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Researching The Canal and Family Genealogy

Are you setting out on your journey to find your canal family tree? We are often asked how to find people who worked or lived on the canals, and sadly, there is no magic place where all canal based records are kept. A lot depends on how your state ran the canal. Was the canal government controlled, or was it all hired out? New York State has run its canals since 1817 and has great canal records when it comes to the construction and operation, but employees not so much. States like Pennsylvania and Ohio built their canals but hired out their operations to private firms. The Delaware and Hudson Canal was all privately owned and operated. If your ancestor was a state employee they might be mentioned in passing. If they were a boat owner or worked for someone on a boat, it is unlikely you will find them mentioned in any official records. If they were born on a boat, you might find a birth notice in the local town or county, but not often. So what to do? Well don’t despair. If you live down the street or on the other side of the world, there are many resources to help you find your ancestors and here are some of our favorite places to look.

First off, although subscription services such as Ancestry.com or Family Search can seem expensive, the amount of materials available will be well worth any money spent. These services have millions of records available and if you add up what you can find on their sites, and what it would cost to drive to each site to hunt and peck, you will find it worth the cost. Plus if you do a DNA test, it will tie into your tree. If you are new to these services, check out some of the genealogical how-to videos on You Tube. If you can’t afford them, or just wish to see what they offer, many libraries have access to a free Ancestry.com account, so ask!

But maybe you don’t want to do that, so try these sites.

Check with the state’s canal society. Most are all volunteer run groups but many maintain an archives or at the very least, know where the records are kept. The Canal Society of New York State, the Canal Society of Ohio, the Canal Society of New Jersey, the Canal Society of Indiana, the Virginia Canals and Navigations Society, the Delaware and Hudson Canal Society, the Pennsylvania Canal Society, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Association, as well as many smaller groups.

A Caution- All these sites use OCR (optical character recognition) technology. if you don’t find what you are looking for, try a different search term or way to word it. You will be surprised!

Internet Search engines, or just “Google it.” Don’t overlook the simple tool of simply typing in your name and seeing what comes up. The search engines that power the internet are constantly crawling about content and updating. Local historical societies will write up articles, newspapers will run history based articles, and of course those of us who write blogs, are constantly adding new information to the web. The search engines will typically pick it up.

There are rules that will help your searching, such as adding “quotes” around your search terms. I go into this a bit further down in this post, but in short, searching for Bob Smith and then “Bob Smith” will return different results. The quotes turn the two words into one phrase. However if Bob Smith used the middle name Tom, using the quotes will rule out any returns if he was called Bob Tom Smith, or Bob T. Smith.

Google Books. Make a direct search in the Google Books search engine. Sometimes Google Books will pop up in your broad internet search, but not always. This is a overlooked resource. Search for; Bob Smith Lock 34 canal, and see what comes up. Be fancy and add the quotes to search “Bob Smith” “Lock 34” canal.

See if there is a local historical society. Many towns and villages will have a small volunteer run historical society, but every state is different. For instance, New York has village, town and county governments, whereas Pennsylvania has townships and county. Some states have county and city governments only. If you can’t find a local resource then take a wider look. Is there a county or city historical society? Check for a state archives or state library. Then check with the Library of Congress! Use a website like Cyndi’s List and/or Linkpendium to help you find these resources.

Be warned. While many small organizations will be happy (delighted!) to answer your questions, many will charge a fee upfront just take a look. If the organization has paid staff, then expect to pay for any information.

Check digital newspapers. Newspapers.com is a paid service but might be worth a month’s service if you can find something. The site called Old Fulton Postcards is free. It has over 51 million newspaper pages (as of March 2022) from all across the United States and Canada. As you might expect, it is a very busy site and at times, you will find the results very slow to load. I will open a few tabs and have many searches going at once so I am not waiting for a page to open.

If you use Old Fulton, take some time to learn how to use the sites search engine, and specifically, how to do Boolean searches. If you were searching for Oliver Tanner who ran a dry dock in Port Byron NY, you could simply type in the word Tanner, and chose the All The Words search option, your results will show every time the name Tanner, or the word tanner, as in tanning leather, was used. You could try to focus a bit more by entering, Tanner Port Byron, and then chose All The Words, and you will find every time Tanner, tanner, Port, and Byron, was used. So your results might show articles about the poems of Lord Byron next to a leather maker in Port Jacobs. You could try the Exact Phrase option to find all the articles about Port Byron, but that will return all the mentions of such as the Port Byron Chronicle, Port Byron schools, Port Byron Illinois, and so on.

