$45.00 U.S. (Short discount; trade discounts available for bulk sales)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover
192 pages with 103 color photographs by the author, 24 historic drawings, maps, plans, and photographs, and two maps = 129
11.0″ x 9.0″ landscape
ISBN 978–1–938086-91-5
Published in August 2022
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
Published in association with the Center for the Study of Place.
Events and Exhibitions
Wednesday, November 8, 2023
“The Vincent Canal and the Schuylkill Navigation”
Spring-Ford Area Historical Society
526 Main Street, Royersford PA
Sunday, May 21, 2023
Book Talk, Schuylkill Canal Association, Mont Clare, PA
Tuesday, April 11, 2023
“The Schuylkill Navigation Canals in Chester County”
Slide talk and book signing
The Foundry, Schuylkill River Heritage Center,
2 N. Main Street, Phoenixville, PA
February 28, 2023
Book talk via Zoom
Preservation Alliance of Philadelphia
Saturday, November 12, 2022
Book Talk
Schuylkill County Historical Society, Pottsville, PA
Friday October 21, 2022
Inland Booksigning and Reception
Curiosity & Company, Jamestown, RI
October 12, 2022 – March 18, 2023
Inland Exhibition
Fairmount Water Works Media Gallery, Philadelphia, PA
Tuesday October 11, 2022 at 5pm
Inland Booksigning and Exhibition Opening
Fairmount Water Works,
Philadelphia, PA
Interview with Sorlien Hidden City (2023)
by Sandy Sorlien
with a foreword by John R. Stilgoe and essays by Mike Szilagyi and Karen Young
A rare photographic river trip revealing the once-celebrated but now-hidden industrial landscapes of Pennsylvania that helped shape the nation.
The Schuylkill River flows more than 130 miles from the mountains of the Pennsylvania Coal Region to its confluence with the Delaware River. It passes through five counties—Schuylkill, Berks, Chester, Montgomery, and Philadelphia—and its valley is home to more than three million people. Yet few are aware of the hidden ruins and traces left by a pioneering 200-year-old inland waterway that opened in 1825: the Schuylkill Navigation. Some of it is literally buried in their own backyards.
Often called the Schuylkill Canal, this complex navigation system actually boasted 27 canals. The first of the anthracite-carrying routes in America, the 108-mile Navigation shadowed the Schuylkill River for nearly all its length. It once had more than 30 dams and slackwater pools, more than 100 stone locks, numerous aqueducts, and the first transportation tunnel in the nation. They were all built by hand starting in 1816.
The water pollution created by the coal industry, unregulated factory and residential waste, and obstructive dams all but destroyed the river that fed the Navigation. Clogged channels, railway competition, and repeated flood damage meant the end of a way of life for many of the towns that boomed along the canals, and only a few historians keep have kept its memory alive.
During the 1940s, as part of a massive environmental cleanup of the Schuylkill, this important and influential infrastructure was largely dismantled—but not entirely. Two short sections of the watered canal get plenty of attention: the Oakes Reach at Schuylkill Canal Park near Phoenixville and the Manayunk Canal in Philadelphia. Both are popular recreational destinations. What happened to the rest of it? Photographer Sandy Sorlien resolved to find out.
Over the course of seven years, she repeatedly traveled upriver from her home near the Manayunk Canal, bushwhacking along the riverbanks and rowing and paddling in the river itself. Armed with camera and binoculars, loppers and trekking poles, nineteenth-century maps and modern satellite imagery, and abetted by local historians and an archaeologist, she found all 61 lock sites and explored most of the canal beds. Her photographs reveal a mysterious remnant landscape, evidence of an extraordinary engineering feat that spelled its own demise.
Along with Sorlien’s extraordinary color plates and insightful essays, Inland features a selection of historic images, rare historic Schuylkill Navigation Company maps, and early Philadelphia Watering Committee plans. The book also includes a foreword by renowned landscape scholar John R. Stilgoe, an essay on regional transportation history by Mike Szilagyi, former Trails Project Manager for the Schuylkill River Greenways Natural Heritage Area, and an afterword by Karen Young, Director of the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center. A sweeping new Schuylkill River map by Morgan Pfaelzer connects it all.
Inland is the first book to present contemporary photographs from a survey of the entire Schuylkill Navigation, becoming an essential resource for historians, preservationists, and communities along the Navigation, offering and a resonant visual history of a once-famous place all its own.
