My AutoBlogs!

certain respects the effort of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation
Company to bridle the Lehigh and make it play its part in the
commercial development of Pennsylvania
No struggle for the mastery of an American river matches in
certain respects the effort of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation
Company to bridle the Lehigh and make it play its part in the
commercial development of Pennsylvania. The failures and trials
of the promoters of this company were no less remarkable than
was the great success that eventually crowned the effort. In 1793
the Lehigh Coal Mine Company was organized and purchased some ten
thousand acres in the Mauch Chunk anthracite region, nine miles
from the Lehigh River. It then appropriated a sum of money to
build a road from the mines to the river in the expectation that
the State would improve the navigation of the waterway, for
which, it has already been noted, an appropriation had been made
in 1791, in accordance with the programme of the Society for
Promoting the Improvement of Roads and Inland Navigation. Nothing
was done, however, to improve the river, and the company, after
various attempts at shipping coal to Philadelphia, gave up the
effort and allowed the property, which was worth millions, to lie
idle. In 1807 the Lehigh Coal Mine Company, in another effort to
get its wares before the public, granted to Rowland and Butland,
a private firm, free right to operate one of its veins of coal;
but this operation also resulted in failure. In 1813 the company
made a third attempt and granted to a private concern a lease of
the entire property on the condition that ten thousand bushels of
coal should be taken to market annually. Difficulties immediately
made themselves apparent. No contractor could be found who would
haul the output to the Lehigh River for less than four dollars a
ton, and the man who accepted those terms lost money. Of five
barges filled at Mauch Chunk three went to pieces on the way to
Philadelphia. Although the contents of the other two sold for
twenty dollars a ton, the proceeds failed to meet expenses, and
the operating company threw up the lease.

Bookmark to:

Washington
>From New York Baily returned to Baltimore and went on to
Washington. The records of all travelers to the site of the new
national capital give much the same picture of the countryside.
It was a land worn out by tobacco culture and variously described
as ‘dried up,’ ‘run down,’ and ‘hung out to dry.’ Even George
Washington, at Mount Vernon, was giving up tobacco culture and
was attempting new crops by a system of rotation. Cotton was
being grown in Maryland, but little care was given to its culture
and manufacture. Tobacco was graded in Virginia in accordance
with the rigidity of its inspection at Hanover Court House,
Pittsburgh, Richmond, and Cabin-Point: leaf worth sixteen
shillings at Richmond was worth twenty-one at Hanover Court
House; if it was refused at all places, it was smuggled to the
West Indies or consumed in the country. Meadows were rapidly
taking the place of tobacco-fields, for the planters preferred to
clear new land rather than to enrich the old.

Bookmark to:

mystery to the average dweller on the Atlantic seaboard as the
elephant was to the blind men of Hindustan
Inland America, at the birth of the Republic, was as great a
mystery to the average dweller on the Atlantic seaboard as the
elephant was to the blind men of Hindustan. The reports of those
who had penetrated this wilderness–of those who had seen the
barren ranges of the Alleghanies, the fertile uplands of the
Unakas, the luxuriant blue-grass regions, the rich bottom lands
of the Ohio and Mississippi, the wide shores of the inland seas,
or the stretches of prairie increasing in width beyond the
Wabash–seemed strangely contradictory, and no one had been able
to patch these reports together and grasp the real proportions of
the giant inland empire that had become a part of the United
States. It was a pathless desert; it was a maze of trails,
trodden out by deer, buffalo, and Indian. Its great riverways
were broad avenues for voyagers and explorers; they were
treacherous gorges filled with the plunder of a million floods.
It was a rich soil, a land of plenty; the natives were seldom
more than a day removed from starvation. Within its broad
confines could dwell a great people; but it was as inaccessible
as the interior of China. It had a great commercial future; yet
its gigantic distances and natural obstructions defied all known
means of transportation.

Bookmark to: