Jersey City Times: Museum of Jersey City History Digs Into the Once All-Important Morris Canal
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- Jan 17
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Museum of Jersey City History Digs Into the Once All-Important Morris Canal
by Ron Leir
Jersey City Times
January 17, 2025
Today, only traces of it remain but Jersey City was once home to the eastern terminus for a 107-mile waterway used to transport primarily coal and iron ore.
But there’s still plenty of interest in the historical record, judging from the 100-plus in-person and Zoom attendees of “A Forum on the Morris Canal in JC: Past, Present, Future,” hosted January 7 by the Museum of Jersey City History.
The museum, which last year featured a 3-part presentation on former Jersey City Mayor Frank Hague, hopes to expand its outreach to the community in 2025 by offering 20 lectures, including six focusing on the city’s “legendary sports arenas and the legends who competed there,” such as Jackie Robinson, who broke baseball’s color line.
There are also plans to highlight the city’s growing diversity by recording interviews with representatives of the various ethnic groups that have made Jersey City their new home and making those conversations publicly available as “oral histories” through the museum website.
A recording of last week’s program on the Morris Canal is expected to be posted shortly via a link on the website.
Sharing their insights on the canal were: Steve Krinsky, representing Hudson County Sierra Club/Morris Canal Greenway Working Group; Mike Helbing, president of Metrotrails; Joe
Macasek, president of Canal Society of NJ; Jerome Choice, Museum board member; John Beekman, founding museum board member and chief librarian of Jersey City; and Lyndsey Scofield, Jersey City senior transportation planner.
Macasek credited Morristown businessman George MacMcCulloch with devising water-driven turbine-powered inclined planes and locks – reportedly the first such system in the U.S. – to get canal boats up and down mountainous terrain in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley and northern New Jersey with an elevation of 1,700 feet above sea level to blast furnaces springing up in a newly industrializing economy.
The Morris Canal, as it became known, stretched through 37 municipalities spread over six New Jersey counties – Warren, Sussex, Morris, Passaic, Essex and Hudson.
A Wikipedia entry on the canal traces its flow, via a cable ferry crossing the Delaware and Lehigh rivers and Pennsylvania Canal’s river gate lock to Phllipsburg, then to the valley of the Musconetcong River and Lake Hopatcong, through the valley of the Rockaway River to Boonton, around the northern end of Paterson’s Garret Mountain and south to Newark on the Passaic River, across Kearny Point and through Jersey City to the Hudson River.
Construction began in 1825 and a 99-mile-long section ending in Newark was completed in May 1832 at a cost of $2.1 million (equivalent to $64.2 million in 2023). By 1840, the canal – with its boats each hauling 18 to 20 tons of cargo – had been enlarged to include Jersey City as its new eastern terminus.
The canal’s eastern end was home to other activities related to the nation’s growing internal hostilities and the Civil War, according to Choice.
An estimated 50,000 to 60,000 fugitive enslaved persons were smuggled through the canal basin to New York or Canada as Jersey City became known as one of the last stops on the so-called “underground railroad,” Choice said.
The basin also was home to a shipbuilding trade and it is believed that local tradesmen erected six warships dedicated to the Union cause, he added.
Meanwhile, canal boats continued their main mission, hauling raw materials, with boat crews deploying mules tethered to the crafts to avoid accidents.
The canal’s yearly tonnage peaked in 1866 at nearly 890,000 but after another decade or so, the numbers began slipping due to competition from railroads which, according to Wikipedia, “could deliver in five hours cargo that took four days by boat.”
By the early 1900s, with commercial traffic all but non-existent and the section between Paterson and Jersey City deemed a threat to the water supply, the state took over the canal, shutting it down in 1924.
Over the next several years, the state drained the canal, cut away its banks and dismantled the mechanisms used to move its boats. The Newark City Subway filled in a portion of the canal route.
Some longtime occupants of the canal zone have been sacrificed for current and/or future reshaping or redevelopment. One notable example cited by Beekman is the Greene Street Boat Club in the canal’s “Little Basin.”
Dating from the mid-1960s, club members – largely fishing enthusiasts – fashioned a sort of maritime squatter’s village, creating a makeshift pier where they docked small boats, bait shops and the like.
The club’s occupants were ordered to vacate by the state in 1983 and demolition followed. That section of waterway, bounded to the east by Jersey Avenue and Liberty State Park, awaits further action.
Other evidence of the canal’s presence, according to Metrotrails’s Heibling and museum board vice chairman Michael Ehrmann, can be found on the South Kearny peninsula where the canal ran south of and parallel to U.S. Truck Rt. 1&9, the cross-highway bridges for Kearny’s Central Avenue and rail spur to its east.
Athough the canal has been accorded state and federal historic designation, Macasek says that generally affords “very little protection” against private owners looking to develop those properties.
Macasek – whose group organizes weekend tours of the canal path — and Helbing – who says he’s walked the corridor’s entire length three times – said nonprofits are pressing municipalities and the state to help finance signage, exhibits, restoring tow paths and the like to preserve the role played by the canal for the sake of future generations.
As a companion piece to protecting the canal corridor, Jersey City planner Scofield said the city is hoping to improve an area south of Berry Lane Park – which bordered the canal – near an area targeted for new charter school development.
“We’re looking to open this area within the next year or so,” Scofield said.
Photos from original article
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