About
About the Author
Sandy Sorlien is the author of Fifty Houses: Images from the American Road (John Hopkins, 2002). For decades she has traveled America’s back roads and city streets, and the length of her native Schuylkill River Valley, photographing the built and natural environment. She has received three Fellowships in Photography from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a Commonwealth Speaker Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Humanities, and 2020 and 2021 Fellowships from the Charles E. Peterson Fund of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. She taught photography at the University of the Arts and several other Philadelphia-area schools. In 2013, she joined the Fairmount Water Works, the education center for the Philadelphia Water Department, as a watershed educator and environmental photographer. For recreation, competition, and exploration, she rowed an open-water single shell on the slackwater pools of the Schuylkill Navigation. After living 27 years near the Manayunk Canal, Sorlien moved with her husband to Rhode Island, where she rows on Narragansett Bay. Her website is sandysorlienphotographs.zenfolio.com.
About the Contributors
John R. Stilgoe is the Robert and Lois Orchard Professor in the History of Landscape Development at Harvard University. His ten books on landscape include What Is Landscape? (MIT, 2015), Old Fields: Photography, Glamour, and Fantasy Landscape (Virginia, 2014), Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape (Virginia, 2007), Landscape and Images (Virginia, 2005), Lifeboat (Virginia, 2003), Outside Lies Magic (Walker, 1998), Alongshore (Yale, 1994) and Common Landscape of America: 1580–1845 (Yale, 1982), winner of the Francis Parkman Prize for best book of American history. Stilgoe is a Fellow of the Society of American Historians and has received the American Society of Landscape Architects’ Williams Medal and the American Institute of Architects’ Medal for collaborative research, among other awards. Among his research projects are a book on elites and another on suburban adaptation to rapid climate change. He restores antique boats.
Mike Szilagyi, AICP, has served as Trail Project Manager at Schuylkill River Greenways National Heritage Area and as Chair of the North Wales (PA) Historic Commission. He has spent decades devoted to planning southeastern Pennsylvania’s bicycle trail network, yielding a deep knowledge of the long-forgotten web of former railroad and canal rights-of-way built before the automobile came to dominate the landscape. A lifelong cyclist, Szilagyi is the author of Bucks County Trolleys (Arcadia, 2020) and co-author of Montgomery County Trolleys (Arcadia, 2018).
Karen Young is Director of the Fairmount Water Works Interpretive Center, the watershed education arm of the Philadelphia Water Department. Ms. Young has more than 25 years of experience developing and implementing urban environmental programs.
Slide Show
Praise
“Although Sandy Sorlien’s striking photographs of the nineteenth-century Schuylkill Navigation Company (SNC) canal are the primary focus of this beautiful, oversized (11 × 9 inch) hardcover volume, the book also provides a wealth of valuable information for scholastic researchers, canal enthusiasts, and anyone who is fascinated by Pennsylvania’s industrial heritage. The 108-mile long SNC canal was completed in 1825 to transport anthracite from the mines of northeastern Pennsylvania to the ports of Philadelphia and the markets availed by the Atlantic coast. The system paralleled the Schuylkill River from its headwaters in central Schuylkill County to its confluence with
the Delaware River at Philadelphia. Following a brief, poetic foreword penned by Harvard University’s John Stilgoe, a specialist in the history of landscape development, the book includes four chapters, an afterword, and an appendix that describes each of Sorlien’s ninety-six stunning photographs in detail.”
—Gary F. Coppock, Skelly and Loy, A Terracon Company, Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies (read the full review here pdf)
“In Inland, Sandy Sorlien presents a history and photographic journey along of the Schuylkill Navigation in a grand style. Unlike the majority of history books that are presented in the typical smaller formats designed to fit on the book shelf, Sandy seemingly throws caution to the wind, using a large format that allows the photos and prints to be viewed with vibrancy, color and clarity. Sure, it costs more, but the book itself becomes a piece of art, as Sandy is a professional photographer and it shows in her images. The larger format encourages you to linger on the photos and prints to take them all in, and it is so nice that you can read the maps without the need to pull out the magnifying glass. The large format allows a map of the 108-mile-long navigation to flow, in color, across the inside front covers to the inside back covers. It might be the best map of the system I have seen.”
