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.
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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.