Morris Canal: A century after its demise, 102-mile watery relic is reborn with new role

Imagine a day when Route 80 is demolished, its exit and entrance ramps destroyed, and its ribbon of real estate given back to the dozens of New Jersey towns it now bisects.

Sound farfetched?

That's exactly what happened to the Morris Canal — a 102-mile stretch of water that weaved through North Jersey and was the main mode of transportation for goods, especially coal and iron ore, headed to New York.

The canal’s demise ended a distinct way of life for the families who worked and lived along the watery thoroughfare. Over time, much of the canal’s footprint was obliterated by new housing, highways and office parks.

Yet, incredibly, snippets of the Morris Canal survived.

Now, one by one, those disjointed sections are being retrieved from obscurity and restored by individuals and small groups with a passion for history.

The goal is to stitch these canal remnants into the Morris Canal Greenway, a ribbon of hiking and biking parks across six New Jersey counties that would celebrate an intriguing, overlooked chapter in the state's history.

“The Morris Canal was once an economic engine for this region, and it has the potential to do that again, in a different way,” said Ted Ritter, a special projects manager with the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority.

The agency recently awarded a $300,000 contract to develop an inventory of each parcel’s owner along the former canal route, map each segment, and assess which portions could be restored as a greenway.

“We want to support walking and biking as healthy, alternative forms of transportation — and as green transportation,” said David Behrend, the agency’s director of government affairs, explaining its interest in the canal route.

“We’re well on our way to creating a truly regional asset that can serve as a recreation and transportation resource for hundreds of thousands of people across North Jersey,” he said.

But steep hurdles remain.

“The largest problem is to knit it into a single concept, and bring some pieces into public ownership,” said Joe Macasek, president of the Canal Society of New Jersey, which works to resurrect the canal’s history.

“The Morris Canal did for North Jersey what the Erie Canal did for New York,” said Macasek. “Without it, North Jersey would have been a backwater.”

Around 1820, while fishing on Lake Hopatcong — then called Great Pond — Morristown entrepreneur George Macculloch surveyed the expanse of water and contemplated its latent power.

Macculloch figured that, with gravity’s help, the lake could be the prime water source for a canal across New Jersey, from the Delaware River to Newark.

With the lake at the canal’s high point, water would flow down the canal’s western section to the Delaware River at Phillipsburg, and down the eastern section to Newark. Periodic locks would raise canal boats through the Highlands and back down into the lowlands.

At the time, the only way to transport goods was in small wagons pulled by horses over treacherous roads.

A canal boat could carry far more — and do it faster. The canal would be a watery precursor to Route 80.

“The boats traveled 3 miles per hour,” Macasek said. “It sounds absurdly slow today, but back then the idea of moving 70 tons of material 102 miles in five days was incredible,” he said.

Power for the canal boats was provided by hitching up a pair of mules that walked along a path that ran the length of the waterway.

The mules were strong enough to haul the coal — a new energy source for homes, forges and factories — from remote Pennsylvania to businesses across North Jersey and major markets in Newark, Jersey City and New York. The boats also carried North Jersey iron ore.

Macculloch was raised in Bombay, where his Scottish father worked for the East India Company. When his father was poisoned, George was shipped home to Scotland. He eventually met his wife in London, and they moved across the pond to New Jersey.

His Federal-style home, built in Morristown in 1810, is now a museum. In 1820, Macculloch was the first person to record planting a tomato in New Jersey.

Two years later he invited investors to Morristown to discuss his canal proposal. By 1824, the Morris Canal and Banking Company had raised more than enough capital to cover canal construction. Ultimately the canal would cost $2.4 million to build, nearly three times the original estimate.

The company hired more than a thousand men, mostly Irish and Italian immigrants, to dig the canal bed.

“The canal was dug by guys with shovels,” said Macasek.

The ditch was about 5 feet deep. It was 25 feet wide at the bottom and broadened to 40 feet wide at the top.

The company built a new dam at Lake Hopatcong to raise the lake level an additional 5 feet. By 1831, the canal was operating.