Instead, use the Boolean search function and use the w/? function. Boolean allows you to enter the words, Tanner AND Port AND Byron, however it is much easier to enter Tanner w/10 “Port Byron.” This change has done a couple things. First notice that Port Byron is in quotes. This turns the two words into one word/phrase. So instead of getting every time Port and Byron is used, you will find only Port Byron. The w/10 tells the search engine to search for each time the word Tanner is used within 10 words of “Port Byron” And the number is up to you. If you wish to find all the times Oliver is used near Tanner, such as any of Oliver Tanner that might include his middle name, enter Oliver w/5 Tanner. You could do Tanner AND “Port Byron”, and you will find each time Tanner was on the same page as “Port Byron.” This is very helpful for finding those little articles in a far away newspaper that notes that “Mrs. Tanner of Port Byron, NY was visiting her niece last week.”

While Old Fulton is great, it is not easy to turn the page if your article is continued on …(page 4). What you need to do is to copy the page address that you are currently on, take a guess at how many pages to add, paste that into the search box, enter the Exact Phrase option, and then adjust from there. So if you find an article on page 8 of the Port Byron Chronicle 1905 Oct-0788.pdf, and your article continues on page 12, you will need to adjust the address to -0792.pdf. And go from there.

There are many other newspaper resources. The Advantage Archives are working with smaller organizations with digitizing their collections and then hosting the pages. Check their website for a directory map to see what might be available near your relatives. Advantage Archives has a nice feature where you can simply turn the page to find that continued on article. Many times if I know the date I am looking for I will focus on that date and then search the entire paper for the name, just in case the OCR missed it. Note- I find that the Community History Archive Directory works better for me in Firefox then Chrome.

NYS Historic Newspapers. This is another organization that has made newspapers available on the internet. Their search engine is a little different but you can search by county, dates, names and so on.

Be sure to check out the US GenWeb project. GenWeb is not what it used to be but it can be helpful and should be checked. Some county pages are great while others are very basic.

Don’t overlook Find A Grave, and Billion Graves. Both of these sites post cemetery information and have local volunteers that will search for a headstone and photograph it for you. Many of the bios are quite full of information.

Finding Their Routes; Family History and Genealogy -(Pamela Vittorio) specifically focuses on canal based family research. This is a fee based service but might be worth it if you are really stuck. Here is a guide Pamela has for finding records in New York State. if you want to hear Pamela talk about the canal and records, here she is on The Forget-Me-Not-Hour in 2016. (audio) The first 30 minutes is mostly a canal overview and history. The second half gets into what records are available.

Feel free to drop us a note and we will be happy to try to guide you along.

Construction Equipment on the NYS Barge Canal, 1905-1920

The New York State Archives has a wonderful collection of Barge Canal Construction photographs that show the progress of construction of the new waterway throughout the years of 1903 to 1920. In these you might find images of what the area looked like prior to construction, the first shovelful of work, progress through the years, work that was disqualified due to poor construction, damage from floods and ice, and then the finished projects (and more). You can find these in collection 11833 (Barge Canal Construction Photos).

These images also provide a remarkable record of the early days of heavy earth moving construction machinery. In the early 1900s, the steam shovel was only about 25 years old, and once they “perfected” that versatile machine, the possibilities were endless. Do you need to shape a bank? The cantilevered conveyor is the machine you need. Need to move rocks from a deep channel cut? How about the double boom crane? Do you have soft soils? How about a cable-way? If there was a job to do, some inventor had a machine to do it. And many of these machines were used to dig the new Barge Canal.

The Barge Canal was not the first use of these machines. The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which was built in the 1890s, used many of the same machines. And it appears that some also were used on the Hennepin Canal construction.

Beginning with the Winter 2022 issue of the American Canals newsletter we have begun to look at these early machines. We will post the the same images from the articles, plus a few more, so you have the ability to enlarge and get a better look at their use and workings.

