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.
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.