are remains of one of the locks by which boats descended from the summit level north of Lebanon to the Schuylkill at Reading.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
The Union Canal, in use from 1828 to 1884, linked the Susquehanna and Schuylkill watersheds across the rolling country of eastern Pennsylvania. Boats descended through a chain of locks from the canal's summit level near Lebanon down to the river at Reading. Remnants of one such lock still lie a short distance south along the Tulpehocken.
Why it matters
It was part of the canal-building boom that knit the young nation's interior to its ports, moving coal, iron, and grain before the railroads took over.
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Nearby & related markers
John A. Shulze
Marion Township, PA · est. 1951
John Andrew Shulze served as Pennsylvania's governor through the 1820s, a moment when young American states were racing to knit themselves together with roads, canals, and other public works. Under his administration the Commonwealth launched an ambitious program of internal improvements, the kind of canal-and-turnpike building that would soon reshape Pennsylvania's economy. Born in 1775 in the parsonage behind Christ Lutheran Church, in the German-settled countryside of Berks County, Shulze rose from a Lutheran pastor's household to the statehouse.
Union Canal Tunnel
North Lebanon Township, PA · est. 1947
Beneath this ridge runs what the marker calls the first canal tunnel in America, bored in 1823 as part of the ambitious Union Canal. When the full canal opened in 1827, it linked the Schuylkill and Susquehanna watersheds, carrying boats of coal and freight across the Pennsylvania interior in the golden age before railroads. The waterway ran until 1884, and its stone-lined tunnel survives as a monument to early American engineering.
Union Canal
Swatara Township, PA · est. 1950
This stretch of the Union Canal reveals the engineering ingenuity that kept 19th-century canals flowing. Water gathered behind the Big Dam in Swatara Gap traveled by a branch canal to the Water Works, where wheels and steam pumps lifted it to the summit level near Lebanon. From that high point the canal fell away in both directions, east to Reading and west to Middletown.
Union Canal
Penn Township, PA · est. 1950
Here the Union Canal ran along the north bank of the Tulpehocken, where a dam, two locks, and a mule bridge allowed boats to cross Northkill Creek. The surrounding cluster of grist mills, a lime kiln, and a tannery shows how a canal was never just a ditch of water but the spine of a small industrial community that grew up along its banks.