Canal Basin Park / The Pennsylvania Main Line Canal

Visitors to Canal Basin Park in Hollidaysburg can see a replica of a Pennsylvania Main Line Canal lock.

Children climb and slide on playground equipment shaped like barges and ferries. Mothers chat with one another while sitting on benches and under trees as their kids play. On a nearby wooden bridge, a toddler stares through the supports at a small creek bustling below. Boys ride their bikes on gravel paths dotted with plaques.

This is a typical summer day at Canal Basin Park in Hollidaysburg. The park itself is just a little more than a decade old. Much of the playground equipment still looks as new as the day it arrived. A nearby amphitheater is furnished with a smooth concrete stage and a stone brick foundation. The Reiser House, which acts as a visitor’s center,

hasn’t aged much with sparkling windows, red bricks and clean tan siding.

Canal Basin Park has boat-themed playground equipment to recognize Hollidaysburg's history during the time of the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal.

The amphitheater is used for concerts during the summertime at Canal Basin Park.

The Reiser House acts as Canal Basin Park's visitor center.

It’s hard to believe how this little piece of land, now reserved for child recreation, was once one of the most significant points for travel and transportation in the state of Pennsylvania.

As I had mentioned in my previous post about Hollidaysburg, there wasn’t much going on in the borough when it was founded. The National Park Service puts it bluntly:

“Hollidaysburg was a small backwoods village in the early 1820s. Founded in the years after the Revolution, the settlement's growth was hampered by its location in the rugged remoteness of the Allegheny foothills. The Huntingdon, Cambria, and Indiana Turnpike, a narrow dirt road really, ran through the heart of town, bringing an occasional pack train of horses or a Conestoga wagon. Its population in 1827 was about 76.” -http://www.nps.gov/alpo/historyculture/hburgbasin.htm

The Park Service gets the point across. Hollidaysburg wasn’t exactly a booming metropolis. However, for about a 20-year period, Hollidaysburg was the bees’ knees, and it was all thanks to a marvel known as the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal.

The canal is an engineering feat to this day, which is why Blair County has made the effort to capitalize on the former's significance. It ran from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, making it the first direct link between the two major cities. This was huge, considering a trip between the two cities today by automobile is anywhere between 300 to 350 miles and 4.5 to 5.5 hours. I'm guessing a trip by horse had to be a hell of a commute.

This map from the National Park Service shows the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal and the Allegheny Portage Railroad when they were fully operational.

What’s even more incredible is the canal was dug by hand through clay and rock. Working conditions during the construction of the canal were wretched. There were no backhoes, bulldozers or cranes in those days, and the workers didn't have the aid of an alien race like the Egyptians did with the pyramids (citation needed). The workers had donkeys at best. Injury, disease and death were all common. Workers got paid 48 cents a day, according to the National Park Service. If a worker was injured, he was fired. The blame was placed on the injured person for "carelessness," according to the NPS.

How the canal system worked gets a little confusing. There are signs and plaques all over the region with historical tidbits. Each seems to mention another railroad, canal, passage, basin until the point where we wonder if the historians even know what they’re talking about. A map here or there would do great justice, but apparently this would’ve been too convenient. I think I’ve nailed out the basics, though, and that’s all you really need to understand to appreciate what I’m yammering on about.

Back in the 1800s, people wanted stuff. They also wanted stuff quick. The problem was people couldn’t get stuff quick, so they couldn’t satisfy their desire to want stuff. Therefore, if people wanted to end their desire to want stuff quick when they couldn’t get stuff quick since there was no way to get stuff quick, they needed to find a way to get stuff quick. Simple enough to understand, I’m sure.

You have to remember that this was a time before major highways, planes, or tractor-trailers existed to transport goods in an efficient manner. Pennsylvania is also a geographically long state. I mean really long, as in “You need at least 11 bathroom breaks and four meals” long -- in present day Pennsylvania. So as you can see, our ancestors had a predicament.

Anyway, a group of people got together and started brainstorming ideas. Now, the typical result of a brainstorming session is to knock out the not-so-great ideas and to be left with the best solution. Instead, someone stood up and said: “You know what? We should dig a giant river from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh!” I’d like to know how bad the other ideas were that everyone in the room said “why not” to the concept of one of the most back-breaking, laborious tasks in Pennsylvania’s history.

Construction began for the man-made river from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh somewhere in the mid- to late-1820s. According to the National Park Service, there weren’t really blueprints involved. The logic at the time, and I can’t even make this up, was, “Let’s start digging at each end and try to meet up somewhere.” The Philadelphia side cheated a bit by starting with a railroad on its part of the canal before actually digging.

