The Delaware Canal (12 page)

The company also operated mud diggers or shovel dredges that removed—or redistributed—the sediment deposited by streams and storm water so that the canal was kept at a six-foot depth in the middle. In addition, there were work scows and carpenter boats that repaired the banks and the locks.

Privately owned boats also worked the canal, and instead of being numbered, they were named by their owners, usually after wives, mothers, daughters or sweethearts. The only rule on the canal was that there would be no duplication of names.

One of the most successful men to benefit by the discovery of anthracite coal and the building of the canals on the Lehigh and Delaware was Asa Packer. Mauch Chunk had become the wealthiest town in the United States at that time. More than fifty citizens of Mauch Chunk had a personal wealth of $50,000, which is the equivalent to $1,000,000 now.

Packer, who was born in Mystic, Connecticut, in 1805, apprenticed as a carpenter to his cousin in Susquehanna County. He saw an advertisement for a coal boat captain on the Lehigh Canal and he applied. Within three years, he was assigned a second boat with his brother-in-law. His fleet grew, and he decided to return to carpentry to build coal boats and canal locks for the Upper Lehigh Canal. His boatyard produced closed-hatch, sixty-ton coal boats that were known as “packer” boats. With the profits from his boatyard, Packer purchased coal lands and soon controlled a share of the coal market. By 1850, he was the richest man in Mauch Chunk.

Additional boatyards were located in Easton, Uhlertown, Erwinna, New Hope and Bristol. Michael Uhler was a merchant who opened a general store in Allentown initially. When the store burned down and he suffered a great monetary loss, he moved to Uhlersville. He opened another store and began a limestone business after purchasing thirty acres of limestone property in Northampton County—only a half mile from Easton. He had eight large kilns to manufacture lime along the canal bank and had an annual output of 250,000 bushels.

Limestone was an important industry in the Delaware Valley. Lime was used as farm fertilizer and in masonry cement, and limewater also had uses, such as whitewashing barns, chicken houses, fences and other structures. Uhler's kilns supplied most of the farms in the region that purchased lime products. He also established a gristmill on his property that produced flour and feed.

He built and owned twenty-five of his own boats to deliver his lime along the Delaware Division, Morris and Delaware and Raritan Canals, and he built and repaired boats for others. Uhler's industries kept as many as one hundred men employed year-round. In the early twentieth century, men who worked for the boat builder earned forty cents an hour, and a foreman could make as much as fifty-eight cents an hour. At that time, it took about two hundred days to build a boat.

In “Lehigh and Delaware Division Canal Notes,” Rapp proudly discusses the boats he built at his boatyard in Erwinna.

Canal boats are about eighty-seven feet six inches long, ten feet six inches wide, and seven feet high midship with a shear of six inches bow and stern and carry about 100 tons of coal on a load. The No. 6 built in my boatyard at Erwinna in the year 1872 was loaded at Mauch Chunk and passed the weigh lock August 12, 1872, with one hundred and twelve tons of coal to New York. This being the largest record tonnage carried by any one boat through the canals from Mauch Chunk to New York. The same boat on September 30
^th
, in the same year, carried one hundred and ten tons to New York, making a record that has never been broken by another boat
.
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One of the earliest independent canalboat operations was the Red Line Transportation Company out of Easton. It was organized soon after the opening of the Delaware Division Canal in 1836, and Captain Jacob Able was the president. These boats carried general merchandise instead of coal, with capacities from sixty to eighty tons.

But it was the coal-loaded boats that took up the greater amount of the canal industry. The larger boats came in two sections, called hinge boats or “snappers,” and single boats were called stiff boats. They traveled approximately thirty miles a day, two miles an hour when full and four miles an hour when empty. They required a crew of at least two people, one to steer the boat and one to drive the mules. Very often, canal men brought their whole families aboard to live and work with them during the canal season. Some of them didn't own homes except for their boats and lived on their boats even in winter when the canal was emptied for maintenance.

Boats would move nonstop from four or five o'clock in the morning until ten o'clock at night, and mule drivers took breaks by riding on their mules. They would tie their wrists to the mules' traces so they wouldn't fall off if they fell asleep.
Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Canal Society, National Canal Museum, Easton, PA
.

Every boat was equipped with a stove—sometimes two, one on deck and one in the tiny cabin below—a barrel for water, a toolbox, a night hawker (headlight) and a pole. Poles had many uses, and there were different types: a bow pole, stern pole and hook pole. The hook pole was a multipurpose tool. A steel rod was inserted on one end of the pole with a hook at the other end. It could move a boat along a wharf, push or change the location of a boat and fish things out of the canal that may have fallen off deck (sometimes even people). Time was money, and once on the move, it was very rare for a boat captain to stop the boat for anything but entry into a lock, so the hook pole was also used by the mule driver to vault to and from the towpath onto the boat when he needed to get onboard to eat or when being relieved by another driver.

In the early days of the canal, ten-plate stoves were used for cooking. Some boats had stoves made of sheet iron with a grate. Pans, coffeepots and other cooking utensils were placed on top of these stoves, which were located near the hinges. The captain of the boat would usually do the cooking.

The steersman, while cooking, had to run from the cabin, to the stove, back and forth to the rudder, and set the table on the cabin deck, while the other man or boy was on the tow-path, after which he took the tow-path and the other man came on board and ate his dinner, the boat never stopping
.
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A capstan or windlass was a necessity on a boat. The device, shaped like a spool and usually made of wood, was mounted vertically in a bearing in the foredeck and was used to pull a boat off accumulated silt or other obstructions at the bottom or sides of the canal by turning a rope from an anchor.

