October 24th, 2008
From Thursday October 16 to Saturday October 18, Lehigh University hosted the 75th annual Pennsylvania Historical Association conference at the Hotel Bethlehem. The conference opened Thursday night with a lecture by noted Abraham Lincoln scholar Gabor Boritt and concluded Saturday afternoon with a luncheon address by Nicole Eustace, a scholar of emotion and love in American history. In between, historians presented their work on a wide variety of topics in Pennsylvania and Mid-Atlantic history. Talks ranged from urban renewal in twentieth-century Allentown to new perspectives on Native Americans.
On Friday afternoon, the D&L sponsored a talk by Dr. Howard Gillette, a professor of modern American history at Rutgers University and Director of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities. Dr. Gillette’s research interests are urban and regional development, and the University of Pennsylvania Press recently published his book Camden After the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-Industrial City.
Dr. Gillette has been deeply involved with discussions of redevelopment in Bethlehem, especially regarding the Sands BethWorks casino complex on the former Bethlehem Steel property. On Friday, Dr. Gillette offered a summary of the campaign to protect the historical resources of the steel site and issued a dire warning that preservation efforts face a rapidly closing timeline. Bethlehem is the site of the most extensive historic steel making infrastructure in the United States, yet there is no plan in place to stabilize or protect the blast furnaces or other iconic buildings. Fortunately, Dr. Gillette, local organizations, like Save Our Steel, and a devoted contingent of community members are working to make sure preservation of the Steel remains an important element of the south side’s revitalization effort.
Gillette’s work and the prevalence of public history panels at this year’s conference are evidence of a recent trend in the American historical profession. Historians are now more than ever eager to advocate on behalf of unique relics of our past and are more likely to frame their arguments in the pragmatic language of economic impact and development. At the same time, public historians are interpreting the past in ways that are accessible to a larger community, helping others understand the importance of history and allowing them to have a hand in creating and protecting their own history.
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September 12th, 2008
Rail trails got their start with Congress’ purely pragmatic deregulation of the railroad industry. During the 1970s, the railroad industry was faced with a deteriorating infrastructure, uncompetitive market structure, and the bankruptcy of several large companies. Existing regulations forced companies to hold onto unprofitable branch lines and maintain unreasonable prices for freight and passenger traffic. The United States Congress’ response was the 1980 Staggers Rail Act. The railroad industry welcomed the legislation because it limited regulation of prices in competitive markets, legalized railroad-shipper contracts, and generally increased the financial stability of the industry.
Rail Banking
More important to the development of rail trails was an aspect of the Staggers Act that streamlined the process of selling or transferring abandoned rail lines and property. In 1983 the National Trails System Act was amended to allow for “rail-banking” of dormant lines. Traditionally, abandoned lines were divvyed up between adjacent landowners, in effect becoming private land. Rail-banking was based on the idea that rail corridors (graded, connected, open space) should be preserved, in case the need for rail transportation ever materialized in the future. Meanwhile, these corridors would be made available for recreational uses, such as hiking, walking, and bike riding. The railroad industry and the outdoor recreation community forged an unlikely yet symbiotic relationship: railroads freed themselves fromm the burden of abandoned lines, and recreationists, in theory, provided maintenance in return for access.
In 1986, the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy was founded to provide assistance to trail managers and organizations hoping to obtain oversight of rail-banked corridors and to lobby for favorable legislation in federal, state, and municipal governments. Arguably the most important accomplishment of the Conservancy came in 1990, when it successfully defended the constitutionality of the National Trail Act’s rail-banking amendment, in front of the US Supreme Court.
The Rail Trail Movement
The constitutionality of rail-banking ensured, the rail trail movement began in earnest and long-distance trails appeared around the nation, especially in the Midwest and Northeast. Rail-banking was an important precedent and acted as a catalyst to the rail trail movement but certainly was not the only means of creating trails on old railroad right-of-ways. Out of the nearly 100 rail trails in Pennsylvania, only seven are on rail-banked corridors. The majority of trails are on pieced-together parcels, wholesale transfers or purchases between governments and railroad companies, or old rail beds reverted back to private property and publicly accessed through easements.
Of course, many sections of the D&L Trail follow abandoned rail lines and short spur lines, so our efforts have benefited from the enthusiasm generated by rail-banking and other means of developing rail trails. In some cases, we have successfully cooperated with railroad companies to transfer lands to local governments. In other cases, the interests of railroad companies struggling with insurance liabilities have not coincided with our efforts to expand recreational opportunities. However, as the history of rail trails indicates, there are opportunities for the railroad industry and outdoor recreation community to cooperate, when both of our needs are met.
