Union Canal
Swatara Township, Lebanon County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
After entering the reservoir at the Big Dam in Swatara Gap, water from Swatara Creek came down the branch canal to the Water Works, 3.7 miles southwest of here. At that point it was raised by water wheels and steam pumps and carried by a feeder tube to the summit level near Lebanon. From there the canal descended eastward to Reading and westward to Middletown.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
It shows the ambitious waterworks early Americans built to carry commerce over the ridges of Pennsylvania, an achievement of the canal age that briefly rivaled the railroads.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the second quarter of the 1800s, Americans had fallen in love with the canal. It was the technology that promised to conquer distance, and eastern Pennsylvania — a country of ridges, creeks, and river valleys — became a proving ground for just how far that promise could stretch. Getting boats across high ground was hard enough; keeping the canal itself full of water was a problem few travelers ever thought about, and it was often the harder one.
A canal is not a river. It does not refill itself. At its highest point — the summit level — water is always draining away downhill through every lock a boat passes. Unless that water is constantly replaced, the whole enterprise runs dry. Around Lebanon County, in the decades of the canal age, engineers built an entire hidden system whose only job was to lift water uphill to that summit and keep the boats afloat.
This stretch of the Union Canal is where you can still trace that ingenuity. It belongs to the Early Republic, a time when the country was betting its commerce on water and willing to build astonishing machinery to keep it flowing.
People & events
The story here is one of gravity defied. Water gathered behind a great dam in Swatara Gap and traveled down a branch canal to a place called the Water Works, several miles to the southwest. That water had reached the low ground — but the canal needed it at the top.
So at the Water Works, the water was lifted. Wheels turned by the current and steam-driven pumps raised it up and sent it along a feeder to the summit level near Lebanon. This was cutting-edge engineering for its day: the steam engine, still a young technology, put to work not to move a boat or spin a mill, but simply to push water uphill so that commerce could continue.
From that hard-won high point, the canal did what canals do best — it let gravity take over. The water, and the boats it carried, flowed away in two directions at once: eastward toward Reading and westward toward Middletown. Everything downhill of the summit depended on the pumps at the Water Works never stopping.
Its place in the American story
This is the canal age's engineering ambition in miniature. The great national projects of the era — the ones that opened the interior and made fortunes — all wrestled with the same enemy: the high ground between one watershed and the next. The answer was always some combination of dams, reservoirs, feeders, and lifts, a whole invisible infrastructure built just to keep the visible waterway alive.
What happened here is a vivid example of early Americans marrying old and new power. Water wheels were ancient; the steam pump was the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution. Set side by side to solve a single stubborn problem, they show a nation improvising its way into the industrial future.
For a brief window, waterworks like this one made canals rival the earliest railroads for the nation's freight. That the effort was so elaborate — pumping water up a ridge so that boats could ride it down the far side — measures both the value placed on cheap transport and the sheer determination of the people who built it.
If you visit
Stand at the marker and let the geography do the storytelling. Look toward Swatara Gap and imagine water being gathered there, sent down to the Water Works, and then hoisted uphill to the summit near Lebanon before spilling away east and west. The genius of this place is invisible — it lives in the routing of water across a landscape — so it rewards a little imagination.
This is not a manicured park but a working piece of history laid over ordinary countryside. Trace the lay of the land: the gaps in the ridges, the creek valleys, the natural low points where a canal would have run. You are reading the same map the engineers read.
It fits beautifully into a road trip that follows the Union Canal through the county, letting you assemble the whole system marker by marker — the dam, the feeders, the summit, the descending locks. Keep to public roads and posted access, and treat the modern landscape as the palimpsest it is: today's fields and roads written over yesterday's grand hydraulic machine.
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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Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
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
Union Township, PA · est. 1950
A feeder branch of the Union Canal followed the Swatara Creek from Pine Grove down to the main line at the Water Works, carrying both boats and the water that fed the larger system. It operated from 1832 to 1862, its route now marked by the surviving remains of the Big Dam, a guard lock, and several lift locks across the creek. These fragments trace a working piece of Pennsylvania's canal network.
Union Canal
Jackson Township, PA · est. 1950
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.
Union Canal
Derry Township, PA · est. 1948
First imagined by William Penn and surveyed as early as 1762, the Union Canal finally opened to traffic in 1828, connecting the Susquehanna River at Middletown with the Schuylkill at Reading. For a few decades its boats carried coal and goods across the Pennsylvania interior before the railroads rendered it obsolete. Abandoned in 1885, its overgrown remains can still be seen near Union Deposit, just to the north of the marker.