Lehigh Canal

The Lehigh Canal or Lehigh Navigation was a 'navigation', the type of canal built along the line of a river and parallel to the fall of the watercourse, constructed in two parts--a lower and an upper section built over a span of twenty years from 1818. Sections of it were engineered to bypass rapids in the Lehigh River in Eastern Pennsylvania. The canal moved Allegheny anthracite coal to the cities of the coast and ran to an eventual length of 72mi. At its terminus, other entities would scramble to build canals and railroads to distribute the 'fuel of choice of the day' to all the Eastern Seaboard of America and ocean going ships. Anthracite would not only banish the worries of the nation's first energy crises as deforestation raised firewood and fuel prices and incurred ever increasing transportation costs, but also make iron plentiful, revolutionizing materials and machinery in hundreds of cumulative innovations as White and his associates brought Anthracite pig iron smelting into being and made the Lehigh Valley a major iron production center —the leading production region in iron and steel production for decades.