[intriguing music] MATT: That's awesome.

DUSTIN: This is cool.

The whole thing's complete.

You don't see this.

MATT: Yeah, it's a very complete lock.

This is neat right here, this little cove behind you, because the doors forming a V right here-- Yep.

--and they would face upstream, which is that way, right?

There would be another set of doors down there.

And so when the doors open they go into these little nooks right here, so the boat can pass through.

DUSTIN: What an incredible lock.

MATT: I can't believe we're walking through old ruins of a canal lock in the middle of Pennsylvania.

I mean, it's crazy to think that in the 19th century, hundreds of miles cut through the state, and we can still see remnants of it like this.

I wish we could go back in time and really experience this unique time period.

If only we had a way to see what it was like through the eyes of a 19th-century, witty, famous author.

Funny you should say that.

I actually keep a book in my canal pants of the work of Charles Dickens, who traveled the Pennsylvania Canal in 1842.

You just carry that book around with you?

I do.

And we're going on a journey, my friend, so we're going to need it.

Well, maybe we should get out of this mud first.

Yeah.

[cheerful music] Hey, I'm Matt.

And I'm Dustin.

BOTH: And we are Local Historia.

MATT (VOICEOVER): As educators and historians, we are passionate about exploring and sharing local history all around us.

You may have seen us leading walking tours and shining a light upon the past.

Now we're bringing yo Journeys with Local Historia.

Experience local history with us.

Let the journey begin.

DUSTIN (VOICEOVER): On this episode, we explore Pennsylvania's early transportation history, including its unique canal system, with Charles Dickens as our guide.

[exciting music] MATT: So Dustin, we're heading to York, PA, because that's where Charles Dickens really started his journey across Pennsylvania.

DUSTIN: Dickens is from England.

What in the world is he doing in York?

And, I mean, what's he doing in America?

MATT (VOICEOVER): Charles Dickens was about 30 years old when h made his first visit to America in 1842.

The English novelist had already become famous for writing works li The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist.

The fanfare surrounding his visit, and his overall popularity at the time, would have been comparable t when The Beatles came to America over a century later.

Alongside his wife Catherine, Dickens voyaged on steamships, canal boats, railroads, and stagecoaches to many cities in the US, and even Canada.

We are picking up his journey in York, Pennsylvania, where he arrived by train from Baltimore.

So what's great historically about his travels is he took notes along the way, and observations, and wrote letters to friends.

And then he gathered all those materials and wrote a book called Americ Notes for General Circulation.

Oh, so that's where the Pennsylvania connection comes in, and specifically the Pennsylvania Canal.

Yeah, exactly, which is what we're interested in.

But in addition to his writings on American Notes, there were local coverage, like local newspapers and local histories, because this famous author came to all these respective towns like York and people reported on it.

So we have those too.

That's what I love about primary source documents.

You can really see and experience what Dickens felt here in 1842.

Yeah, almost like time traveling.

[rhythmic music] We made it.

We're in York, Pennsylvania.

I mean, we're here because Charles Dickens actually visited this hotel.

It goes back to about 1828, when it was called the Whitehall Hotel.

And then it became known as the National House.

And it's said that Charle Dickens actually dined inside.

Yeah.

Let's check it out.

[bluesy music] DUSTIN: So Dickens was here, but how do we for sure?

Good question.

So in American Notes, he actually says, "We left Baltimore by another railway at 8:30 in the morning--" CHARLES DICKENS (VOICEOVER) "--and reached the town of York, some 60 miles off, by th early dinnertime of the hotel, which was the starting place o the four-horse coach wherein we were to proceed to Harrisburg."

So we assume this is the hotel he was talking about, but he doesn't actually say that in American Notes.

Do we have any other local sources that might add to the story?

Yes.

Thankfully there's local newspapers that covered this event, because he's such a celebrity, of course, you'd think the local papers would say, hey, Charles Dickens was here.

And it wasn't easy to find, bu we did find at least one account from the York Gazette, and it was titled "Boz," and it reads as follows.

"There was quite a 'Boz-tle' in our town on Thursday last, when it became known that Charles Dickens had arrived in the Baltimore cars.

He dined at Whitehall and proceeded by stage to Harrisburg.

