Landmark Pump Saved the Canal ... and the Union

Before container ships, before tractor trailers, before interstate highways, and before the railroad came to dominate shipping, the waterways of the United States were crucial for moving goods from one place to the other. And where there weren’t waterways, we created them. After the Erie Canal opened to great fanfare and subsequent success, the nation went on a canal building craze: by 1840 the country had created 3,326 miles of canals.     
 
Bits and pieces of those canals still survive as curios and tourist sites, but only one remains in real use: The Chesapeake & Delaware Canal. “For every 15 ships that go down around Cape Henry, there’s one or two that go through the C&D,” said Ed Voigt, a government affairs officer at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Motorboats, yachts, car carriers, and barges carrying oil, coal, chemicals, and other commodities, still frequent the shortcut that the waters of the C&D provide. 
 
And it’s quite a shortcut. Without it, any boat going from Philadelphia to Baltimore would have to (and once had to) go down the Delaware River, down the Delaware Bay, then into the Atlantic as it passed further south along the Delmarva peninsula (that contains the eastern borders of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia), around the cape and back up north through the Chesapeake Bay. Cutting a 14-mile watery path across the northern tip of Delaware, the canal slashes that journey by some 300 miles. 
 
But making that cut was a long, costly—politically and technically—fraught affair that only became a reliable route for cargo thanks to a steam engine and wheel built by Merrick and Son in the early 1850s. Today, it’s an ASME Landmark that is still in the Old Lock Pump House in Chesapeake City, Md.
  

Making a short cut

The canal was first envisioned by Dutch diplomat Augustine Herman as he rode through his lands, named Bohemia Manor, sometime in the early 1660s and proclaimed the narrow tract a perfect place to connect the Chesapeake Bay to the Delaware Bay. (Actually, the shortcut, sans water, was long known to Native Americans who frequented several heavily trafficked footpaths there.) 
 
Herman died in 1686, having done nothing to further this vision.
 
The cause wasn’t picked up in earnest again until the mid-18th century when Thomas Gilpin, a milliner, engineer, and Philadelphian began to promote the idea. After he died, his son, Joshua, carried the torch, eventually helping to found the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal Company in 1802. Soon after he raised hundreds of thousands of dollars (the equivalent of several million dollars today) and began surveying. And the first shovelful of dirt was removed in 1804. 
 
But the last shovelful wouldn’t be removed for another quarter-century. Funds for the canal dried up quickly, and Gilpin turned to the federal government for support—which he secured after a 20-year struggle. President Monroe signed a bill in May 1825 that turned on the monetary taps and by 1826 there were 2,600 men digging the 13.6-mile trench from bay to bay. 
 
On July 4, 1829, finally, water was let into the long groove of land. Shipping on the freshly filled canal began immediately. 
 
The cost of the canal came to $2,250,000, or roughly $165,000 a mile—no small fee, especially considering that the Erie Canal had cost only $19,000 per mile. So it was more than alarming for investors and shippers when the canal shut down. And it was shutting down all too often, almost from the get-go. The banks caved in regularly, the locks leaked, a culvert became blocked and flooded the farms near it, and, worse of all, it kept drying up. 
 
In an attempt to remedy the situation, and keep canal depth at its original 10 feet, the Old Lock Pump House was built in 1837. It housed a steam powered engine, boilers, and a pump to lift water from Back Creek, at the western end of the canal, into the canal.
 
It wasn’t enough. In the ensuing years, in addition to the locks breaking all-too frequently and the sides caving in all-too frequently, water loss kept the depth at just over six feet—and that with a dredger working fulltime. That was too shallow to keep the bigger cargo boats from running aground. Meanwhile the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal was hoping to increase traffic and the size of the boats it could handle. 
 
To find a better solution to these wants and woes, the company decided to throw a contest to elicit designs for a superior pump. The winner would receive $300 and, arguably, some glory. 
 
The received 50 entries. The prize went to a design submitted by Samuel Vaughan Merrick and John Henry Towne, founders of Merrick & Sons, a company out of Philadelphia, known for their manufacture of steam hammers. 
 