On the bow of every boat hung a “night hawker,” which was a lantern about twelve inches square with glass on three sides that burned kerosene. This was the headlight of the boat, and it lit the way during the dark morning hours and the blackness of late night.

The cabins in the boats were built into the stern and were accessible by a set of steps similar to a ladder. They were usually eight by ten feet and seven feet high, only large enough to hold a stove, stool, two hinged bunk beds and a hinged table. When not in use, the hinged table and bunks fell against the walls to give the cabin more floor space. In slightly larger cabins, there may have been a cupboard. Women who lived on the boats sewed curtains for the tiny windows and used tablecloths to make the cabin feel homier. Oil lamps provided light in the cabin and sometimes pictures adorned the walls.

To canal men, especially those who owned their own boats and didn't lease them from the company, their boats were the center of their lives. It was a boatman's home, his place of business and even where his children were born and sometimes died. Men as old as seventy and boys as young as sixteen could captain a boat. For many families, working the canal was a multi-generation business. For some it was all they knew. They played music, wrote poetry, traveled in the dark of early morning and late night, steered their boats under the oppressive heat of summer and shivered in the cold without protection from the elements as they steadily moved up and down the canal, stopping only when they had to. Their boats were their base—their heaven and their hell.

Chapter 7

The Mules

It has been said that boat captains' mules were almost as important to them as their children. Mules were part of the canalboat team, working as hard as the captain and mule driver—sometimes harder. Where the men and little boys slept in the tiny cabins of the boats or sometimes on deck, exposed to the elements, the mules were well taken care of and put up in the numerous stables along the canal. It cost fifteen cents to stable one mule at night, twenty-five cents for two mules, and the captains didn't hesitate to pay the price.

Because of their importance, when a mule became lame or died, the canal men had no choice but to purchase another one for their team. Mule teams would cost anywhere from $300 to $400, and the better the quality of the mules, the more the boatmen could brag. They were an investment, and because of their importance, a canal man sometimes treated them with more deference than he did his own family. Losing a mule to lameness or death cost a boatman dearly; in fact, losing a mule and having to replace it would negate the amount he would earn from a round trip hauling coal.

Half Horse, Half Donkey, All Muscle and Brains

The fact that festivals have been held across the United States strictly to honor mules is testament to their worth. In Columbia, Tennessee, they have even crowned a special mule each April as king for a day during what they call a
Mulesta
, and mules from around the countryside parade together to the courthouse, where a girl places a jeweled crown between the king's long ears.
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A mule's dam is a horse and his sire is a donkey, and it appears that most mules inherit the best qualities from both. He has the strength, courage and speed of the horse, and the patience, long ears and sure-footedness of the donkey. A mule has the ability to grow sleek and strong on nothing but grass. Some say he is stubborn, but most muleteers call it wisdom. If his load is too heavy, he expects the mule driver to lighten it. If he's been put to work for too long, he stops until he's rested. If the pasture in which he's eating is hilly, he eats uphill so he won't have to bend too far down. And if the weather is unbearably warm, he slows his pace—whether the human driving him likes it or not.

Horses will work themselves into exhaustion and will dash blindly over a cliff, but mules practice moderation instinctively—they don't overeat and they rest when they need to. They endure heat better, they aren't gourmet eaters—plain clean hay or grass is good enough for them—and they rarely have hoof problems, as their hooves are strong, tough, flexible and don't split or chip as a horse's will. They even live longer than most horses, and they excel in physical soundness.

Additionally, the mule is easier to breed than its counterpart, called a hinny, which is the offspring of a male horse and a female donkey. Both are almost always sterile, except in very rare cases, which is a result of the differing number of chromosomes of the two species. Donkeys have sixty-two chromosomes and horses have sixty-four.

The mule was introduced to this country when George Washington heard of the exceptional abilities of the mules that the Catalonian donkeys in Spain sired. The king of Spain was honored by President Washington's interest and sent two of his finest as a gift to the new country. One died onboard the ship during the passage, but Washington was thrilled with the other one when it was presented. “From him,” President Washington said, “I hope to secure a race of extraordinary goodness which will stock the country. He is indeed a Royal Gift, and henceforward that shall be his name.”
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Americans who saw the offspring of Royal Gift working on Washington's farm were amazed to find how durable Washington's new mules were. They wanted to breed their own mares with Royal Gift, and soon Virginia's farms were being plowed and cultivated by Royal Gift's “sons and daughters.”

Owners of working animals prefer mules to horses since their skin is harder and less sensitive than horses' skin, and they show a natural resistance to disease and insects. Mules have a combination of hair types, with coarse main hair and a tail more like a horse than a donkey, and they don't have pronounced arches to their necks. Their bray is mixed with that of a horse's whinny, and they come in different sizes and shapes. There are miniature mules under thirty-six inches and others that can measure up to seventeen hands. It is interesting to note that they can also strike out with any one of their hooves and in any direction, which many canal mule drivers found out the hard way.

They are the perfect work animal. They have a strong sense of self-preservation, which is probably why they last longer than horses, and people who have worked with them for years come to heed their mule's actions.

Pets of the Mines

Mules were used extensively in the coal mines. Because of their intelligence, they knew what to do even without a mule driver leading them. When young boys were sent into the mines to handle the mules, they were told to “watch the mule and learn something.”
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