Volunteers angled it this way and that, but discovered it was too wide for the entrance. Once the truck rolled into Waterloo Village, the sections of boat were unloaded and carried by hand into the carriage house. 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. One day last fall, volunteers used a forklift to stack pieces of the old boat on a flatbed truck. State officials let the society use a Victorian-era carriage house there to display the canal boat. The group has a small museum of artifacts at Waterloo Village, a state park and old canal hamlet in Sussex County. 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. To get the historic boat from under the house, the bow was moved intact and the hull cut into sections. “The canal had become an inconvenience, so they filled it in,” Macasek said.ĭevelopment and new infrastructure wiped away large swaths of the canal. Workers threw metal parts and stonework from inclined planes into the stone shafts that housed the turbines that had pulled the cables.
Some towns signed over their sections to railroads. The state sold off some canal property and transferred the canal right-of-way to towns. New technology provided cheap transportation and helped the economy lurch forward.” “The name of the technology changes, but the stories are the same. “The canal took us forward a great leap from the era of wood as fuel,” he said. “But it was not financially successful because technology in the 1800s moved so quickly. “Like any public transportation project, everybody used the Morris Canal and it was a tremendous asset to the communities along its path,” said Macasek. 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.īy 1922, plans were drawn up to abandon the canal, and it shut down in 1924.
Railroads were faster, carried more material, and operated 24 hours, all year. Soon after, railroads grabbed business from the canal.