Free The Delaware Canal by Marie Murphy Duess Page B

manufacturing centers in America, dotted with mills and factories, including a paper mill owned by the Riegel family. Mansions were built on its hillsides, and the town remained prosperous well into the twentieth century. It is still one of the most charming towns along the canal.
    Many communities sprung up along the canal simply to supply provisions for the important waterway, and with the demise of the canal, many of them faded away again. Shipbuilders closed their doors, taverns closed down and stables weren’t needed any longer. Except for two or three, the stores in which boatmen and locals gathered around the stove to exchange gossip, argue politics and complain about the LC&N are gone. Sadly, most of the covered bridges along the canal were washed away by floods.

    Boatmen stopping at Jacob Oberacker’s would be served salt cakes similar to our soft pretzels. Today, this favorite stop of the canallers is called the Golden Pheasant and is owned by Michel and Barbara Faure. Courtesy of the Golden Pheasant Inn, Erwinna, PA .

    The barroom at the Golden Pheasant, then called the Delaware House, served boatmen during the height of the canal age. Courtesy of the Golden Pheasant Inn, Erwinna, PA .
    However, several suspension bridges that cross over the canal and the river remain, as do many of the charming camelback bridges. Bridges in Washington’s Crossing, New Hope, Centre Bridge and Riegelsville are all open to pedestrians and offer beautiful views of the river and canal.
    Keeping soap on the boat was a problem for the canallers because when the soap was wet, it often slipped from a person’s hands, plopped into the canal from the deck of the boat and sank into the silt and mud at the bottom of the canal, never to be seen again. Losing brown soap to the bottom of the canal was a common complaint of the boatmen.
    The owner of the store on the Morris Canal in 1891 decided to stock a new brand of soap that was white. He believed that the new Proctor & Gamble product, Ivory soap, might be easier for the boatmen to see at the bottom of the canal and they would be able to fish it out with a scoop.
    A canal captain bought a bar of the white soap from the merchant and decided to use it right away. As anticipated, the fresh bar of soap slipped out of his hands and into the canal. Annoyed that he was about to lose a brand-new bar of soap, he grabbed the scoop immediately and rushed to the side of the boat to see if he could find it before it sank all the way to the bottom. Much to his surprise, he found the cake of soap floating beside the boat. He scooped it up, amazed and delighted with his new floating soap.
    He was so impressed, in fact, that he was quick to share his discovery of the new soap with every boatman he passed. He spread the news of the floating soap up and down the canal and in Phillipsburg and Mauch Chunk when he was filling up his boat with coal. Soon, all the canal men who had access to the store that carried Ivory soap bought several cakes to keep on their boats.
    A representative of Proctor & Gamble was curious when he saw the huge amounts of soap the store proprietor was selling, and he visited the store to inquire as to why the soap was selling so well there. The proprietor informed the representative that the canal men discovered “Ivory soap, it floats.” And so began the slogan for Ivory soap. 44 Or at least that’s one story. Another, less amusing, is that Harley Proctor, after a chemist listed the ingredients in percentages, wrote the slogan “99–44/100 ths Percent Pure: It Floats.” The canal store owner’s story is more fun.

    Ivory soap was the choice of the canallers when they discovered it floated instead of sinking to the bottom of the canal. Author’s collection .

Chapter 6
    Snappers and Stiff Boats
    Early Travel on the Delaware
    Aside from the canoes of the Native Americans who were the first inhabitants living along its shores, the first boats