Though a successful entrepreneur, Macculloch wasn’t as adept at gauging elevation. He figured Lake Hopatcong was only 460 feet above sea level. But a canal survey determined it was at 914 feet.

So the Morris Canal would need to move boats up and down the largest elevation shifts of any canal in the world. A lock could raise or lower a boat only about 10 feet. It would be too costly — and slow — to move boats vertically more than 900 feet using only locks.

The canal required something more.

The solution, an inclined plane, had not been used to any great extent on a canal before.

Inclined planes were earthen ramps connecting a lower portion of canal to one as much as 100 feet higher. When a canal boat approached a plane, it floated into a large wooden cradle car waiting half-submerged in the water. The cradle car had metal wheels that sat on railroad-style tracks.

Cables pulled the cradle car — with the canal boat resting inside — out of the water and up the plane. At the top, the canal boat slid out of the cradle car into the water of the next section of canal and continued on its way. Canal boats coming in the opposite direction descended the same way.

The 2-inch-diameter iron cables that pulled the cradle cars were manufactured by J.A. Roebling and Sons, which made the Brooklyn Bridge cables. The canal cables were pulled by a turbine powered by water diverted from each upper section of canal by a flume.

“The inclined plane was basically a huge water-powered machine,” Macasek said.

It took the apparatus 10 minutes to pull a canal boat up 100 feet to the next level. It would have taken 10 locks — and far more water — 2½ hours to do the same thing.

In all, there were 23 inclined planes and 23 lift locks along the canal.

Another problem was finding water for the canal. Officials realized Lake Hopatcong would not be sufficient.

So in 1837, the 5-mile-long Pompton Feeder was constructed, sending water from the Pompton River to the main canal at Mountain View in Wayne.

Water was a vital source of power in that era, so the feeder project sparked a legal battle.

Paterson mill owners considered it a threat, and argued that the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures held the rights to all water reaching the Great Falls on the Passaic River. Since the Pompton River was a tributary of the Passaic, mill owners worried the feeder would reduce flow in the Passaic and they would have less water for their mills.

The court sided with the canal company.

The Pompton Feeder not only provided more water for the Morris Canal — it extended the canal’s reach to North Jersey iron ore furnaces.

For most of its life, the Morris Canal struggled financially. But North Jersey businesses and communities along its banks thrived.

The amount of material hauled by canal boats increased from 60,000 tons in 1845 to nearly 900,000 tons by 1866. The decade from 1860 to 1870 was the canal’s only prosperous one, aided by the Union’s transportation needs during the Civil War.

Soon after, railroads grabbed business from the canal. Railroads were faster, carried more material, and operated 24 hours, all year. It took a canal boat five days to travel from Phillipsburg to Jersey City, and the canal didn’t operate at night or in winter.

By 1922, plans were drawn up to abandon the canal, and it shut down in 1924.

“Like any public transportation project, everybody used the Morris Canal and it was a tremendous asset to the communities along its path,” said Macasek. “But it was not financially successful because technology in the 1800s moved so quickly.

“The canal took us forward a great leap from the era of wood as fuel,” he said. “The name of the technology changes, but the stories are the same. New technology provided cheap transportation and helped the economy lurch forward.”

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The state sold off some canal property and transferred the canal right-of-way to towns. Some towns signed over their sections to railroads. Locks were drained and buried. Workers threw metal parts and stonework from inclined planes into the stone shafts that housed the turbines that had pulled the cables.

“The canal had become an inconvenience, so they filled it in,” Macasek said.

Development and new infrastructure wiped away large swaths of the canal. Soon bushes and trees obscured the rest.

But some of the canal footprint remains, reflected in newer infrastructure. Newark’s light rail tracks follow the canal footprint, and the city’s Raymond Boulevard follows the slope of a former inclined plane.

In Bloomfield, John F. Kennedy Boulevard uses the canal route, rising along another inclined plane.

Traces of the canal bed still run through the Upper Montclair Country Club golf course.