We start with Contract 40 which was the area of the big cut. This was the 5-mile section west of Lockport where the canal had to be cut through bedrock in order to reach the level of Lake Erie. This area was famous for its work during the construction of the original Erie Canal, and it posed the same challenges in 1900 with how to remove the massive quantities of rock from the channel.

The Brown Hoisting and Conveying Machine Company built this cantilevered conveyor. The machine was designed to remove spoils from the bank and deposit them directly behind the machine.

A close up of the Brown cantilevered excavator. A drag-line bucket runs along the arms and can be used to shape the banks. This machine was able to work in the navigation season. The machine sits of railroad style trucks.

You get a sense of the work with the shaped bank in the foreground and the vegetated bank behind it. A boat can be seen in the distance. The machine could also be used to lift skips of material that had been loaded by hand or team-shovel.

The Browning double-boom crane was designed to allow one boom to be working while the opposite one was dumping. This machine was used mostly to lift skips of rock out of the cut. Multiple skips would be in the work area either being loaded by men or using a steam-shovel.

You get a good sense of the scale of the work. The steam-shovel alone could never remove the rock so the double-boom crane is used to lift the rock out of the cut. The shovel would load a large skip and the crane would lift it clear. The machine would rotate 180-degrees and dump it’s load onto the spoils pile. At the same time, the boom over the canal would be lowering a empty skip into the cut.

Here you can see the skips, basically large baskets. This was July 1910 and the canal is in use. The canal cut is being widened down to the water level and the rest will be removed in the winter.

The Browning double-boom could also function as a drag-line by using only one of the booms and fitting it with a drag bucket. The machine sat on skids and would use it’s engines and capstans to drag itself around.

This view gives us a nice look at many of the machines used on the Barge Canal. The Brown Hoisting cantilever can be seen in the distance, which a Bucyrus steam-shovel loads skips on the Browning incline conveyor. The skips will run along the top of the track and then tip it’s load at the high end onto the spoils pile. A Lidgerwood cable-way flies over along the top of the photo.

Details on all these machines are featured in the Winter 2022 issue of American Canals. In upcoming issues we will take a look at more equipment used of the Barge Canal.

Canal Comments – Kelly’s Canal

By Terry K Woods

I was given a copy of Kelly’s articles by Lew Richardson who I deem to be, by far, the best editor of the many who worked on Towpaths, the quarterly historical publication the Canal Society of Ohio. I never met Lew, who had retired and moved to Georgia to live before I became editor, but whenever I contacted him, I could always count upon him answering my letter of inquiry and dire need quickly and concisely.

This Kelly isn’t Alfred, the Acting Canal Commissioner for the Northern Division of the Ohio Canal back in the beginning. The is S.J. Kelly who wrote two very short, very informative columns about the Ohio Canal back in 1943 for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. There is an error or two here and there, and I’m not sure if he wasn’t describing early Erie boats rather than early Ohio boats, as Ohio’s boat’s stables were in the center of the craft while those on the Erie had bow placed stables. Anyway, there is some good stuff in this piece. Here, then, is S.J. Kelly – on the Ohio Canal.

“Gazing west, down Superior Avenue you sight the heavy B & O Railroad bridge poised in air. Some 165 feet above the street level. At its base, east of the Cuyahoga, about 300 feet south of Superior Hill, the old Erie and Ohio Canal entered the river through big Ship Lock (No. 44). Eastward along the tracks you can almost locate Merwin’s Basin, 225 by 150 feet, between West and James Streets. You can picture, too, the busy scene when gaily painted canal boats lay up beside Brigantines, Schooners and other craft and passenger packets moored to the slip in the northwest corner.

“The STATE OF OHIO was the first boat to descend the canal. Leaving Akron on July 3, 1827, it stopped at Boston, about half way to Cleveland for the night. Aboard were Ohio Governor Trimble, State Officials, and Canal Commissioners. The ALLEN TRIMBLE joined them later and on the Fourth the Governor reported in his annual message: “The boats were cheered by thousands assembled from the adjacent country at different points to witness the novel and interesting sight.”

