Landmarks with Leon is now also known as Lehigh Valley Landmarks. I'm your host, Rachel Leon, and president of the City Council in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Each week, I'll share a short feature with a big story commemorated with a historical marker that explores a person, place, or an event important to the Lehigh Valley.
In the summer of 1843, the Lehigh Canal did something a canal was never supposed to do: it stopped. Above Easton, Pennsylvania where the river widened into the pool near the Chain Dam, several hundred canal boats sat tied together, going nowhere. Coal that normally moved toward market simply stopped moving. The men who operated those boats had turned the transportation system itself into a bargaining tool — and before the summer ended, one of the Lehigh Valley’s most famous businessmen would be thrown into the river for trying to break it up.
The Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company controlled the Lehigh Canal, the essential route connecting the anthracite coal region with eastern markets. By the 1840s, boatmen worked within a transportation economy shaped by contracts, freight payments, canal conditions, and the company’s considerable leverage over the entire system.
A surviving 1843 letter from James S. Cox, president of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, gives us a close view of management’s position. Cox wrote that after a breach in the Delaware Canal, some contracted boatmen refused to help with repairs and instead demanded more money. He urged company officials not to concede to what he called a combination seeking higher freight payments.
The dispute quickly became collective action. According to a Lehigh University account, boatmen demanded an increase of thirty cents in company script, or twenty-three cents in hard money, for every ton of coal carried downriver — a substantial sum in an economy where every ton counted. By mid-July, several hundred boats — estimates range from 400 to 500 — were tied up between the Chain Dam near Easton and Freemansburg, completely immobilized.
That scale mattered. The boatmen didn’t need to destroy a lock or seize a warehouse. They simply stopped working. In a transportation system built on continuous movement, immobility itself became leverage.
The dispute also carried an ethnic dimension, though it deserves careful handling. Cox’s letter alleged intimidation by Irish boatmen against so-called “country” boatmen, and repeated a rumor that people connected to the Schuylkill Canal had supplied money to sustain the strike. These claims come from company correspondence, not independent verification — they reflect management’s fears and assumptions at the time, not established fact.
Easton became the pressure point. In mid-July of 1843, roughly 250 boatmen marched through town on foot and horseback, seeking public support. Then Asa Packer entered the story. Already a canal contractor, boat operator, and sitting state representative, Packer joined a group that included the Northampton County sheriff, magistrates, and constables to confront the blockade directly.
Packer and his companions boarded one of the tied-up boats. He began untying the rope connecting it to the fleet. A horn sounded, drawing strikers toward the scene. Packer was thrown into the river and pelted with stones before swimming to shore. The strike was settled a few weeks later.
The confrontation reveals something larger than a colorful Easton anecdote. In the early industrial economy, the line between private enterprise and public authority wasn’t always clear. The canal was run by a powerful company, but its operation affected the entire regional economy. The boatmen worked under contract, yet together they could halt the movement of coal — and a wage dispute could escalate into a public-order crisis involving law enforcement and political power. Before railroads transformed the Lehigh Valley, the canal was one of its industrial arteries, and the summer of 1843 proved that whoever controlled that movement held real economic leverage.
Today, the Chain Dam site sits within Hugh Moore Park, where the National Canal Museum interprets the history of the Lehigh and Delaware canal system. The dam visible there now isn’t the original nineteenth-century structure — it dates to the 1970s — but the landscape still preserves the geography that made this stretch of river a critical transportation corridor.
Information for this episode was provided by Uzal W. Condit’s History of Easton, Lehigh University Special Collections’ Asa Packer digital history project, a surviving 1843 letter from James S. Cox, and the National Canal Museum’s documentation of the Chain Dam. (wc 669)
