A thousand hands shaped its banks and a thousand ships have traversed the waters of a canal that defined a region. The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal has both provided an important route between the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays and acted as a secondary and unofficial boundary between the North and South. Yet this historic waterway almost failed before the first shovel struck earth in 1804. Local historian David Berry tells the fascinating story of the C&D Canal, from the tenacious Gilpin family's sixty-year struggle to open the shipway to the canal's role in the Civil War as a vital path for Union troops and supplies to quickly cross the Delmarva and travel down the Chesapeake.

The Delaware and Raritan Canal connected the Chesapeake Bay with New England ports, allowing a wide variety of vessels to use the waterway and avoid the treacherous Atlantic Ocean. The unusual machinery of the canal--locks, swing bridges, aqueducts, spill gates--is depicted in detail in The Delaware and Raritan Canal at Work. The book focuses on many of the businesses that operated along the canal, including farms, food-packing companies, rubber-reclaiming plants, coal yards, quarries, Johnson & Johnson, and Atlantic Terra Cotta. It includes scenic views along this famous waterway, one of the most successful towpath canals in the United States.

All but forgotten except as a part of nostalgic lore, American canals during the first half of the nineteenth century provided a transportation network that was vital to the development of the new nation. They lowered transportation costs, carried a vast grain trade from western farms to eastern ports, delivered Pennsylvania coal to New York, and carried thousands of passengers at what seemed effortless speed. Along their courses sprang up new towns and cities and with them new economic growth. Canals for a Nation brings together in one volume a survey of all the major American canals. Here are accounts of innovative engineering, of near heroic figures who devoted their lives to canals, and of canal projects that triumphed over all the uncertainties of the political process.