“The PIONEER is said to have been purchased at Buffalo and towed to Cleveland for the celebration, and some distance up the Cuyahoga it was hauled across and launched in a cut through the towpath. This is wrong.

“Records show the PIONEER was built at Peninsula. On the Fourth, loaded with passengers and a band, the boat met the other two some six miles up the canal. A salute was exchanged and the three journeyed on together. (1)

“Cleveland histories fail to report that the three boats stopped some distance outside the village or to locate the spot. When the waterway was started in 1825 its terminal and which side of the Cuyahoga it would follow were left undecided. An estimate of 1825 showed it would cost $6,000 less for the canal to remain on the left bank. Judge David Bates of New York, chief engineer, arriving at that time, picked the east side and Cleveland Village donated $5,000 to the Canal Fund.(2)

“Where those first three boats stopped that Fourth is of historic importance. Investigation shows that not until April 1828, was water let into the long Cleveland Bends from Four Mile Lock (N0. 42) nor was Sloop Lock (No. 43), at the foot of south Water Street hill, completed until July 29. Then boats entered Merwin’s Basin for the first time, reaching the river by a temporary cut and unloaded. Ship Lock (NO. 44) was completed months later.

“Research leads me to believe that Lock 41 at the foot of Harvard Avenue, often referred to as “Five Mile lock, was the stopping place. I believe, also, that “Weight Lock”, 1,000 feet south of the Old Grasselli chemical plant on Independence road, must have been Lock 42.(3) Some may remember the drydock at the foot of Seneca (West 3d) Street hill, long used by canal boats.

“A canal trip is better understood if one knows something about canal boats. The first (on the Ohio Canal) were from 50 to 60 feet long and rather sharp at bow and stern, resembling river keel boats in their hulls, They were narrow with small cabins, sleeping bunks for passengers and crew, and a “galley” for the cook.

“These first boats were built for freight, and perhaps a half dozen passengers. Bulky cargoes of coal stone (4), flour, grain, whiskey, merchandise and produce (usually carried in barrels or other wooden containers) were the rule.

“ But sharp bows damaged bridges, locks and other structures as well as a careless ramming of a canal bank. In the early 1840s regulations were imposed that required rounded bows and iron bars or straps on the bow edge were prohibited.

“As the Ohio Canal was completed through to the Ohio River and a branch to Columbus, a demand was created for long distance accommodations, By 1835 a number of passenger/freight Lines were answering this demand and the design of boats was altered to accommodate this freight/passenger trade. Boats particularly designed to carry both passengers and freight called Line Boats) appeared and, by 1837, true “Passenger Packets” carrying exclusively passengers were making through, scheduled trips between Cleveland and Portsmouth.

“The traveling public could be divided into two classes. One included families, persons going west, permanently, to resettle, and individuals wanting dependable travel (at least more travel than the current roads could promise) for required travel and conduct business or seeing to other important matters away from their normal habitats. These used Line Boats (two-deckers) that carried both passengers and freight.

“The other class, with money enough to travel a bit classier or swifter or purely for pleasure, would engage passage on packet-boats after they were introduced onto Ohio’s canal in the late 1830s.

“An early Line Boat was often 65 or so feet long by 7 ½ feet wide. In the bow were stables for horses, three of which were taken aboard at the end of each shift. Across a passageway was the crew’s cabin with bunks for six men, Projecting above the deck over four feet. This gave a ceiling clearance of about eight feet. Passengers on a Line Boat were not generally provided with a cabin, but slept in the hold, frequently without bunks. No bedding was supplied. They brought their own provisions and were advised to bring a cook stove if they wanted warm meals.(5)

“At the stern of an was the Captain’s cabin and the cook’s quarters. Here was stationed the steersman. The white cabins had slightly slanted walls and fairly flat roofs with shuttered windows. The crew included two steersmen, two boy drivers, and a cook. The Captain sometimes owned the boat and lived on it year round. Almost the entire craft was given over to freight, often with deck loads of lumber. The speed of a Line Boat was from 2 to 2 ½ miles an hour. Cost of passage varied. Sometimes it was as low as 50 cents a day for a distance of 50 to 60 miles. Again, it could be as high as 3 cents a mile.