There was a run-to-places o Whitehall pavement by those who were anxious to catch glimpse of the immortal author of The Pickwick Papers."

So this is the smoking gun that corroborates all these other sources.

Yeah.

He was here at the Whitehall Hotel at the time, in March of 1842.

And other local papers even gave other flavorful details, like he had the best beef in America at this hotel.

DUSTIN: Maybe we should get something to eat while we're here.

Yeah, let's get some early dinner.

Just like Boz, we had a delicious meal before departing for Harrisburg.

Dickens described the giant stagecoach as a kind of barge on wheels as it came rumbling up the street.

So is the stagecoach coming?

Yeah, it should be here any minute.

[mellow music] DUSTIN: All right.

Just like Dickens and hi entourage in their stagecoach, we're on our way from York to Harrisburg.

MATT: Yeah, and the stagecoach driver, Samuel Stubbins, became kind of famous for takin Charles Dickens to Harrisburg.

And so newspapers interviewed him, so we have all these extra really cool details about that trip.

DUSTIN: I'm sure he had a lot of interesting things to say about it.

MATT: Yeah, he sure did.

"We always made three stops between York and Harrisburg.

At each stop, nearly all the passengers invariably got off to get something t moisten their parched throats.

I think it was a whiskey straight he swallowed, and good whiskey it was them days, too.

It tickled Dickens when I would blow the big horn we always carried, and which would bring almost the entire town out to see the arrival of the stage."

DUSTIN (VOICEOVER): By the evening, Dickens finally emerged upon the streets of Harrisburg.

The following day, Friday, March 25, he toured the Capitol Building, including its historical archives, an the new Dauphin County prison.

On that rainy afternoon, Dickens boarded a canal boat, which he described as a barge with a little house on it, and began the three-and-a-half-day journey to Pittsburgh on the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal.

To learn more about the canal journey that Dickens might have experienced, we visited the Perry Historian and spoke with Dr.

Denny Hocker, a canal expert and author.

The Perry Historians is an all-volunteer organization located in New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania.

They are focused on studying and preserving family heritage and local history in Perry County area.

DENNY: What the canal was all about was creating a mass transit system that could carry a lot of weight.

A canal boat could hold 100,000 pounds.

Yeah.

A wagon at the time, a Conestoga, one of the bigger wagons, held about 10,000.

Yeah, five or six tons, yeah.

DENNY: So it took four horses per wagon.

It took 10 wagons to equal a canal boat.

Yeah.

So that's really what the canal was all about.

Oh, yeah.

DENNY: It allowed the Industrial Revolution to take place.

The canal was basically a water pathway, a water road.

It would drop about a foot in a mile.

When you got past that, then you put a step in, just like a stair step, except it was a water stair step.

That was a lock.

So they would pull in-- if they were going downstream.

They would lower the water level, and it would come out at the new level of the canal.

MATT: So the water goes in, the boat will go up.

The water comes out-- DENNY: The boat goes down.

Eastern Division had 14 locks.

The Juniata Division had 86.

So you had a hundred locks, basically, between here and Pittsburgh.

So Dickens would have probably gone through nearly a hundred locks in his trip.

Mm-hmm.

[cheerful music] DUSTIN (VOICEOVER): As Dickens moved north of Harrisburg, he would traverse one of the most interesting and critical segments of the Pennsylvania Canal, at Clarks Ferry Bridge in Duncan's Island.

CHARLES DICKENS (VOICEOVER) When we crossed the Susquehanna River-- over which there was a extraordinary wooden bridge with two galleries, one above the other, so that even there, two boat teams meeting may pass without confusion-- it was wild and grand.

DUSTIN (VOICEOVER): Mules woul tow canal boats across the river using the Clarks Ferry Bridge.

A slackwater dam was built just below the bridge to make the water calm an deep enough to float the canal boats across.

A couple miles further on Duncan's Island, Dickens would cross the Juniata River using an aqueduct.

A canal aqueduct is a covered bridge with a canal inside, so boats could cross over the river rather than through it.

While the Juniata aqueduct is long gone, remnants of its supporting piers can still be seen in the Juniata Rive on the northern end of Duncan's Island, near Amity Hall.