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July 2nd, 2008
We tend to think of nature and industry as polar opposites. One of the primary narratives of American history is the shift from fear of nature during colonization and expansion west, to its pragmatic and often aggressive consumption, and finally to a paternal respect and appreciation of nature that seeks to limit the excesses of industrialism. Within this narrative, nature is seen as either a hindrance or potential raw material of industry, and industry represents the state of nature conquered. Theoretically, there is little room for a peaceful coexistence.
[View of Bethlehem Steel from the D&L Trail. Photo Courtesy of Will Minehart]
Our greatest proto-environmentalists approached nature from this perspective. Benton MacKaye envisioned the Appalachian Trail as a therapeutic relief valve for Eastern urbanites that would serve to reinforce industrial capitalist society by rejuvenating its adherents. Frederick Law Olmsted planned Central Park as a respite from “the confinement, bustle and monotonous street-division of the city” not a repudiation of it. Although Central Park and the Appalachian Trail provided nature experiences for millions, both projects also reinforced the belief that nature, by definition, was a space free from the infrastructure and ideology of industry.
Lately, however, a variety of projects have embraced industrial sites for their recreational potential and-paradoxically-for their natural beauty. Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord in Germany is a 570-acre park constructed on the site of a Thyssen steel plant that operated until 1985. Visitors to the park climb the old brick and cement walls, promenade on the elevated rail, and relax in large clusters of trees, all in the shadows of dormant smokestacks and pipelines. In Seattle, Gas Works Park was built on the site of a coal and crude oil conversion works. The city turned the boiler house into a picnic shelter and the exhauster-compressor building into a children’s play barn. Closer to home, the South Bethlehem Greenway will be built on an old Norfolk Southern right-of-way and connect the Bethlehem Steel industrial area with Lehigh University and regional greenways.
[Saylor Cement Kilns in Coplay]
Of course, the D&L Trail is our own example of nature and industry in symbiotic coexistence. The Trail follows the old rail beds and towpaths that once fueled the industrialization of America, and the protection and maintenance of the Trail highlights and ensures the permanency of those remnants of industry. Users of the Trail will recognize that watered canals, remnants of locks, rail ballast, and scattered industrial artifacts add to the natural beauty of the Trail rather than detract from it.
[Inactive lock in Freeemansburg]
In this sense, maybe twenty-first century Americans have crafted an enlightened environmental ethic that allows for nature and industry to exist in the same place. Hopefully, in the future we can look at post-industrial sites for their latent potential rather than as a nostalgic reminder of what has been lost.
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June 24th, 2008
In 1904, Mansfield Merriman, a civil engineering professor at Lehigh University and respected expert on hydraulics, delivered a report to Jay S. Moyer of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company. In December 1903, Moyer had commissioned Merriman to conduct a detailed survey of the Lehigh Canal system and determine the feasibility of generating power from the channeled water. This was not a novel idea. The Lehigh Canal was primarily built for the transportation of coal, but other large canal systems, such as the Augusta Canal, were constructed solely for their hydraulic power, with transportation a convenient and lucrative secondary benefit.
Working in an office full of documents relating to river flow, flood stages, lock heights, land ownership issues, and turbine schematics, Merriman pieced together an estimate of the latent power of the river and its canals, as well as a tally of the power generated from existing plants. In his Report on the Water Power Obtainable from the Lehigh Canal, Merriman offered several specific conclusions:
1) The amount of power generated by the plants existing in 1904 was approximately 2300 horse power.
2) Twenty-nine additional locations could provide sites for power plants. These new plants could generate 10200 horse power, 80 percent of the time (when the river was high enough.)
3) The amount of power “wasted” by the Lehigh’s nine dams was approximately 8000 horse power.
He also noted, possibly with an eye towards the railroad-dominated future, “that the accounts of power above stated as obtainable from the canal may be very materially increased if boat navigation should ever become discontinued, since higher velocities [of water]…may be permitted,” therefore providing more “fuel” for the hydraulic turbines.
[One of the D&L’s interpretive signs describes the nineteenth-century hydroelectric power industry in Slatington.]
Forgotten during the years of coal and oil abundance and energy security, the idea of harnessing the water power of canals is experiencing a renaissance. Innovated hydraulic technologies, such as the Gorlov Helical Turbine, make small-scale, aesthetically-pleasing power generation a real possibility. Constructed to power a specific building or tied into the grid, these projects could help ease our reliance on fossil fuels and even contribute funds to trail and preservation projects.
[Mansfield’s 1904 report to Moyer is available from the Special Collections of Lehigh University Library, Bethlehem, PA.]
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