pplied to the Legislature for
permission to improve the navigation of the Lehigh, stating the purpose
of the improvement and citing the fact that their efforts would tend to
serve as a model for the improvement of other Pennsylvania streams.
The desired opportunity "to ruin themselves," as one member of the
Legislature put it, was granted by an act passed March 20, 1818. The
various powers applied for, and granted, embraced the whole range of
tried and untried methods for securing "a navigation downward once in
three days for boats loaded with one hundred barrels, or ten tons." The
State kept its weather eye open in this matter, however, for a small
minority felt that these men would not ruin themselves. Accordingly,
the act of grant reserved to the commonwealth the right to compel the
adoption of a complete system of slack-water navigation from Easton to
Stoddartsville if the service given by the company did not meet "the
wants of the country."

Capital was subscribed by a patriotic public on condition that a
committee of stockholders should go over the ground and pass judgment on
the probable success of the effort. The report was favorable, so far as
the improvement of the river was concerned; but the nine-mile road to
the mines was unanimously voted impracticable. "To give you an idea
of the country over which the road is to pass," wrote one of the
commissioners, "I need only tell you that I considered it quite an
easement when the wheel of my carriage struck a stump instead of a
stone." The public mind was divided. Some held that the attempt to
operate the coal mine was farcical, but that the improvement of the
Lehigh River was an undertaking of great value and of probable profit to
investors. Others were just as positive that the river improvement would
follow the fate of so many similar enterprises but that a fortune was in
store for those who invested in the Lehigh mines.

The direct result of the examiners' report and of the public debate it
provoked was the organization of the first interlocking companies in the
commercial history of America. The Lehigh Navigation Company was formed
with a capital stock of $150,000 and the Lehigh Coal Company with a
capital stock of $55,000. This incident forms one of the most striking
illustrations in American history of the dependence of a commercial
venture upon methods of inland transportation. The Lehigh Navigation
Company proceeded to build its dams and walls while the L