Barnabas Bartols, an engineer at Merrick & Sons, designed a ten-foot wide, 39-foot diameter wheel of cypress and iron with twelve scoops curving from its interior to its circumference. It would be powered by a 175-horsepower condensing beam engine designed by Merrick and Towne. The piston would be 36 inches in diameter with a seven-foot stroke. The company promised that this engine and wheel, now the oldest, largest, stationary engine of its kind, would burn 560 pounds of coal an hour to raise 200,000 cubic feet of water an hour up 16 feet to the canal.
  

A big wheel 

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a pump. “It just scooped the water up,” said Jack L. Shagena, a retired electrical engineer and author of The C&D Canal and Towns Along the Way, as well as more than a dozen books on engineering history and other subjects. 
 
“You can think about it as a mill with water flowing over it, turning a wheel,” Shagena said. “Of course, it’s just the opposite—this is a wheel being turned by motive power, steam engines.”
 
In April 1852, the engine was fired up for its first test. It ran smoothly, turned the wheel successfully, and was soon put to work filling the canal.
 
Water from Back Creek was sent to a well under the wheel where it picked up water. On the other side, at the top, the wheel dumped the water into another conduit that emptied into the canal. With the engine turning at 24 revolutions per minute, the wheel made 2.46 revolutions transferring 29-and-a-half scoops of water from well to canal each minute. That meant it was outdoing the expectations set by Merrick & Sons, raising 227,000 cubic feet of water an hour (while burning 613 pounds of coal) . . . and that the canal was open for more stable business. Eight months after the wheel first turned, the president of the C&D Canal Company, Andrew C. Gray, decided that it could use some additional power. The company reached out to Merrick & Sons again, and, in 1854, they built a second 175 horsepower engine on the other side of the wheel. 
 
The engines and wheel proved their mettle then next year when they were required to run continuously for 11 straight months thanks to dry weather.
 
Seven years later they would prove more than enduring mettle, when the scoop, the engines and the canal became essential to the Union at the start of the Civil War. Days after Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Virginia seceded and sent troops marching toward Washington D.C. The union began sending volunteer troops from Pennsylvania and Massachusetts south to defend the capital. But rebels and rioters sympathetic to the Confederates quickly burned down all the bridges on the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad. In response, the Union immediately commandeered 842 barges, 144 steamboats, and 89 tugs to bring troops, weapons, and supplies across the canal and further south. And the canal was maintained and used for this purpose by the Union throughout the war. 
 
Fearing that the Confederates would recognize just how vital the steam engines and scoop wheel were to keeping the canal operational and set out to sabotage it, the engines were shut down at least once during the war. “The lifting wheel was stopped at 10 o’clock this morning in order that everything at the water works might be quiet and escape the observation of the rebels,” wrote a nameless canal manger on July 14, 1864. The rebels never arrived, however, and the wheel was started again at 6:30 that evening. 
 

Belongs to history

After helping the Union win the war, the canal and its scoop wheel remained in use with minimal upkeep until 1926 when the canal was dug down to sea level, negating the need for locks and all the machinery needed to keep the canal at depth. 
 
The engines and wheel still sit in their original location to this day, having survived efforts to repurpose the parts as well as one attempted act of destruction. “During World War II, they were looking for all the scrap iron they could get for the war effort, so they considered taking out those engines and melting them down,” said Shagena. “Some Army Corps of Engineers engineer intervened and said no, this is too historic.”
 
At one point one of the buildings housing an engine was being used as a mechanic garage. “They wanted to get the wheel out of the way, so they tried to burn it down,” said David Hawley, a retired project engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who worked on the canal for three decades. “But it wouldn’t burn.”
 
Thankfully, the Old Lock Pump House with its engines and it’s 39-foot wheel survived the decades, are well preserved, and are open to the public as the C&D Canal Museum in Chesapeake City. “The engines look to be in good shape,” said Shagena. “I would say that if you came up with enough pressure you could get those engines going again. That would be a hell of a project.”
 
Michael Abrams is a writer in Westfield, N.J.