In Clifton, the Garden State Parkway follows the canal route between Routes 3 and 46. Route 19 does the same. In Paterson, Route 80 curls around Garret Mountain along the old canal route. Wilmore Road in Little Falls mirrors the old canal, as does Boonton Turnpike in Lincoln Park.

Though thousands of wooden canal boats operated on the Morris Canal, none was known to have survived.

Then Superstorm Sandy hit.

Many shore homes were ruined by Sandy’s storm surge in 2012. To protect homes from future flooding, some were elevated. When workers raised one narrow home in the Monmouth County borough of Highlands, they exposed the foundation, which looked surprisingly like an old wooden boat.

Archeologists were called in, and they concluded it was a boat from the Morris Canal.

Canal boats were nearly 90 feet long and 10½ feet wide, and could carry up to 70 tons of coal. Built as two sections, they were hinged in the middle, so they could navigate the angle at the top of an inclined plane.

To get the historic boat from under the house, the bow was moved intact and the hull cut into sections. Eileen Scanlon, the homeowner, donated the relic to the Canal Society of New Jersey, which has worked for decades to revive the canal’s storied history.

The group has a small museum of artifacts at Waterloo Village, a state park and old canal hamlet in Sussex County. State officials let the society use a Victorian-era carriage house there to display the canal boat.

Then came the hard part.

One day last fall, volunteers used a forklift to stack pieces of the old boat on a flatbed truck. Because Highland’s streets are narrow, the flatbed couldn’t park near the house, so the forklift made multiple trips across the sand and through the streets. Once the truck rolled into Waterloo Village, the sections of boat were unloaded and carried by hand into the carriage house.

Last came the bow. Volunteers angled it this way and that, but discovered it was too wide for the entrance. One volunteer, wielding a Sawzall, cut the bow in half.

“They had to do some skillful surgery,” said Macasek.

Then, using a block, tackle and rollers, volunteers maneuvered the sections through the door.

The pieces were reassembled, and the canal society installed a display around the boat.

“I’m surprised when people don’t say, ‘What is that piece of junk?’ ” Macasek said. “But they are generally fascinated by it. This is the only surviving Morris Canal boat we know of.”

When the Morris Canal died, so did the culture and lifestyle that had grown around it.

People were born on the canal and baptized in the canal. They played by the canal and died in the canal.

Because it took five days to cover the route, boat captains often brought their families along, stopping for supplies at general stores in hamlets that lined the canal's banks.

One of those stores still stands at the canal’s edge in Waterloo Village in Byram Township, Sussex County. Inside, a concave groove is worn into a pillar where boat captains, warming by the fire, rested their boot heels.

The boats had two feed boxes across the middle of the deck that held oats — the boat's gas tank, in essence — for the mules that towed the boat along the canal. At a time before refrigeration, the oats also provided insulation to preserve fresh food.

Some dishes became canal boat favorites, though they wouldn’t appeal to today’s culinary palate. There was dough dab, and pork float, and lard gravy. One treat was called hunks-a-go pudding — batter cooked in hot grease from a beef roast.

Each boat had a 10-foot-square cabin.

Isabelle Lenstrohm Mann was born in the cabin of her father’s boat in 1898, near Port Colden, in Warren County. Her father, Peter Lenstrohm, had taken his wife along because he didn’t want her alone at home so close to her due date. They were trying to get back to her doctor in Phillipsburg, but little Isabelle didn’t wait. The wife of another boat captain helped deliver Isabelle.

Mann, interviewed in the 1970s by her son-in-law, James Lee, for his book “Tales the Boatmen Told,” recalled watching workers load her father’s canal boat with coal at Phillipsburg.

“We would get awful dirty from the dust,” she said, “and we would have to keep it off the place where we walked on the boat.”

Besides coal, Mann remembered hauling lumber, sawdust, ice, manure and kegs of nails. The sawdust went to ice houses. Horse manure from city streets went to farms as fertilizer. Once, Mann’s dad hauled several heavy wood containers from Jersey City filled with Rough on Rats, a rodent poison.

