TLH for Rod With Corrections

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An Old Canal Boatman Remembers…by Rodney F. Rhoads

My great grandfather’s youngest brother George Schaeffer (1871-1946) was a “character”in family circles because he was always traveling,rst on the canals: the Schuylkill Navigation, theErie, the Intercoastal Waterway, then as a tugboatcaptain in New York and along the east coast,and nally as a railroader for the Philadelphia &Reading Railroad. He was also remembered as a“ladies man” because of his sparkling personality,his vocation, and the fact that he was a widower.His wife had died early on, leaving him with ayoung son Calvin, who was raised by George’ssister Kate. The nature of his work and heavytravel precluded his remarrying.

In family conversations, George was always theman who had been “up on the Erie” or “in NewYork Harbor.” Very little other information wasconveyed, and he remained a man of mysteryto the author in a family with deep roots in thetransportation history of eastern Pennsylvania.The Schaeffer family and intermarried kindredwere canal boatmen or railroad men through andthrough. The family names of Schaeffer, Reichart,

Ney, Bausman, Emrich, Kantner and Staller areetched into the history of Schuylkill County, theSchuylkill Navigation, and the Philadelphia &Reading Railroad in particular.

The very rst canal boat used on the Schuylkill Navigation Canal was constructed by George

Reichart and Jacob Huntzinger at Orwigsburg.George Reichart was a member of the rstgroup that towed and poled this boat by handfrom Orwigsburg toPhiladelphia over ten dayson the then new SchuylkillCanal in 1825. DavidSchaeffer, my great-greatgrandfather (and the father of George Schaeffer) was a boatman on the Schuylkill Navigation. His wife wasSarah (Sallie) Bausman,sister of the famed John

Bausman of Lock 12.My great grandfather Charles S. Schaeffer wasdredge foreman on thecanal for many years andlived at Lock 60 in hislast years. Nevertheless,despite all this history,the ne details of our family’s life on the canalas canal boatmen was not preserved and transmitteddown to my generation.It was with great surpriseand excitement that documents recently came tolight in the collection of the Pottsville Free PublicLibrary and fortuitously gave a more human sideto the family’s canal experiences. An unpublishedmanuscript/scrapbook compiled by Edwin F.Smith titled Schuylkill Navigation was the resultof many interviews by Smith of old-timers on thecanal. The manuscript was nalized ca. 1943; thetyped interviews were pasted into a scrapbook of other canal papers and donated to the library. Tomy glad eye, George Schaeffer occupied several pages of interview notes.

Despite some missing pages of George’s

interview, there is ample detail to esh out hisand his father’s life on the canal. George wasonly nine when he started on the canal on hisfather’s boat. This would have been 1880. Georgeindicates that his father David (1827-1898) ownedtwo canal boats. The newest one was the Duke,which got its name when a Schuylkill Havendruggist named Coxe advanced David the moneyfor its construction. He was so grateful that henamed the boat after Coxe’s favorite pet–his dogDuke. The second boat was named the WilliamWashington. It, according to George, lived up to

LOCAL HISTORIAN

TheJanuary 2006

Vol. 36 No. 1

A Publication of Tri-County Heritage Society Serving Berks, Chester and Lancaster Counties

David and Sarah (Sallie) Bausman Schaeffer,

parents of George Schaeffer.

Photo courtesy of the AuthorPhoto courtesy of the Author

George Schaeffer

(1871 - 1946)

Photo courtesy of Author



its patriotic last name and died “a hero’s death” onthe Potomac during the Civil War when it caughtre while carrying supplies for the Union Army.George relates that at rst David had only one team

of mules for the two boats. He would give them aday’s rest in between trips, unhitching the empty boat, and then start off with a newly loaded boat of coal for Philadelphia or New York. The sons of thefamily, including George, then had to clean andmove the empty boat to the coal chutes at Bousum’s(Bausman’s) Lock–this was Lock 12 in SchuylkillHaven, where their uncle John Bausman presidedas lock tender. There the empty boat was loaded by the Schuylkill Navigation at chutes 9, 10, 11 or 12 for their father’s return pickup. David and hiswife Sarah had twelve children and also adopted alittle girl. Sarah accompanied her husband on the boat along with some of the smallest children. As

the sons grew into manhood, they acted in variouscapacities on the boats and as drivers of the mules.Initially David hired boatmen, but soon his sons became the deckhands and drivers. George tellsof one incident when his seven-year-old sister felloff the canal boat into the canal at Birdsboro andsank to the bottom, grabbing the vegetation on the bottom, which necessitated a boatman diving inand breaking her death-grip to save her. Mother Schaeffer also had to contend with cleaning theliving quarters as “the boat crews had a way of leaving insects behind them and dirt on deck and inthe lockers.” According to George, after scrubbingout the litter with strong washing soda, she used

“swamp tea” (water cress) under the chaff bars,which served as beds on the boats. As he indicated,“the battle ended in her (Sally’s) favor.”

