Description
Full title - "Inland: The Abandoned Canals of the Schuylkill Navigation" by Sandy Sorlien
George F. Thompson Publishing
List prices is $45. SFAHS price is $40 + S&H
What happened to the Schuylkill Navigation System, sometimes referred to as the Schuylkill Canal?
Photographer Sandy Sorlien resolved to find out. Over the course of seven years, she repeatedly traveled upriver from her home near the Manayunk Canal, bushwhacking along the riverbanks and rowing and paddling in the river itself. Armed with camera and binoculars, loppers and trekking poles, nineteenth-century maps and modern satellite imagery, and later abetted by local historians and an archaeologist, she found all sixty-one lock sites and explored most of the canal beds. Her photographs reveal a mysterious remnant landscape, evidence of an extraordinary engineering feat that spelled its own demise. The water pollution created by the coal industry, unregulated factory and residential waste, and obstructive dams all but destroyed the river that fed the Navigation. Clogged channels, railway competition, and repeated flood damage meant the end of a way of life for the towns that boomed along the canals, and only a few historians keep its memory alive.
Along with Sorlien’s color plates and explanatory essays, Inland features a selection of historic images, rare historic Schuylkill Navigation Company maps, and early Philadelphia Watering Committee plans. The book also includes a foreword by renowned landscape scholar John R. Stilgoe, an essay on regional transportation history by Mike Szilagyi, Trails Project Manager for the Schuylkill River Greenways Natural Heritage Area, and an afterword by Karen Young, Director of the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center. A sweeping new Schuylkill River map by Morgan Pfaelzer connects it all.
Inland is the first book to present contemporary photographs from a survey of the entire Schuylkill Navigation, becoming an essential resource for future historians and a resonant visual history all its own.