—Michael Riley, American Canal Society (read full review here)
“The beauty and substance of Sandy Sorlien’s book took my breath away, and I was fascinated to learn about the history with which she is so profoundly engaged. Inland is a gorgeous and important book, modeling best practices for responding to the residue of human actions embedded in the land.”
—Sandra Matthews, author of Occupying Massachusetts: Layers of History on Indigenous Land
“Inland is, most of all, a work of the historical imagination, recovering for the viewer the significance of the long-lost canal system, a once-essential economic resource that was left behind and disappeared from view as transportation technologies changed. To imagine the Schuylkill Navigation as a whole and to realize its importance is itself of considerable importance to the nation and especially to Pennsylvanians, an act of reclamation that is at the same time an act of discovery. To imagine the Navigation as one interconnected series of dams, locks, and canal structures, as one coherent system, is the work of a truly creative artist and historian. The value of such a vision is immense—for the whole of the canal is what gives significance to each of the parts, which would otherwise disappear into the void, as nature overtakes the stones and as properties overcome the remnants of the past. Seeing the whole, and seeing the parts of the whole, changes everything. In Inland, Sandy Sorlien achieves a perfect synthesis of documentary and aesthetic modes. I can’t think of another who combine the talents of Sorlien.”
—Miles Orvell, Professor of English & American Studies at Temple University, author of Empire of Ruins: American Culture, Photography, and the Spectacle of Destruction (OUP, 2021)
“Sandy Sorlien’s Inland represents a haunting journey through a critical waterway of Pennsylvania and the now-ruined stone architecture that gave shape to its flow. Her work documents, in remnants of living water, trails, and stone, both an economic and environmental legacy of our region. There could be nothing more important today than to embrace and rebuild the relationship between human activity and the precious, life-giving resource of water as seen in the Schuylkill Navigation.”
—William R. Valerio, Ph.D., Director and CEO of the Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia
“The first time I stumbled upon the Schuylkill Navigation’s Lock 68 in Manayunk while walking along the river, my jaw dropped, for here was this astonishing piece of crumbling architecture covered not only in lichens and moss, but fantastical graffiti. What was this once? And how do we keep it with us? Thankfully, Sandy Sorlien answers the first question with stunning photography and clear, concise text. I hope many Schuylkill residents and walkers like me discover her book. Then it’s up to us to answer the second question: How do we preserve this remarkable history?”
—Mike Weilbacher, Executive Director of the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia
“Working with the tenacity and persistence of a detective, Sandy Sorlien navigated urban and rural landscapes of the present to find the remnants of a past—our past—that’s almost invisible and nearly forgotten. In Inland, she has puzzled together a story with photographs and words, revealing an astonishing feat of engineering—the Schuylkill Navigation—along with the cultural, economic, and political capital required to complete it. The essays by Sorlien and others shine a light on early indifference to the near-destruction of a major river and its ecosystem, while the photographs act to correct a subsequent indifference to the infrastructure itself. But Inland does more than reconstruct a canal system and identify a profoundly troubling environmental past—it offers perspective that informs our present as we consider our current activities and their generational impacts.”
—Byron Wolfe, Professor, Program Head, and Graduate Advisor in Photography, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, and author of Drowned River: The Death and Rebirth of Glen Canyon on the Colorado (2017) with Rebecca Solnit and Mark Klett
“Following the Schuylkill or ‘hidden river,’ Sandy Sorlien uncovers the sometimes forgotten but clearly not lost Schuylkill Navigation system. Her book, Inland, connects readers with the physical reminders of this influential waterway. We meet the Navigation at a crucial time, examining two centuries of its history even as some towpaths and ruins are repurposed as recreational trails and cultural sites, benefiting many former Schuylkill Canal communities. Inland exceeds at linking the past to the present, celebrating the engineering marvels of the canal era and the mystery of the surviving relics. Anyone who cares about the Schuylkill River—or American rivers and canals in general—will love exploring Inland.”
—Daniel Roe, Historic Resource Supervisor, County of Berks Parks and Recreation Department, Berks County Heritage Center, Reading, Pennsylvania
“Her photographs reveal a mysterious remnant landscape, evidence of an extraordinary engineering feat that spelled its own demise. …
Holding a very special appeal for readers with an interest in landscape photography and regional American history, Inland: The Abandoned Canals of the Schuylkill Navigation is an extraordinary, beautifully presented, impressively informative, and highly recommended addition to personal, professional, community, college, and university library Contemporary Photography and American History collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists.”
