Schuylkill and Susquehanna Navigation Company

The Schuylkill and Susquehanna Navigation Company was a limited liability corporation founded in Pennsylvania on September 29, 1791.

The company was founded for the purpose of constructing a transportation canal, the Schuylkill and Susquehanna Canal and improve navigation on the Schuylkill river.

The idea of uniting the Schuylkill and Susquehanna rivers by a canal was first proposed and discussed by William Penn in 1690. Penn's plan, conceived a few years after he had founded Philadelphia was to make "a second settlement" on the Susquehanna river, similar in size to that of Philadelphia itself. He made this plan, titled "Some Proposals for a Second Settlement in the Province of Pennsylvania" public in England in 1690. The route envisioned by Penn was a road up the west bank of the Schuylkill to the mouth of French creek near present day Phoenixville heading west to the Susquehanna via present day Lancaster and a Susquehanna tributary, Conestoga creek. Although Penn first proposed the project of continuous water transportation from the Delaware to the Susquehanna, he did not call for the building of a canal.

In 1762, Philadelphia merchants petitioned the Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly to commission a project for the passage by water up the west branch of the Susquehanna River with an intervening portage to a navigable branch of the Ohio River. In 1769, another petition to the Assembly requested that then Province make the Juniata river navigable down to the Susquehanna river. Both petitions were unsuccessful but neither mentioned canals as an essential element for the proposed improvement.

In 1769, the American Philosophical Society with Benjamin Franklin as its first president was organized with six standing committees, one of which was on "Husbandry and American Improvements". One of the first projects the committee looked in February, 1769 was a canal between the Chesapeake and Delaware bays using the Chester River in Maryland and Duck creek, near Smyrna, Delaware some fifteen miles south of the present location of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal (C&D Canal). In March, the committee was tasked with preparing a "scheme of application" for the Philadelphia merchants for defraying the expenses of conducting a route location ("proper levels") for the canal as well as construction costs. In April, the committee discussed a more northerly route using the Bohemia River, a tributary of the Elk river with headwaters extending into Delaware using Drawyers Creek . In June, this route was reported being feasible only with locks as the cost of constructing a clear passage from river to river was to great. That same month, Thomas Gilpin, a member of the merchant committee submitted an alternative "plan of a canal and elevation" using the original southerly route along the Chester river and Duck creek. In April 1770, W. T. Fisher produced a map of the several canal routes proposed for connecting the Chesapeake and Delaware bays.
In August 1771, the committee then became aware of the prospect of joining the Susquehanna and Schuylkill rivers by means of a canal. One of the key features of that survey was its emphasis on the middle ground or summit level, roughly four and a half miles between the headwaters of the Quitapahilla, near Lebanon, and those of Tulpehocken, near Myerstown. The survey was conducted by Dr. William Smith, Provost of the College of Philadelphia, John Lukens, Esquire, Surveyor General of the then Province (now State) of Pennsylvania, and John Sellers. In 1771, the Society recommended the third route for a canal.
The Pennsylvania Provincial Assembly then appointed a committee of its own to survey the Susquehanna, Schuylkill, and Lehigh Rivers and in 1773, David Rittenhouse delivered its report. Nothing became of this work due to the coming of the Revolution.
In total, the Society sponsored studies of three routes to the connect Philadelphia with the Susquehanna valley, one by canal across the Delmarva peninsula(1769-1771), the second was a paved road from the Susquehanna valley to a river port south of Philadelphia and the third (1773) was a canal using the Schuylkill and Susquehanna rivers and their tributaries, the Tulpehocken and Swatara creeks.

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