“A standard line of Packet Boats was soon built with far more luxurious interior fittings and arrangements.(6) A typical Packet Boat was 75 feet long by 11 wide, its cabin extending above the boat proper some six feet or more. Along each side ran a row of about 20 neatly framed windows. With curtains drawn and green window shutters, these gave the packet an elegant appearance.

“Near the bow the crew quarters had berths for 10 men. This was separated from the rest of the main cabin by a partition. Nearly all the rest of the cabin space aft was devoted to the passengers. First came the woman’s dressing room and the ladies cabin. The largest compartment, the full width of the packet, was usually about 45 feet long with a ceiling 9 feet above the floor. It became a long, rather narrow, gentleman’s sleeping apartment at night, a dining room three times daily, and between those periods, a gathering place for men, a place to write letters, play checkers and backgammon or discuss politics.

“At 6 a.m., noon, and 6 p.m. the Captain appeared with stewards and quickly cleared the room, setting up a large table at the center. Fares on a packet boat included meals and all passengers, ladies gentlemen, and children, dined at the same table. With dusk, the younger children romped through the cabin. If the night was clear, older passengers gathered on the roof which served as a deck. No packet made the trip without some travelers who brought their flutes, fiddles and accordions”.

(1) I always assumed that, if the PIONEER was built in Peninsula, it was the GOVERNOR TRIMBLE that was brought from the Erie and slid from the Cuyahoga to the canal.

(2) This is just a bit garbled, David Bates from New York ran the initial surveys in 1822 and 1823, but was not involved in the final route selection. That was finalized by the Ohio Board of Public Works at a meeting in February 1825, though rumor insists the decision (of the Cleveland terminus over the Black & Killbuck Route and the west Cuyahoga) had been made long before, but not announced in hopes of obtaining “donations” from interested localities.

(3) The “Weight Lock” mentioned was built in the 1870s after Cleveland obtained the northern-most three miles of canal and leased it to a railroad. I believe the actual stopping point for the first three craft on the Ohio Canal was at Lock 42 (Four Mile Lock) which was about a mile further south and removed in 1838 and the canal banks raised for flood control.

(4) Stone coal doesn’t appear to have been commonly used, or transported, during the first seven or eight years of the Ohio Canal’s life.

(5) I have a lot of trouble with this entire paragraph. I have seen no authenticated description of Ohio Line Boats, but I believe they were similar to the design of early Ohio Freight Boats, with the addition of “amenities” for a few passengers .Early Ohio Lines experimented with using way stations to provide fresh teams, but found the practice too expensive and converted to carrying a spare team in a center-mounted stable in the early 1840s.

(6) By 1835 or 36 Packets were making scheduled runs between Cleveland, Columbus and Portsmouth. By mid 1837 a ‘through’ line was established between Cleveland and Portsmouth. This through line’s last year was 1842, but passenger packet travel on the northern section of the Ohio Canal lasted through 1852 and on the southern division into the 1870s.

Earl Giles Collection – The Packsaddle

Many of Earl’s slides are in groups of one or a few. The topic with the most slides was those of the Packsaddle. If you don’t know (I didn’t), the Packsaddle was a valley through the Chestnut Ridge cut by the Conemaugh River. It is located between Robinson / Bolivar to the east and Blairsville on the west.

A post by Coke Oven Mike on his Old Industry of Southwestern Pennsylvania blog tells us that the Packsaddle Gap is very isolated and only accessible by walking the along the railroad or by boat. Compare some of his images to those of Earl. The website of the Pittsburgh to Harrisburg Main Line Canal Greenway tells us that it is possible to see the remains of Lock 5 and 2 miles of revetment wall.

Aside from that, I don’t know much about these. These were all taken between 1968 and 1972.

This is a postcard that Earl had copied.

Maybe he compared the postcard to this view?

This was from the shore. It says from the dam. If Lock 5 was a guard lock, then it would make sense that there would be some sort of dam nearby.

It is difficult to see, but there is a bit of wall in the bank. Earl notes that this is the site of the dam and outlet.

This says lock at Packsaddle. No date, but early 1970s.

This slides says that the men were excavating at the Lockhouse. The men are not identified.

There are a few more like this showing various rocks and such.

This one is labeled canal in the Packsaddle and it is dated March 1968.