-Julie Summers, Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
My Place
I worked on this essay for a long time before deciding I had too much to say. It was unorganizable! So I’ll just tell you about two places that imprinted on me: a house and a mountain gap. Both are small portions of my wider home place: Philadelphia and the Schuylkill River Valley of southeastern Pennsylvania.
I’ve loved many different places and their people besides those: Jamestown, Rhode Island; Putney, Vermont; Kelly, Wyoming; Floyd, Virginia; Blairstown, New Jersey, all of New Zealand. Oceans, coves, woods, deserts, prairies, roads, trails, farms, bungalows, rowhouses, ballparks, ponds, and now specifically this Schuylkill River I grew up near but didn’t really know until middle age when I started rowing on it.
There seem to be a few ways that places can imprint on us: (1) immersion, (2) repetition, and (3) formation; that is to say, formative years. A fourth way, not to be minimized, is like a bolt of lightning—the way they describe love at first sight. It could be fleeting, like the first time I saw Yosemite outside of photographs (holy crap, it’s real) but which holds no attachment for me now; or permanent, like Uig Sands in Scotland. Both were short stays, but only one place stuck. Why that happened is another story, which I share here.
Observation is not enough. We documentary photographers observe and care but often move on, even emotionally. Compelling subject matter and surface visuals like the quality of light may have little to do with the imprint of a place, which may come from early formation or later immersion. You need not “observe” or “study” an imprinted place; you are simply in it or of it. That’s not to say photographing a place can’t make an imprint deeper.
It took me a long time to realize, but a latent quest for my formative home place drove me, literally, all over America. For my first book, Fifty Houses: Images from the American Road (also shepherded by George Thompson, twenty years ago), I drove alone through all fifty states, rereading William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways and eschewing interstates. I made thousands of house portraits over seven years of road trips and chose just one for each state.
By necessity, about 45 of those were bolt-of-lightning types. (Though the repetition of printing and reprinting them made most of them stick.) Oddly, I was rarely attracted to modern architecture. I’d grown up in a mid-century wood-and-glass split-level, surrounded by woods and adventurous friends. I was happy there, so why did I keep photographing traditional white farmhouses on open fields? In Indiana, Connecticut, Kansas, everywhere? It couldn’t have been just my teenage painter self’s Edward Hopper imprint, enduring as that was.
Then one day I came across a photograph of a white stucco farmhouse in my dad’s stuff. Whoa, there it is. Morgan Farm. I hadn’t gone back far enough. This was my first home place, inhabited from birth to age three, a drafty pre-Revolutionary stone house with a big dilapidated barn amidst raggedy pastures in Delaware County, Pennsylvania. I hadn’t gone back far enough in my own history to recognize that this house had imprinted on me more than any other. The formative imprint happened without my ever making a picture of it, but I’m glad someone did.
Now for the second story, a bolt of lightning. About eighty miles upriver from Morgan Farm is the Schuylkill River Gap at Port Clinton, where Berks County meets Schuylkill County and the Schuylkill and Little Schuylkill Rivers both carve their way through the Blue Mountains of Pennsylvania’s coal region. I don’t recall being there as a child. Now I walk the old towpath from the overgrown ruins of Lock 27 to the towering walls of Lock 25, the trail hugging cliffs above the pretty river. In winter when I photograph, I head back to the car by three o’clock or it will be dark down in there. It has its own micro-sunset.
The gorge is rimmed with byways: the dry canal bed, the towpath, the river, the active rail line of Reading Blue Mountain & Northern (once the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad), and the repurposed Pennsylvania Railroad line, now the John Bartram Trail of the Schuylkill River Trail. The granddaddy Appalachian Trail intersects right here; it plummets down and climbs up this vertiginous space, its hikers stopping for repast in tiny Port Clinton’s inn or candy shop. The river on summer weekends is populated with paddlers of the Schuylkill Water Trail. But who’s there in November or February? A photographer struck by a bolt of lightning, at least.
The Gap is brightly lit on one side, a smoky glow of bare branches, and it’s damn dark on the other side, too much range for even a digital raw file to handle. Fine, let the shadows go black. The Gap in low light is like a concave Hopper house, a simple shadowed shape.
Morgan Farm was long ago paved over for a corporate headquarters. The Schuylkill Gap is hidden, but you can find it. Follow the river. Winter is best.
Copyright © 2021 Sandy Sorlien. All rights reserved.