Until she was 14, Isabelle Lenstrohm walked the towpath alongside the canal, guiding two mules that tugged her father’s boat at 3 miles per hour.

“There were always a lot of snakes that ran across the towpath,” Mann told her son-in-law. “The mules were afraid of them and would jump back or forward, and step on our feet.”

Without her as a guide, the mules would have stopped to eat whatever grew along the towpath. At day’s end, Mann brushed the sweat from their backs.

“It was not a glamorous life, but she didn’t recall going hungry,” said James Lee Jr., Mann’s grandson.

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Parents tethered children to the boat’s deck so they wouldn’t fall overboard. Isabelle Mann once saw a lock tender’s child fall between the boat and a lock near Stanhope. He was crushed to death. Others drowned.

Still, the canal provided recreation for children living along its path. They fished in it, swam in it, skated on it.  

Some kids had mischievous fun. While swimming, they would grab the rudder of a passing boat, making it impossible for the captain to steer.

When that happened to tobacco chewer Peter Lenstrohm, he got “a whole mouth full of juice and then he would squirt it right down in their face,” Isabelle Mann recalled. The children would “leave go of the rudder.”

Near Market Street in Newark, Mann said, people threw tomatoes onto the boats.

To entertain themselves when tied up in a canal basin for the night, boat captains and their families played ditties on fiddles, banjos and the squeezebox. One of them went: “Oh, you rusty old canaler, you think you’re mighty nice, standing by the tiller blade, picking off the lice. Psssssst.”

To give a lock tender advance warning of their approach, some boat captains blew into a tin horn. Others used conch shells. Jim Lee Jr. still has Peter Lenstrohm’s conch shell.

“He painted it with buttermilk and ocher paint,” Lee said. “The conch produces a long low tone, like a bugle or trumpet. It’s similar to a shofar.”

Lee Jr.’s father bought a plane tender’s house near Stewartsville in Warren County after World War II, and that’s where Lee Jr. grew up. He and his son, James Lee III, operate a small museum at the tender’s house filled with canal artifacts found on the property.

One recent day, Lee Jr. agreed to take the conch shell outside. He stood on the inclined plane and blew several times. The conch emitted a raspy toot that echoed off the surrounding hills.

The small villages along the canal served the boatmen's every need, just as strip malls at highway exits do today.

“The Morris Canal was the infrastructure that allowed northern New Jersey to develop,” Lee Jr. said. “Towns and villages sprang up, places like Rockaway and Wharton and Bloomfield.”

Clifton was mostly farmland in the early 1900s, but a small village grew up around a canal boat basin where Broad Street and Van Houten Avenue meet today.

The village, called Centerville, included a blacksmith shop and general store. Best known was the Centerville Hotel, built around 1832 by Joseph (Josie) Van Winkle, a local Dutch farmer. By century’s end, it had a cupola and a wraparound porch with Victorian embellishments. Boatmen called it Cheap Josie’s. 

One local history said it was so named because the owner “for years conducted a wide open house" and sold "wet goods at ruinous rates.”

In 1932 the hotel was destroyed by a fire that forced several chorus girls to leap for their lives from a second-floor window.

Don Schuld’s metal detector spurred the restoration of an inclined plane on the Morris Canal.

Though he grew up in Roxbury, in Morris County, Schuld never heard about the plane hiding in the woods in the Ledgewood section of his town until he joined the Roxbury Rotarians in the late 1970s, two decades after high school.

Since the plane dated to the early 1800s, he figured it might be a fun spot to use his metal detector. The slope was overgrown with bushes and trees, but in the middle of the plane, undisturbed, he found a dime from 1870.

“I didn’t even need the metal detector for that,” Schuld said. “I started walking among the trees and found mule shoes, railroad spikes and chunks of iron.

“Later I thought it would be a great project for our Rotary club to expose the plane by cutting down the trees and cleaning up the rubble.