The Juniata aqueduct was about 600 feet long and was mostly constructed of wood, except for its stone piers and abutments.

[intriguing music] Close by, we visited the famous Junction Lock Number One, that would have lifted boats to the level of this aqueduct, allowing them to clear the Juniata Rive and enter the Juniata Division of the Pennsylvania Canal.

DENNY: We are in the canal.

We are about here.

MATT: OK.

DENNY: Now, see, this is also a basin, because if you had to park canal boat, waiting for the lock to clear, they stayed over here.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

OK.

We're heading toward the lock.

Heading towards the lock.

You want to head towards that downed tree over there on the left side.

[twigs snapping] Wow.

DENNY: All right, guys, welcome to Juniata Junction Lock.

[sweeping music] MATT: Incredible.

Humongous.

So you said it can lift a boat about 15 feet?

DENNY: About 15 feet up.

Gotcha level with the aqueduct.

Yep.

DENNY: Right up here is where the doors closed flush.

MATT: Yep.

DENNY: 13 degrees water pressure coming this way would seal the gate.

OK.

And it faces the upstream.

And the V faces upstream.

So right here would have been-- actually, probably right up here a little bit-- would have been a sill they would have closed on.

MATT: So it's probably down there.

DENNY: It's probably down there.

MATT: Yeah.

Got a remnant of the gate, actually, which is pretty rare because the wood-- like, this one is rotting and it falls off and gets covered in the mud.

But there's part of the gate right here.

You can see the iron, like-- DUSTIN: Bar.

MATT: --fasteners, and that little circular stone part where it allows the gate to open.

DENNY: Now, we had talked about locks acting as a step.

MATT: Yeah.

Here you can clearly see it.

DUSTIN: The physical-- MATT: The step.

Because there's a physical step down.

When they closed the gates, two doors at the bottom, two little doors, they would have opened those to fill the gate up, because all the water then would have flowed in and up.

DUSTIN: And the boat-- MATT: It would rise to that level.

DUSTIN: --and go out.

DENNY: Yep.

MATT: Which is level with the aqueduct.

DENNY: Right.

MATT: This is called the Junction Lock.

DENNY: Yes.

MATT: Is that symbolic of how important it was?

DENNY: Yes, because what we just traveled through was the junction of the Susquehanna branch, the Juniata branch, and the Eastern branch going south.

So you had three divisions of the canal here.

MATT: Intersecting right here.

Intersecting here.

MATT: Yeah.

And this was the route west.

Cross over the Juniata right here at the aqueduct.

DENNY: Right.

MATT: And keep going toward Huntingdon, toward Lewistown, toward Huntingdon, toward Hollidaysburg, toward Pittsburgh.

So can we say with 100% certainty that Charles Dickens came through this lock?

Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely.

[intriguing music] MATT: Man, I can't believe Charles Dickens came through this lock.

I mean, it is such a vita part of the Pennsylvania Canal, and it's the biggest lock I've ever seen.

DUSTIN: I mean, it really i emblematic of this bygone era.

Denny, thank you so much for taking us to explore the Junction Lock.

You're very welcome.

This has been incredible, but let's go get cleaned up.

I'm for that.

Yep.

[upbeat music] MATT (VOICEOVER): Many towns along the canal began to grow thanks to the increased flow of goods and people.

These towns still celebrate their canal history and work to preserve what remains of the old infrastructure.

Going west, the canal would face some of Pennsylvania's toughes geography, the Allegheny Mountai The Allegheny Portage Railroa was built to solve that problem.

One of the greatest challenges facing Pennsylvania canals was the constant elevation changes, like right here in the Alleghenies.

That's exactly why we're here at the Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site, to find out exactly how they could take th boats up over those mountains.

Let's check it out.

Yeah.

[mellow music] ELIZABETH: This railroad system really was an engineering marvel in its day for being able to conquer the Allegheny Mountains.

The Allegheny Portage Railroa was 36 miles over the Allegheny Mountains, and it connected two canal basins, the canal basin in Hollidaysburg on th eastern side of the mountains, to Johnstown on the western side.

If you were traveling on the Main Line Canal, if you got to Hollidaysburg, for example, people, goods came out of the water.

They were transported to railroad cars.

They were taken up and over the Allegheny Mountains by a series of 10 incline planes.