David’s load down the Schuylkill Navigation wasalways coal. His return load, however, varied withthe season and the nal port where he unloaded.From New York he brought back molding sand, partof which he sold in Philadelphia and the remainder to the mills in Reading. In the summer, when hetook his boat to Philadelphia, he’d send a postcardahead to a man named Scott on Paddy’s Island inthe Delaware. When David tied up at the foot of

Chestnut Street, Scott would be on the lookoutand send rowboats across lled with basketsof peaches or sweet potatoes. Cantaloupes andwatermelons also were purchased in Philadelphiaand though David might start out North with a backload of 2000 melons, customers would bewaiting for him at every lock and feeding placeon the way home. As George relates, customers

would ask, “Mr. Schaeffer, what have you got thistime?” “Punkins” was his jovial reply, and he’d be lucky to have six melons left for the family bythe time he reached Schuylkill Haven. The factthat he bought the melons for 10¢ in the city andsold them for 25¢ each all the way up, accountsfor Mr. Coxe, the boat’s mortgage holder, being paid off so promptly.

David, after having the Duke constructed, paidit off and then engaged to sell it to the Schuylkill Navigation. Henry Zulick was the superintendentof the loading chutes at Bausman’s Lock and toldDavid that unless he could load 200 tons of coalinto it, they wouldn’t be interested. He loaded 204

tons, 15 hundredweight on her and then added hisown personal stock of anthracite for his cook stoveon board on top of the dead hatch. The companythen bought the boat and made him captain of itas the usual maximum load was 197 or 198 tons,

according to George. This incident angered some,especially a group of Philadelphia lads called the“Schuylkill Rangers,” a gang of Irish lads whonot only extorted money from canal boatmen asthey passed but also had boats of their own on thecanal. Envy of his status and new company boatnally culminated in the attempted murder of mygreat-great grandfather on the canal in FairmountPark in Philadelphia. One Schuylkill Ranger boatman tried to pay off his grudge by yellingto David, “Lay over against the bank till we get by”! Schaeffer obligingly drew over by the berm bank to let him pass. Just as the two boats wereopposite, the Ranger poised a harpoon-like pike pole ready to throw. George’s mother saw what

Schuylkill Canal looking south from Bausman’s Lock,

Lock 12, in ca. 1880s.


Canal Boats at Schuylkill Haven

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was coming and yelled to her husband who, just intime, dropped to the deck as the pike pole passedover him with tremendous force. It would almostcertainly have passed through David’s body hadhe not quickly acted on his wife’s warning. As itwas, it struck a tree on the bank and stuck therequivering. Luckily a Fairmount Park guard on thehill had witnessed the attempted murder and camerunning down. He yelled, “Captain, tie up your boat, come to City Hall with me and press chargesagainst this man,” as he placed the fellow under arrest. When Schaeffer demurred, the guard said,“This is a madman; he’s not safe to be at large”!At City Hall, David told the judge, “I don’t like todo this; the man has a family who will suffer.” The judge said it was too bad the man himself didn’t

think of his family and gave him a prison term of fteen years for intent to kill.

George remembered one memorable trip whenhis boat “took to dry land” near Birdsboro. Atthat location, the reinforced berm was on oneside and the weaker towpath bank on the other.Unfortunately, muskrats had tunneled the bank extensively here on the weak side of the canal,and when the boat nipped this section of bank, thewater came pouring through the newly breachedchannel and the loaded boat rode the overowright out into the eld. After the bank was repaired,all the coal had to be hauled by wheelbarrow toan empty back boat passing by and the damaged

boat taken to Schuylkill Haven for repairs. Georgealso related that there were “aqueducts” on thetowpaths at certain places when the water levelwas too high where a cascade or sheet of water spilled over into the river or canal and the driver had to have the mules wade these watercourses.

