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.
Historical Topographic Map Collection
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.Some cut stone from the lock. This slides says that the men were excavating at the Lockhouse. The men are not identified. More of the lock house foundation. 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.
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.
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.
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.
Historical Topographic Map Collection
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.
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.
This is dated October 1969
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.
Dated October 1969.Dated June 1970.
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.
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.
The sad thing is that even though we have these images, we don’t have names of the people.
Today the engine house excavation and display are covered with this large building.
The track sleeper stones were also uncovered in 1968.
And here is what it looks like when we visited the site in the fall of 2021.
A little background- I saw a post on one of the canal-related social media sites asking if someone was willing to digitize a few hundred slides that the poster had recently purchased. I enjoy the sense of discovery that comes with scanning these old slides as these personal collections can contain some real treasures. Ray Hall, who was the new owner of the slides, offered to donate them to the ACS in return for a copy of the digital files. A box of slides arrived in a few days and we were off to the scanner!
Ray was able to provide me with the last name of the seller, a Mr. Giles, and he said that they had been taken by a canal/local historian from the Johnstown (PA) area. With this information, it was fairly easy to find that the collection belonged to Earl Giles. I found this article in The Daily News (Johnstown, PA) of July 8, 1968.
This article helped immensely as I was noticing that many of the slides had been labelled as ‘duplicate’ since Earl liked to trade. So now I knew that all the images were not his alone. However, the slides do point to Earl’s interests and that was the western division of the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal with an especial interest in the Pack Saddle region along the Conemaugh River and the Allegheny Portage Railroad. Most of the slides dated from the late 1960s and early ’70s. All the 357 slides were scanned at 2400 dpi as tiff files. When that was done, I went back through and used GIMP to reduce the slides to 400 dpi Jpeg files.
The images were a mix of Earl’s original images taken out on his explorations and slides that he traded for showing the same. About half of the slides were his photographs of older photographs, postcards, and maps. So I sorted out what I thought was interesting and will share them here.
We will start with some images of the Staple Bend Tunnel (constructed 1831-1833) which is claimed to be the first railroad tunnel dug in the United States. (There were two canal tunnels dug prior.) The tunnel is located near Mineral Point, about 5 miles slightly northeast of Johnstown. To reach the tunnel you need to park and walk or ride a bike two miles along the old railroad bed (now a stone-dust path). This site was added to the Allegheny Portage Railroad National Sites in 2001.
When Earl and his fellow explorers visited it in the late 1960s it was certainly a bit more rugged a walk.
This is labeled as the east portal. Apparently much of the stonework had been removed and used elsewhere by 1907.This is an old postcard that might be the same as the one above showing the missing stone-work.These were dated 1968.
The planes were numbered from west to east along the APRR and the 901-foot-long tunnel sat at the head of Plane 1. The image below shows one of the explorers sitting on top of the tunnel portal looking west along Plane 1 and the Conemaugh River valley.
It would take ten planes to lift the canal boats over the mountains and in the next post, we will see the work at Plane 6.