It is clear that Earl and his friends walked along the railroad rather then boating in.

If you have walked into the Packsaddle and have info to share, leave us a comment.

Earl Giles Collection- Ardenheim

I don’t have much to add to these four photos of the lock(s?) at Ardenheim. Ardenheim is just east of Huntingdon where the Raystown branch of the Juniata River joins with the main branch of the river.

The shot from summer is dated June 1971.

These are all dated April 1969. It almost looks like two locks. This one is not nearly as deep as the second one.

I would say that these two shots are of the same lock.

That’s all I got. The oldest topo map of this area was from 1922 and there is nothing on the web. If you know more, leave a comment.

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.

Canal Comments- The First Time I Saw Santa Claus

Terry K Woods

As told to Terry by Ben Ludenberger, January 1972.

Wick Ludenberger worked on his dad’s canal boat, the BOILVAR, from the time he was able to drive a team or handle the lock gates until his dad quit boating after the season of 1905 or ‘06. I was able to get Wick and his younger brother Ben to let me interview them both on audio tape at Ben’s home in Bolivar Ohio one Saturday afternoon in January of 1972. Since Christmas is rapidly approaching one of the short tales Wick related that afternoon seems to be quite appropriate. He remembers being four or five at the time this story took place. Wick was born in 1892, so that would mean that it was in 1896 or 97 that little “Wick” Ludenberger first saw Santa Claus.

“ We got froze in one winter just this side of Canal Dover. We had about a half load of coal on board so we decided to stay right where we were instead of trying to make it to the farm at Bolivar to winter at Grandma’s as we usually did.

“Christmas Eve came. There was snow on the ground and everything was froze up. A fellow named Jim Steiner was there that winter too. He had a daughter about 15 or 16 years old. Dad and Jim had been to Canal Dover on the team. I don’t know if they got that Santy Claus suit while they was there or not, but the Steiner girl, maybe somebody put her up to it, decided she was going to play Santy Claus for us kids in all those boats – there was six or seven boats froze up there with us then. I must have been about four or five, because I don’t think Ralph was born yet, but Ben was.

“We was all sitten in the aft cabin of our boat with Mom and Mrs. Steiner. I don’t know where Dad and Jim were. There was a hatch on top of the cabin, the stern deck was up there, with a step-ladder kind of arrangement leading down from the hatch into the cabin. I remember I was sitten on the bottom step. I suppose we were all playen some kind of game or something – when all of a sudden – that hatch flew open, AND THERE WAS SANTY CLAUS. He throwed a bunch of candy and nuts down through the hatch onto the floor. Us kids like to be scared to death. Back under the bunks we all scurried. And that’s the first time I saw Santy Claus.

“The reason I know it was the Steiner girl playen Santy Claus was that, to top things all off – – I don’t know whatever made her try to go around on the gunnel, on the outside of the boat. She could have gone along the catwalk from the stern cabin over the cargo holds and then onto the bank from the bow deck, but she tried to swing down to the gunnel from the stern deck and walk around on it along the outside of the boat to the bank, instead. She must have missed her footing when she swung down, because she fell right into the canal. The ice there along the bank wasn’t that thick and she went right through it into the water. There must have been six or seven feet of water there where she went in.

“We all ran up on deck and Mom and Mrs Snyder, and some of the other folks from the nearby boats, helped fish her out. With that Santy Claus suit on, and how cold it was, and the ice and everything, they had the devil of a time getting her back on board. It’s a wonder she didn’t drown. I don’t think she ever played Santy Claus again, and I know that I’ll never forget that Christmas.”

Earl Giles Collection- Plane 6 on the Allegheny Portage Railroad

The Alleghney Portage Railroad used 10 inclined planes to lift the canal boats up and over the mountains that divided the eastern section of the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal from the western section. Today you can visit Plane 6, which was at the summit or highest level of railroad, at the Allegheny Portage RR National Historic Site.

In the Earl Giles collection there are slides showing excavation work on the engine house in 1968 and ’69. The NPS website only says that; “… and even the National Park Service excavations of the 1970s were done before an interest in evaluating the grounds was voiced.” So it is curious as to what is happening here and who was in charge. These images are dated July 1968. They show the first excavations of the engine house.