Morris Canal

About this property

The Morris Canal (1829–1924) was a 107-mile (172 km) common carrier anthracite coal canal across northern New Jersey that connected the two industrial canals in Easton, Pennsylvania, across the Delaware River from its western terminus at Phillipsburg, New Jersey, to New York Harbor and New York City through its eastern terminals in Newark and on the Hudson River in Jersey City. The canal was sometimes (erroneously) called the Morris and Essex Canal, due to confusion with the nearby and unrelated Morris and Essex Railroad. With a total elevation change of more than 900 feet (270 m), the canal was considered an ingenious technological marvel for its use of water-driven inclined planes, the first in the United States, to cross the northern New Jersey hills. It was built primarily to move coal to industrializing eastern cities that had stripped their environs of wood. Completed to Newark in 1831, the canal was extended eastward to Jersey City between 1834 and 1836. In 1839, hot blast technology was married to blast furnaces fired entirely using anthracite, allowing the continuous high-volume production of plentiful anthracite pig iron. The Morris Canal eased the transportation of anthracite from Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley to northern New Jersey's growing iron industry and other developing industries adopting steam power in New Jersey and the New York City area. It also carried minerals and iron ore westward to blast furnaces in western New Jersey and Allentown and Bethlehem in the Lehigh Valley until the development of Great Lakes iron ore caused the trade to decline. The Morris Canal remained in heavy use through the 1860s. But railroads had begun to eclipse canals in the United States, and in 1871, it was leased to the Lehigh Valley Railroad. Like many enterprises that depended on anthracite, the canal's revenues dried up with the rise of oil fuels and truck transport. It was taken over by the state of New Jersey in 1922, and formally abandoned in 1924. While the canal was largely dismantled in the following five years, portions of it and its accompanying feeders and ponds have been preserved. A statewide greenway for cyclists and pedestrians is planned, beginning in Phillipsburg, traversing Warren, Sussex, Morris, Passaic, Essex, and Hudson counties and including the old route through Jersey City. The canal was added to the National Register of Historic Places on October 1, 1974, for its significance in engineering, industry, and transportation. The boundary was increased in 2016 to include the Lake Hopatcong station in Landing.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

More in Essex County

Historic places, battles, and census history across Essex County.

More historic places in New Jersey

Browse all historic places in New Jersey.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

New Jersey history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.