Of special interest to this writer was George’sdescription of my favorite tugboat, the Dolphin,which I had played on as a young boy at Lock 60 until it was scrapped in 1945, when the canal property was passed to the state of Pennsylvania.The Dolphin and the Catfsh were two of my great-

An Artists version of the “Dolphin” in its last days at Lock

60, Mont Clare, Montgomery County, Pa.*

The boat “Bruce,” thought to be built at Landingville, in

“Poppy” Deibert’s boatyard, is seen here being guided by

the mules at Blue Mountain Dam, ca. 1908.


grandfather’s tugs. George describes the Dolphin as “ a little steam tug…” which, from its narrowand peculiar construction, his father called “thehog-trough.” Its hull was so narrow that the deck had to be widened so that it came out from theedge of the boat in a sort of overhang. Thus onewalked above the water rather than over the bodyof the boat. It had only a four-foot draught so

it was able to navigate the upper reaches of thecanal where larger tugboats could no longer go.The Dolphin itself was a hermaphrodite and had been made from the once proud 90-foot iron hull Havre de Gras by cutting the ends off the faultymidsection and reassembling them into a stumpylittle 65-foot long boat, much to the disgust of theold boatmen who liked a shipshape craft. After the bow and stern had been joined, it well earnedits name of Dolphin, presumably by leaping upand down in the water. The coal-burning boiler in the Dolphin had, interestingly enough, onceserved the little railroad observation car kept for the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad ofcials

and was known as the “Witch.” The boiler wasas wide as the Dolphin, George related, lackingonly a few inches, and there was only a little room behind it, below-decks, for coal. It stopped for coaling at locks or anywhere along its route. The Dolphin served on the Delaware as a towboat, asa paymaster’s boat through the length of the canaland, nally, as a tow for my great-grandfather’sdredge. It was kept in the Basin at Reading whennot in use and was nally kept at Lock 60 whenthe upper reaches of the canal were closed. Whenthis proud little tug was nally scrapped, one of Johnny Hiester’s grandsons luckily rescued the pilothouse, and it is now in the Canal Museum at

Reading. (John Hiester had a boatyard at Readingand was a good friend of the Rhoads and Schaeffer families.)

Just before he passed away, George wasinterviewed for an article in the Pottsville Journal

(continued on page 4)

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Painting by Karlton Smith



4

The Family Line of George A. Schaeffer

I. Johann Nicholas Schaeffer

(1676, the Palatinate - 1744, the Tulpehocken)

married Maria Catherine Suder

A. Johann Peter Schaeffer

(1703, Palatine - 1775,Tulpehocken)

married Elizabeth Feeg

(1711, NY - )

1. Johann Nicholas Schaeffer(1730, Tulpehocken - 1797)

married Maria Susanna Haag

(1734, NY - 1797, Tulpehocken)

a. Johann Jacob Schaeffer

(1767, Tulpehocken - 1847, Sch. Co.)

married Anna Marie _?_

(1768 - 1820, Sch. Co.)

I.) Samuel Schaeffer

(1790, Sch. Co. - 1848, Sch. Haven)

married Salome Kantner

(1795, Schuyl. Co.-1848, Schuylkill Haven)

A.) David Schaeffer(1827, Schuyl. Haven-1898, Schuyl. Haven)

married Sarah Bausman

(1833, - 1904, Sch. Haven)

1.) George A. Schaeffer

(1871, Schuylkill Haven - 1946, Reading)

(continued from page 3)about his life experiences on the canal and as atugboat captain for the Morans in New York Harbor. His fondest memory was of a tugboat hecaptained named the Hercules. It was 115-feetlong and was built as a coastal boat. He recallstaking a month to pull a tow to Florida beforeWWI. This was when he was employed by theAmerican Tug Boat Company. It was a memorable

trip even though he contracted malaria en routeand was a very sick man on the return trip. Hisfondest wish was to revisit the site of the nowsunken Hercules, aground on a reef 52 miles from New Haven, Connecticut. George also recountedtales of voyages along the east coast and told of working for the canal boatyard of Francis Warner in Schuylkill Haven when the canal was closeddue to ice in winter. George went to work for theReading Railroad after WWI and lived in Cressona,Schuylkill County, until his death in 1946. Whilethe author never personally met Mr. Schaeffer, he

v

often visited his son Calvin and George’s sister Kate in Reading. George was among the last of the breed as the canal was effectively closed for commercial trafc in the early 20th century; thushe served on the canal for only two decades or so. A boatman through and through, he typiedthe hardiness and love of adventure of all theSchaeffer brothers as well as his father David.

We are indebted to him for leaving us these brief descriptions of a bygone era.

References

Bowman, John B. “Folklore of the Schuylkill Canal,”

vol. 2. Unpublished manuscript. Pottsville, PA:

Pottsville Free Public Library, 1947.

Dietz, A. Interview of George Schaeffer–untitled.

Pottsville Journal 23 July, 1945.

Smith, Edwin F. “Schuylkill Navigation.” Unpublished

manuscript. Pottsville, PA: Pottsville Free Public

Library, 1943.

* The original painting of the Dolphin docked at Lock 60, Mont

Clare, is owned by the Schuylkill Canal Association and is on

display in the Locktenders house of that historic site.

A full genealogy of this Schaeffer

family is available at TCHS library.

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