The incline planes served as stairs going up one side of the mountain and down the other.

On the level sections of the railroad, train cars were pulled by horses, and then starting in 1835 is the incorporation of steam locomotives.

CHARLES DICKENS (VOICEOVER): Occasionally the rails are laid upon the extreme verge of a giddy precipice, and looking from the carriage window the traveler gazes sheer down, without a stone or scrap of fence between into the mountain depths below.

In the years after the Allegheny Portage Railroad opened, you have advancements i technology and transportation.

When the Pennsylvania Railroad builds the Horseshoe Curve, and they lay an all-track line across the state, you can now travel by rail all the way across Pennsylvania, and it takes about a day.

So you don't need the piecemeal system of the Main Line Canal anymore.

[cheerful music] So can you give us the lay of the land?

Where are we at?

So right now, we are lookin down Incline Plane Number Six.

The Skew Arch Bridge is at the very bottom of this incline plane.

To my right here is Engine House Number Six Exhibit Shelter.

So this is what the engine house structures on the Allegheny Portage Railroad would have looked like.

There were 10 of these, one a the top of each incline plane.

And inside of each engine house was all of the machinery used to pull people and goods up the stee terrain on the incline planes.

So can we go inside Engine House Number Six and check it out?

Absolutely.

Let's go check it out.

Thanks.

ELIZABETH: So we are looking at a model of the machinery that originally would have been inside this engine house building, and we have the boilers and the pulleys and the sheaves and the ropes and everything that would have helped pull everything up and down the incline plane.

MATT: So this has been a National Historic Site since 1964, and a lot o people have put in tons of time interpreting the history here.

Why is that story so important to United States history?

ELIZABETH: Yeah, for folks to come up with this idea in the early 1830s, to build this system, and the incline planes an all of the machinery that went into this, is really amazing.

And this story still inspires visitors today because this was a big challenge.

You had to overcome this obstacle of the Allegheny Mountains.

And people can still relate t that today, overcoming obstacles and challenges, when they learn about this story.

So from the engine house, where would the travelers head next?

So travelers would next head to the summit level, and a lot of them to the Lemon House Tavern.

Let's go that way.

All right.

All right.

[upbeat music] MATT: So the Lemon House is here behind us.

Beautiful.

What purpose did it serve t the Allegheny Portage Railroad?

The Lemon House is the original structure that was built by Samuel Lemon in the early 1830s, and this tavern would have been open for travelers on the Allegheny Portag Railroad when it opened on March 18, 1834.

This was a chance for people to stop, grab a bite to eat, catch up on the news of the day.

So you could sit down quickly, be served your meal, eat, and continue on your way.

DUSTIN: How long did it take to go from Hollidaysburg to Johnstown?

Took between six to 10 hours to travel the 36 miles over the Allegheny Portage Railroad.

MATT: Which was fast back then.

It was fast back then.

MATT: That's fast.

Yeah.

So we're at the summit, maybe we got a bite to eat, and now travelers are heading west, right?

What's our next step?

ELIZABETH: From Johnstown started the Western Division of the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal.

From Johnstown, you woul travel by canal to Pittsburgh.

MATT: So can we explore the Lemon House?

Yes, absolutely.

Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.

My pleasure.

Enjoy the Lemon House.

We will.

[mellow music] MATT (VOICEOVER): The Lemon House gave us another fascinating glimpse of the past.

And while we can't say for certain if Dickens stopped in for a meal or a whiskey, he definitely passed by on his way west to Pittsburgh.

CHARLES DICKENS (VOICEOVER): W emerged upon the ugly confusion of backs of buildings and crazy galleries and stairs, which always abuts on water, whether it be river, sea, canal, o ditch, and were at Pittsburgh.

Wow.

What an incredible National Historic Site that we can see right here in Central Pennsylvania.

Yeah, it's a unique blend o canal history and early railroad history, all wrapped together as an engineering marvel.

It's ironic that the Allegheny Portage Railroad was created to support the canal system, but it's ultimately railroads that will cause the demise of canals.

Yeah, but you can still experience canal history, if you know where to look.

[gentle music] DUSTIN (VOICEOVER): While canals declined and fell out of use due to railroads and modern development, many ruins and relics survive.

