Neversink Valley Museum
December 31, 2011 In the early 1800s, a Philadelphia businessman ventured into the uninhabited woods of Pennsylvania ostensibly to find anything that would make him strike it rich. He found black rocks that turned out to be anthracite, an energy resource that because of its richer quality cost two to three times as much as regular coal. To cash in on the find, however, he had to find a way of transporting it to New York City, more than a hundred miles away.

Instead of transporting by land through mountainous terrain, he had a canal built where water flowed one hundred eight miles east to the Hudson River. The Hudson River was an already established route for trading with the Indians ever since the days of the lucrative fur trade in 1614. Anthracite was then floated on barges along the canal and then on the Hudson River to New York City. Because the canal ran through the Delaware River and ended at the Hudson River, it was named the Delaware and Hudson Canal or D&H.

Today, although most of it has dried up, portions are still wet and towns maintain parks beside them. One portion in the hamlet of Cuddebackville in New York State still has the canal’s aqueduct abutments on opposing banks of Neversink River. A museum beside one abutment, the Neversink Valley Museum, has some exhibits relating to the canal.

Canals were an efficient mode of transporting goods back then, before railroads of the Industrial Age came and made them antiquated and obsolete.

In the early days after the discovery of the New World, settlers came from the Old World wheeling-and-dealing for opportunities that were simply not available to them from whence they came. That is still true today as yours truly--and so do every Tom-Dick-and-Harry immigrating to the United States not just from the Old World but from all over the world--to some extent still does.

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