Abstract
Forgotten today, the Eastern Dam and reservoir near Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania provided dry season flows to the Main Line Canal east of the Allegheny Mountains. After years of delays the dam was completed in 1847, but by the 1850’s it was already rendered obsolete by the construction of a continuous rail route across the state. In 1857 the canal system and the Eastern Dam were sold to the Pennsylvania Railroad. The dam was intentionally notched in the winter of 1882, preventing a deep lake from reforming. Had this not been done, calculations reveal the dam would have failed in the great storm of 1889 causing a catastrophic flood, likely destroying the low-lying parts of Williamsburg 21 km downstream. The embankment of this dam still exists on private ground south of Hollidaysburg as a monument to engineering skills in the mid-1800’s.
“There is nothing new except what is forgotten.”
Mademoiselle Bertin, milliner to Marie Antoinette
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Notes
- 1.
Our research relies on many nineteenth century publications and more recent work that document historic data using English units rather than SI units. For most calculations we use the always preferable SI units, but where we highly depend on old data sources we report the original English units. We believe this will help confirm our appropriate use of the nineteenth century data and will aid future workers who may further study the Eastern Dam.
- 2.
“LiDAR” is a portmanteau word combining “light” and “radar.”
- 3.
The distance over the lake from the embankment to the control tower was evidently too great to easily support a walkway of the type used at many dams after that time.
- 4.
Confirmation of this would require local excavations, which can only be done by or with the permission of the owner of this private property.
References
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Coleman, N.M., Wojno, S. (2019). The Forgotten Dam: The Eastern Reservoir at Hollidaysburg and Its Role in Canal History. In: Johnstown’s Flood of 1889. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95216-1_13
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