There are still many preserved sites to enjoy as recreation today like biking old canal towpaths or kayaking in an actual canal.

One such place is the Union Canal in Lebanon County.

On our way there, we stopped at the Lebanon County Historical Society, where Shane Keenan guided us through their amazing museum.

He even brought out some rare canal artifacts, like this detailed logbook, an a boat horn used on the canal.

Our next stop was the Union Canal Tunnel Park.

Owned by the Lebanon County Historical Society, the park is over 110 acres and is all volunteer-maintained, staffed, and funded.

Public and private boa tours, as well as kayak tours, can be enjoyed here at the park.

So we could not resist the rare opportunity to travel on an actual Pennsylvania canal.

MATT: So geographically, we're in Lebanon and we're on the Union Canal.

So where are boats coming and going from, and through the tunnel?

ED: Yep.

So basically the canal, what's going to become the Union Canal, which is also called the Golden Link, because when it was first opened, it really created that-- I'm going to talk about I-81, I-83, Pennsylvania Turnpike.

That's what this was when this first opened.

So the canal opens in 1827.

And then actually, the canal piece stretches from Harrisburg, technically Middletown, on the Susquehanna River, to Reading and the Schuylkill River.

And then there's a branch part of the Union Canal that actually goes north t Pine Grove in Schuylkill County, and that gave the canal access to the coal fields.

MATT: Yeah.

So a lot of coal through here.

ED: Coal's going to power the Industrial Revolution.

All the cities on the East Coas are dying for the fuel supply.

The Union Canal, along with some other canals in Pennsylvania, really is going to open up the coal regions before the railroads and allo that coal to flow to the cities.

[mellow music] DUSTIN: Yeah, so we're about to enter the Union Canal Tunnel.

Yeah.

So the centerpiece of our park, and the centerpiece of the Union Canal at the summit level here, is the Union Canal Tunnel.

DUSTIN: Yeah.

ED: What we've been sailing on so far and what we're about to go through here is all going to be constructed by hand.

So this is made before machinery.

There are no bulldozers or stea shovels, or none of that stuff exists at this point in time.

MATT: Dangerous work, hard work.

ED: Yeah, no doubt.

Took them two years to complete the tunnel.

So the tunnel was started in 1825.

It's completed in 1827.

When they met in the middle-- again, think about this as a time before computers and lasers and all the fancy stuff that we have today.

When they met in the middle, they were less than six inches off from being dead center of each other.

MATT: Nice.

So pretty amazing given, the tools and the technology they had in the day.

MATT: That is.

ED: But your source of power was a mule.

Yeah.

There's no mule path in the tunnel here.

So-- yeah.

So literally, you were going to push your boat through the tunnel using poles.

Or the boats where the cargo would have been in the middle here, you could have actually laid on top of your cargo, as a captain, and used your feet against some of the lower portions of the tunnel to help push your boat through.

MATT: Yeah, yeah.

It's neat to be able to be actually on a boat in a Pennsylvania canal.

Like, that's pretty incredible still today.

ED: Yeah.

I mean, that's a very rare thing, but it's here.

Wow.

Going through that tunnel, it really felt like traveling back in time.

It's incredible to imagin all the manpower and technology and engineering it took to create a system like this, only to be made inevitably obsolete by railroads.

It's inspiring that they accomplished so much, in so little time, with the tools that they had.

And transportation history like this is really useful.

Sometimes it gets taken for granted, but it can really show yo what life was like at the time, and what was migration like, and economics, and how it impacted the Industrial Revolution.

Thank goodness we still have places like this that we can experience canal history.

[gentle music] MATT (VOICEOVER): The Pennsylvania Canal system truly was an engineering marvel of its time.

With its tunnels, aqueducts, numerous locks, and the Allegheny Portage rail system, the canal managed to conquer Pennsylvania's unique terrain and helped propel the Industrial Revolution.

And while the canal era was relatively brief, the impact and its remnants can still be seen today.

Fortunately, we have the writings of Charles Dickens capturing this unique time in Pennsylvania's transportation history.

CHARLES DICKENS (VOICEOVER): There was much in this mode of traveling which I heartily enjoyed at the time, and look back upon with great pleasure.

[theme music]