Pictures of Delaware Canal Park

Grundy Industrial Complex



Gazebo at the park




The park in autumn



  In the 19th century, coal reigned as the main home heating fuel.  In the basement there was a furnace where the coal would be burned, and the heat would move through the house from a vent directly above.  Or, the house would be heated from the coal stove in the kitchen.  In the earliest days of the coal boom, the Lehigh and Delaware Canals were the main thoroughfare through which coal would be transported from the mountains in Northeast Pennsylvania.  The canal system declined after the Lehigh Railroad was built, and quickly replaced it as the main transportation device for coal.  Although the canals were still used in some capacity until the 1930's, they were increasingly obsolete from the latter half of the 19th century onward.  The anthracite boom itself would end in the 1920's, when oil replaced coal as the main home heating element.   After that, the canal area was sold off to the municipalities that it ran through.  In some places, it was filled in, and in others, like Bristol as shown here, at least some of it was preserved and used as park space.   In the above pictures of Delaware Canal State Park, a small section was dammed up into a pond with footbridges and a fountain.  It stands as both a public recreation facility and as a memorial to a forgotten way of life.

  Less than a mile from where I took these pictures, there is a municipal parking lot where the marina once stood.   That marina was the terminal of the Lehigh and Delaware Canal systems, and at that point the cargo would be loaded onto a freight ship and taken to its destination.  After that, the horses and drivers would start on their 100 mile journey back up the Delaware and Lehigh Rivers to Mauch Chunk and pick up another load of coal, and make the journey down to Bristol again.