Ark (river boat)

In early periods of North American industrial development, an ark was a temporary boat used for river transport in eastern North America before slack-water canals (a lock system and appropriate dams allowing two way travel) and railroads made them obsolete. Because they could be built using relatively crude hand tools, Arks were built in American colonial and early republic times, primarily to carry cargo downriver on the spring freshets, and especially to carry milled lumber, charcoal and other forest products and bulk agricultural produce to a city or a port downriver; while logs were often tied into rafts, on long trips which could take weeks, the rafts would be accompanied by such arks as crew support quarters. Deep rivers allowed large log arks such as is described below instead of less controllable rafts. Since by 1800, most eastern towns and cities were short on heating fuels, even badly processed timber or planks could readily be sold at the destinations.

But it was in the role of delivering coal as a fuel to alleviate the long-standing first energy crisis in the eastern United States that the Arks saw their most frequent transport uses because of the 1816 invention of Josiah White's Bear Trap Lock system. The mechanisms allowed controllable artificially created freshets which enabled the opening of the 45 miles (72 km) of the Lower Lehigh Canal (c.1818-20), and thereby allowed the first extensive shipments of anthracite coal, the new High Tech fuel to energy starved industries in eastern cities. For a full decade ever increasing numbers were built and sent 105 miles (169 km) to the docks at Philadelphia.

By the time the long delayed opening of the Delaware Canal reached partial operation in 1831 and it could switch to another form of river boat, the Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company was annually deforesting vast timber stands reaching by then more than 16 miles (26 km) upriver through the steep banked waters of the Lehigh River Gorge to ship enough coal to meet demand in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania State Historian Fred Brenckman in The History of Carbon County notes that the production of Ark river craft in 1831 by the LC&N would total over 13 miles (21 km) connected end to end.

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