To give the people who started this endeavor credit, the project was only a few miles from completion before the big problem arose. Both sides dug until they reached the two yellow dots connected by the black sliver on the map above. Those two dots are present-day Johnstown and Hollidaysburg, and between these two sits a series of “small hills” known as the Allegheny Ridge. 

The canal workers had enough crap on their plates. Now they had a mountain ridge to contend with. How to get past the mountains was the biggest setback in the construction of the canal. Although a ton of planning wasn't used at this point, this was the time where a solid idea was needed.

The original plan at the time was to dig a four-mile tunnel through the mountains. I’m assuming this idea came from the same guy who came up with the canal idea. This time around, however, the rest of the party realized he was a bit off his clock.

The second-best idea, and the one that stuck, was to build a railroad going over the mountains that would connect the canal at Johnstown and Hollidaysburg. This required a lot of work, but it was much better than digging with shovels through pure rock. 

This would become the Allegheny Portage Railroad, which was the first passage to successfully traverse the ridge. A national park historic site exists where Incline No. 6 of the railroad remains today.

The Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site has a replica of the railroad's Engine House 6.

This wasn’t as crazy as the “burrow through the mountains” idea, but we have to remember that these guys were building a canal, not a railroad. How would this work out in the end?

For the first few years the canal operated, people and goods were unloaded from boats in the canal at the Johnstown and Hollidaysburg ports, put onto trains and sent up the railroad until they were reloaded back onto boats and finished the trip. One man made the process even more efficient by building canal boats that could be loaded onto train cars and sent back and forth. This was serious ingenuity for the time period.

This graphic from the National Park Service shows one of the canal boats being pulled up an incline into an engine house on the Allegheny Portage Railroad.

But before any of this started, there was still the issue of the locations of the canal basins. Johnstown was considered suitable on the western end long beforehand because of the adequate supply of water, courtesy of Stoney Creek and the Little Conemaugh, according to the NPS. On the east side, the builders originally considered Hollidaysburg’s neighbor, Frankstown. The problem was the proposed location sat on a farmer’s land. To the misfortune of the builders, the farmer, as the NPS so nicely puts it, “either didn't like the idea of change or was a little too greedy to accept the price he was offered for his land.”

After getting this far, the builders weren’t going to let a lone farmer hinder their progress. They decided on Hollidaysburg instead, since the local Juniata River had three connecting branches that would supply the canal with enough water. Three canal basins in Hollidaysburg came out of the project, including the Canal Basin Park location, each serving the purpose of loading/unloading people and goods from the Philadelphia side of the canal to the Pittsburgh side and vice versa, according to the NPS.

The joint project of the Pennsylvania Canal and the Allegheny Portage Railroad wrapped up somewhere between 1832-34 (the accounts on the completion are conflicting). The canal would bring prosperity to Hollidaysburg that it hadn’t known before – for a short period of time, anyway.

It took only 20 years before the canal was considered obsolete. Its demise began when the Pennsylvania Railroad decided to buy it out. Instead of utilizing the canal, the Railroad left it there to rot. The Allegheny Portage Railroad was dismantled and likely used for scrap for larger railroad endeavors elsewhere, according to the NPS.

Regular flooding along the Juniata River has destroyed much of the infrastructure along the local portions of the canal. Repairs would have been too expensive for something that was considered pointless now, so it was left a broken mess. Parts of the canal were even filled with cinders to reduce water flow, according to the NPS. This, more or less, marked the demise of the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal and the Allegheny Portage Railroad.

Many of the people who go to Canal Basin Park probably don’t take the time to look at the numerous plaques and signs about the history of the basin and its importance. That's a saddening thought, but it’s nice to know this location became a park because it probably would have faded into oblivion otherwise.

A couple thousand people took advantage of the canal and railroad during its operation, but even that number doesn’t compare to how many people live in the state of Pennsylvania now, or how many people use highways like Interstates 80, 81, 95 and 99 on a yearly basis.

I would kill to have been one of the few thousand who saw the Pennsylvania Canal in action. 

I realize it takes long enough to travel through the state by car alone, but the idea of riding a canal and railroad across the state is majestic. The best I can do is visit the various sites still in existence and reflect on what someone, who was standing in the same spot as me, saw almost 180 years before. Not everyone appreciated it back then, I’m sure, but I bet at least a couple of those few thousand were in just as much awe as I am today.