“Before we started, if you had stood at the base of the plane, you wouldn’t have even known there was an inclined plane, because it was completely reforested,” said Schuld, a retired insurance agent.

Once they cleared the brush, they saw the incline clearly. Then they noticed something else: parallel rows of stones heading up the plane, on which the cradle car rails had rested.

To anyone hiking the plane today, those stones remain clearly visible. At the top of the incline, patches of hardened black tar cover the ground. When the plane operated, workers slathered tar on the cables that pulled the cradle cars to reduce friction. The drippings remain, more than a century later.

Emboldened, the Rotarians decided to restore the stone shaft housing the turbine that powered the cables.

They installed a child’s swing frame over the shaft. With chains and a Rotarian’s wrecker, they hauled out stones and rusted parts. The turbine was gone, likely hauled away for the metal.

Several turbines survive, including one on display in Hopatcong State Park at the southern end of Lake Hopatcong.

The Roxbury Rotarians also cleared the tunnel-like sluice where water left the turbine chamber to rejoin the canal. “We worked at that in July and August, and in that tunnel it was cool as could be,” Schuld said.

Recently, with the help of the Canal Society of New Jersey and a grant, the mortar inside the shaft and tunnel were repointed, and a metal frame and grate were placed over the open shaft for safety.

When John Manna moved to Wharton in Morris County three decades ago, he had barely heard of the Morris Canal, and never pictured himself leading an effort to restore part of the old waterway.

In the 1980s, Wharton had revived a tree-lined quarter-mile of the canal bed. But a lock at the end of the section remained buried. In 2006, Wharton’s mayor asked Manna to join the Main Street Redevelopment Committee, which wanted to restore the lock as an attraction.

“The lock was filled with dirt and debris, and you could see a few of the top stones sticking out,” Manna said. “People had lost sight of what was there.”

Manna sought out the Canal Society and wrote grant applications, securing $2 million in federal and county grants.

When workers removed the fill, they found that most of the lock’s parts were rusted but intact, and could be copied to make replacements.

They had new wooden lock gates built and repointed the stonework on the lock walls.

“The masons rushed to finish the pointing work before it started to freeze,” Macasek said. “They had a big plastic tarp over the lock and they had a portable heater on underneath — it looked like some medieval shrine.”

Now the borough wants to restore the lock tender’s house, a crumbled ruin. People had rented the house from the borough for decades after the canal stopped operating, and it remained intact until the 1970s, when a fire destroyed the roof.

The borough has secured $1.8 million in federal grants for the home’s restoration.

When both the lock and lock tender’s house are restored, “this is going to be a jewel at the midpoint of the canal trail,” Manna said. 

 “I wasn’t a canal person,” he said, strolling Wharton’s restored section of canal. The faint roar of 16-wheelers heading down Route 80 — today’s Morris Canal — mixed with birdsong as he spoke.

“But I used to walk here and fish with my children, and thought it was a magical spot,” Manna said. “It gives you a serene feeling. You can just imagine the mules quietly dragging the canal boats along here 150 years ago.

“Over time I learned more about the canal,” Manna said. “Its story hooks you.”

The Collins House in Bloomfield is no tourist magnet — yet. The house, built in 1790, now huddles in the shadow of an apartment complex for seniors. Paint curls from old clapboards. A green tarp covers half the building like gift wrap. Signs warn: “Danger — keep out.”

Yet this could become a jewel along the Morris Canal Greenway.

The building is a rare remaining example of East Jersey Cottage construction. It was owned by Isaac Collins, a carpenter who built road bridges over the Morris Canal and aqueducts that carried the canal over rivers. One of the canal’s inclined planes bisected the Collins property.

Carlos Pomares, a Bloomfield councilman with a master’s in museum professions from Seton Hall University, is among a group hoping to restore the house as part of the canal’s legacy. Two sections of the canal in the township were reclaimed as walking paths, including a section that Boy Scouts cleared near Exit 151 along the southbound Garden State Parkway.

