January 2022 - The American Canal Society

Earl Giles Collection- Amity Hall Lock and Aqueduct Piers

I have passed by this place many times as I traveled along Route 15 but never knew it was there until I scanned these slides. Amity Hall is/was just northwest of the confluence of the Juniata and Susquehanna rivers. It appears as Aqueduct in this 1907 topo map. You can see the dashed blue line of the old canal and where it crossed the Juniata on the aqueduct, hence the name.

A 1940s guide to the state says this; In Amity Hall, the State’s east-west and north-south canal systems intersected here, and the area is littered with canal remains. A short distance northwest of the junction are the stone piers of the old Pennsylvania Canal Aqueduct, which carried the Susquehanna Canal across the Juniata. The wooden trough of the aqueduct has long rotted away. Near by is a well-preserved lock.

I tried looking up the origin of the name Amity Hall and found this video of an old tavern/inn. The 1940s history says; The Amity Hall Inn (open May-Oct), built about 1810, is a two-and-a-half-story, red brick building, with gabled roof and dormer windows; the inn is furnished with many old household articles and old prints. A dormitory and lunch room here is much patronized by freight truck drives, and it is not uncommon to see from 50 to 100 trucks parked here at one time.

These slides were all dated April 1969. I don’t know if Earl took them or traded for them. You will see later that he did have a interest with the bridge at Clark’s Ferry, so I like to think that he might have been visiting and took these himself.

From Google Maps it looks like the lock and piers are still intact. Today the area is marked by the Amity Hall public boat launch.

Earl Giles Collection – Plane 8 on the APRR

I don’t know much about Plane 8 aside from what I see in these images from May of 1970. They were all labeled “Foundations at Plane 8.” The last image is labeled, “bridge at foot of Plane 8.”

From a site called Wikimapia it shows that the bottom of the plane was at what was known as Muleshoe Curve. The Muleshoe was a relative of the more famous Horseshoe Curve, built in the 1850s and closed in 1981. The Muleshoe and the alignment of the portage railroad can be seen on this 1902 map of the Ebensburg quadrant topo map.

The National Park Service has a lengthy report on-line about the APRR. You can download it here. The report is from 1973 so I wonder if these excavations were part of the study.

If any of this remains intact, let me know. There is a trail along the old railroad in this area and I am surprised not to find more on-line concerning it.

Earl Giles Collection- More of Plane 6 on the APRR

In addition photos of the engine house and Lemon House at Plane 6, the Earl Giles collection has some showing the incline in that late 1960s period.

Many of the slides were labeled and with the trail off to the side, I am reasonably certain that this is Plane 6. It looks as if it had been cleared and then regrew a bit. Honestly today it doesn’t look too much different. I took this on my visit last October 2021. I was remarking that it would benefit from a trim with a good boom mounted mower.

There are a couple others in the collection that say they are Plane 6.

I noticed in my own shots that it can be difficult to tell if you are looking uphill of down. Also in the collection was this shot showing a man measuring the distance between the sleepers along the plane.

This was dated February 1968, so it is possible that someone exposed the stones and then it all regrew or maybe they decided to re-bury them all. The first image in this post seems to capture that regrowth.

If you have been to the park, you know that at the bottom of the plane is the skew bridge. What is surprising is that the only pictures Earl had of the bridge were of older photos like this postcard image. That mark on the left edge seems to indicate that it was taken from some collection.

The skew bridge is where the old highway passed over the railroad. It was constructed on an angle (or skew) which is a feat of engineering on its own. Here is the skew bridge today.

Old Route 22 (a four lane highway) splits just uphill and goes around the bridge site. At the split is this monument to the Allegheny Portage Railroad.

And here is a view looking up the incline from the bridge. The Lemon House sits at the top of the hill/plane and the National Park Visitor’s Center is off to the right, a walk of about a half mile.

Next time it is onto Plane 8.