lift bridge

[P5se Camelback]

What kind of traffic would have used that puny "canal" - canoes??? Here in Texas we would call that a creek.....Seems like a lot of bridge for a little water

Yeah, I know ... all thing are bigger in Texas. But when the pictured canal was in use, there were only "Original People" and those from south of the Rio Grande in Texas! (And the great Rio Grand River is a wide, but very shallow stream in some places)

Having grown up near all that early American history, and visited the banks of the Delaware Canal (which parallels the Delaware River) for the occasional Saturday family picnic outing, permit me to enlighten you, ScubaDude. The canal in the photo is obviously overgrown with weeds, etc. and was undoubtable much wider when it was in use. Most canals of the day permitted navigation in each direction, with a mule path on either side. In the case of the Delaware Canal, when I last lived in the area in the mid-1970's there was a tourist outfit that ran an attraction of scheduled rides up the canal from New Hope, PA in authentic canal barges pulled by two-mule teams every weekend in the summer.

They probably don't teach this song to young second or third graders anymore in this day of revisionist history, but I can recall, as a kid that age, singing, "I've got an old mule and her name is Sall, Sixteen miles on the Erie Canal." North/South freight travel was handled by river boat where large rivers were navigable and by barges on canals where rivers were too shallow to navigate. East/West frieght travel was primarily by wagaon ... and took "forever."

O.K., that's today's history lesson. Now, your homework for tomorrow is read chapters ...