The township is installing signs along the canal route with bar codes so walkers can read historical information online. The signs are covered by a state grant of $24,000 and a township match.

The township already spent $100,000 to stabilize the house and has filed grant requests totaling $500,000 to restore the structure.

Pomares hopes the Collins House can be used as a community space for meetings and canal exhibits.

 “The house was in rough shape,” Pomares said. “It still looks awful, but it’s actually getting better.”

Many projects along the old Morris Canal are in the planning stage, underway or finished.

In Clifton, a section was restored as a park next to the Garden State Parkway north of Route 3.

It is one of the few remnants refilled with water. And the tree-canopied towpath is walkable.

In Woodland Park, another walkable stretch of towpath runs behind homes along Mount Pleasant Avenue.

The borough worked with the Passaic River Coalition to secure grants of $500,000 to clear the canal bed, add benches and lay crushed stone on the towpath. Today people share the space with browsing deer.

“We were trying to take pedestrian traffic off Mount Pleasant Avenue and encourage use of the towpath in a safer setting,” said Keith Kazmark, Woodland Park’s mayor. “There’s a lot of history to the Morris Canal. If we can connect our section to the sections in Little Falls, it keeps access to the canal as a way to exercise and enjoy nature.”

In Little Falls, a section of towpath is restored as a walk and bike path between East Main Street and Cedar Grove Road. Another section runs parallel to Main Street along the Passaic River.

Passaic County has identified 11 “challenge” sites along its 25 miles of Morris Canal Greenway, where sections are disconnected because of a barrier such as a highway.

One barrier is the Peckman River in Little Falls, which cuts the towpath trail off from Peckman Preserve. The county has proposed a pedestrian bridge across the river.

The county would also like to restore the old Pompton Feeder guard lock, now mostly buried near the Ramapo River in Wayne.

In 1928, Passaic County’s parks commission developed a prescient plan to use the abandoned Morris Canal as an unbroken route for walking, hiking and horseback riding.

But when the state decommissioned the canal, it gave the rights of way to towns, and the county’s plan fell through.

Some towns signed over their canal property to railroads and utilities.

Paterson let the Lackawanna Railroad use its right of way.

Wayne and Little Falls let the North Jersey District Water Supply Commission use the right of way to bury a 42-inch-diameter water transfer pipe for the Wanaque Reservoir.

Now, through the Morris Canal Greenway project, the county is reviving its 1920s vision to use the canal for walking and biking.

In 2015, Passaic County signed an agreement with the North Jersey District Water Supply Commission to study the feasibility of using the canal right of way for six 6 miles from Wayne to Totowa. The county expects to finish the study by next year.

Earlier this year, Lincoln Park opened a half-mile stretch of the canal along Windsor Drive as a walking path.

Lincoln Park’s mayor, David Runfeldt, said he remembered clearing the canal bed in the 1970s when he was a Boy Scout, but it became overgrown again.

This time, the canal path was cleared thanks to community volunteers and a $20,000 grant from Atlantic Health System for a tree service to remove the larger trees that had fallen across the canal bed.

“We had this historical treasure buried in bushes and fallen trees,” said Kathleen Skrobala, the borough’s health officer. “Even today when we walk the canal, we find chunks of coal that must have been thrown from the canal boats to local people.”

When resident Claire Moore downsized to an apartment complex, she chose a unit facing the canal bed, since the canal had been part of her family history.

Her father, Halsey Van Duyne, grew up on a farm in Towaco. In his early teens, around 1910, he skated along the canal from Towaco to attend square dances in Paterson. Then he would skate home in the early morning to milk the cows.

“We’ve been watching the work to make this excellent walking path, and we see people on it every day,” said Jeanne Moore, Claire Moore’s daughter. “We’re thrilled the canal is being restored, because it’s preserving our history. I hope that a lot of other towns will do the same thing.”

“People cross the footprint of the canal constantly,” he said. “The Morris Canal remnants are fragmented and hidden in the landscape all around us. It’s an adventure to explore a landscape you know, and find things you didn’t know were there.”

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