Lehigh Gorge and White Haven History

If you have ridden or hiked the Lehigh Gorge Trail, you have already traveled through a genuinely odd piece of engineering history without a single sign really explaining it. The flat gravel path under your tires used to be a railroad grade. The stonework crumbling into the trees along the river used to be canal locks. And the little town at the north end, White Haven, is named after a man who spent years of his life trying to make this exact stretch of the Lehigh River behave.

I fell down this rabbit hole after spending time in the gorge, so here is the history of the Lehigh Gorge and White Haven, coal and canal and all. If you are building a trip around it, this pairs with my Hickory Run State Park history and my 4 days in the Poconos plan.

What you are actually looking at in the gorge

The Lehigh Gorge is a steep, rocky canyon that the Lehigh River carved on its way down toward Easton and the Delaware. For most of the 1800s this valley ran on one thing: anthracite coal from the mountains to the west, moving downstream toward Philadelphia. Getting that coal out of the mountains and onto the water is the whole reason the canals, the dams, and the rail lines exist. When the coal economy changed and a flood wiped out part of the system, the valley went quiet and the forest took it back.

So the trail you ride is a leftover. Understanding why it is here starts more than two hundred years ago, with a river nobody could tame.

Overlooking one of Josiah White's locks in White Haven's Lehigh Gorge State Park

Before the canal: the Lehigh Coal Mine Company, 1792 to 1814

The Lehigh River was declared a public highway back in 1761, which on paper meant it was open for transport. In practice it was shallow, rocky, and seasonal, and it did not care about anyone's paper.

In 1792 a group formed the Lehigh Coal Mine Company and locked up rights to more than ten thousand acres of coal land around what is now Summit Hill. They mined anthracite and had mules haul it about nine miles down to the Lehigh River, where the plan was to float it to Philadelphia. The plan did not work. The river was so unreliable that almost none of the coal actually made it to the city. For a stretch there it was easier and cheaper for Philadelphia to import coal from England than to get it down its own river.

The War of 1812 changed the math. Wood and charcoal ran short on the East Coast, and demand for anthracite climbed. The company knew there was money in that coal if they could only move it, so in 1813 they contracted out for five new boats. Two got built. It was another financial loss, and the effort stalled out. Their charter provisions were allowed to lapse. That opening is where a Philadelphia industrialist named Josiah White walked in.

Josiah White and the bear-trap lock

Josiah White, born in 1781, was already a known innovator before he ever touched the Lehigh. He ran a nail factory, a wire mill, and a foundry near Philadelphia, and by 1808 he and his partner Erskine Hazard were building a water powered ironworks along the falls of the Schuylkill River after their first mill in East Falls proved too small. At twenty seven he had taken over a speculative charter to build locks and mill races on the Schuylkill. He wanted energy for his operations, and he did not like moving slowly.

That impatience mattered. White fell out with the board of the Schuylkill canal venture because he pushed for fast development and they did not. When he heard the struggling Lehigh Coal Mine Company would option its rights, he and Hazard pitched a set of river improvements. Around 1814 they took over the last boats and rights the old company had left, and White started working the problem in earnest.

His own description of the approach, recorded later in Fredrick Brenckman's History of Carbon County, is a great window into how early this thinking was:

improve the navigation of the river by contracting the channels funnel fashion, to bring the whole flow of water at each of the falls to as narrow a compass as the law would allow ... to make artificial freshets to supply the deficiency; that is, by making ponds of water of as many acres as we could get, and letting it off periodically, say once in three days.

That idea, storing water and releasing it on a schedule to float boats down a river that was too shallow on its own, grew into his signature invention: the bear-trap lock. White debugged scale models of the design on Mauch Chunk Creek. The experiments even left a mark on the map. A little alley off Broadway in what is now Jim Thorpe still carries the name Bear Lane. A bear-trap lock let one person open the gates in a few moments and send a controlled surge of water downstream, where the older way of working a lock had needed a whole crew and a lot of time.

The Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company takes over, 1818 to 1822

The paperwork caught up with the ambition in 1818. On March 20 of that year, the Commonwealth handed the newly incorporated Lehigh Navigation and Coal Company expanded ownership of the Lehigh Canal, with a condition attached. The state reserved the right to require, someday, that the canal be rebuilt for two way traffic with proper locks and dams. One account notes that many legislators expected White and his partners to ruin themselves in the attempt.

The same year a separate Lehigh Coal Company took over the actual mining operations. In 1820 the coal side and the navigation side merged into one entity, the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, usually shortened to LC and N. In 1822 they finalized the arrangement with the Pennsylvania Legislature. That company stayed in business until 1968.

White was not content with one way navigation. In 1822 he stopped patching the old downstream only system and built a four lock test project upriver to prove out two way traffic. He finished the test locks in 1823 and proposed extending the improvements down the sixty two mile stretch of the Lehigh, which would open the river to the tugboats and coastal schooners of the day. The legislature turned him down in 1824. Lumber and timber interests were afraid that damming the river would stop them from rafting their logs downstream to the sawmills.

Building the Lower Canal, 1827 to 1829

A revision to the state's Main Line of Public Works, which also cleared the way for the Delaware Canal, finally opened the door. Between 1827 and 1829 crews built the Lehigh Navigation on the lower river. The lower canal opened in July 1829 and ran roughly forty six miles between Mauch Chunk and Easton, connecting the coal region to the Delaware River basin.

The scale is worth sitting with. Across the full works the waterway climbed more than three hundred and fifty feet in elevation using dozens of lift locks, guard locks, dams, and aqueducts. Lock 1 sat at the dam and doubled as a weighing lock, a platform that lifted a loaded barge to weigh the boat and its coal. That weighing lock stayed in service until 1931. The maximum lift on any single lower canal lock stayed under twenty feet.

There was still one stubborn limit. The lower canal ran one way. Every load of coal that went down needed a fresh boat built for the trip, an ark that was often broken up at the far end. That consumed lumber and labor on a scale that made the case for building upstream and for two way traffic all over again.

The Upper Canal, and how White Haven got its name, 1837 to 1843

The 1837 revisions to the Public Works line let LC and N push north into the gorge itself. They brought in Canvass White, an engineer who had worked on the Erie Canal and was a friend of Josiah White, to design and install a twenty two mile Upper Canal through the Lehigh Gorge between 1837 and 1843. To do it, the company started buying up still wild land along the river.

One of those parcels belonged to a man named John Lines, who held a tavern and a house on the river. In present day if you visit, this is present day Linesville Park. It features disc golf, a pond for fishing, a pavillion for picnicing, and baseball fields and soccer nets. The local town uses the historic park often for events.

After the company bought his land, the spot took the name White's Haven in honor of Josiah White. Local speech wore the name down over time, and White's Haven became White Haven. The borough was incorporated in 1841. Right before the major flood of already established neighboring town Hickory Run from Mahlon Taylor's dam. Yes, that Mahlon Taylor, of Washington Crossing. To learn more about the history of Hickory Run read my other post here.

The upper canal was a serious step up in engineering. It used twenty dams, twenty nine locks, and a set of reservoirs to keep working water flowing even through dry summers. Where the lower canal locks lifted under twenty feet, the upper canal locks lifted as much as fifty eight feet. This was the system that turned the gorge from a barrier into a highway.

The railroads that climbed out of The Lehigh Gorge

Water could move coal down the valley, but it could not lift coal up and over the ridge toward the Susquehanna. For that, the same project spun up the Lehigh and Susquehanna Railroad, with three linked pieces running north to south:

• A rail connection from the Pennsylvania Canal docks at Pittston to an assembly yard in Ashley.

• The Ashley Planes, an inclined plane railway that climbed below Penobscot Knob and ran through a man made cut over a hundred feet deep to reach a yard at Mountain Top.

• A marshaling yard at Mountain Top with a line running down the ridge to White Haven and the new upper canal docks, ending at a turnaround yard right at the water.

That combination, canal in the gorge and rail over the ridge, is why so much of the trail today follows the old rail grade. The railroads outlived the canal, and the grade they left behind is the flat, rideable surface you now bike on that makes up the Delaware & Lehigh Trail.

The 1862 flood that ended the Upper Canal

The upper canal did not get a long run. In June 1862 a deadly flood tore down the Lehigh and washed out a dam above White Haven along with much of the upper works. The damage was severe enough that the state legislature forbade rebuilding the Upper Canal at all.

That single decision is a big reason the gorge looks the way it does today. The canal in the gorge was never restored. Coal traffic shifted onto the railroads, the stonework in the canyon was left to the river and the trees, and over the following century the wild land that White and his company had bought up slowly turned back into the quiet, green corridor that eventually became Lehigh Gorge State Park.

What is left to see, and how it fits your trip

Once you know the story, the gorge reads differently. The dressed stone blocks half buried in the bank are lock walls. The long flat benches above the river are old canal towpath and rail grade. White Haven at the north end is not a random trail town, it is the place a canal company named after its founder and incorporated as the upper works went in. The whole valley is a two hundred year old industrial project that nature reclaimed.

If you want to put boots and tires on this history, the practical planning lives in the companion posts. My Hickory Run State Park history covers the state park next door and how it fits the same corner of the Poconos, and my 4 days in the Poconos itinerary strings the Lehigh Gorge, White Haven, and Hickory Run into an actual long weekend.

When you are ready to plan the days out, you can get the Pocono 4 day weekend itinerary in the trip planner, with the Lehigh Gorge, White Haven, and Hickory Run mapped day by day.

Rafting through the locks on the Lehigh River in Lehigh Gorge State Park

A quick note on the dates

Early canal records disagree with each other on exact figures and years, especially lock counts and a few of the 1810s dates, because the companies reorganized so many times. I have used the most consistent version of the timeline here from what I've found in my research. If you find a plaque in the gorge that lists a slightly different number, that is the canal era paperwork being the canal era paperwork.