Industrial History: Girard Locks on Beaver Division Canal in Rochester, PA

Sunday, March 23, 2025

Girard Locks on Beaver Division Canal in Rochester, PA

(Satellite, this was the upstream end of the river-side lock wall because the sewage plant was built on the old locks. Much of the canal has been submerged by the pool of the Montgomery Dam.)

Little Beaver Historical Society posted
1910) view of Rochester, showing the Girard Locks of the Beaver Division Canal long in disuse.
Lloyd Scott Hardin shared

The satellite location is based on this photo.

jaep

This explains what "Beaver Division Canal" means.

jaep

TimesOnline, Beaver County Times
Construction of the canal began in 1834. The railroad arrived in 1851 and a collapsed aqueduct shut down most of the canal in 1872. "Only the Girard Locks of Rochester, which were large enough to accommodate smaller steamboats, survived beyond that point. The final boat passed through Rochester in 1901. The Girard Locks were still visible until the mid-1970s, when a sewage pump station was built over top of them."

bcpahistory
"The Beaver Division was built to carry Pittsburgh traffic north to Erie, to keep trade in Pennsylvania, but it also carried Lake Erie traffic (from New York's Erie Canal) down to the Ohio River. Countless emigrants to the west travelled this way. It was completed in 1832 and began at Rochester, stretching north to a point above New Castle called Harbor Bridge, a distance of 31 miles, where it joined the Erie Extension Canal to Erie. There was one important branch. At Mahoningtown, south of New Castle (and until 1849, part of Beaver County) the Pennsylvania and Ohio Canal branched off, heading to Youngstown, Warren, and Akron, where it joined the Ohio and Erie Canal. Nothing is left of the P and 0 Canal in Pennsylvania today.
"There were 17 locks on the Beaver Division, nine of them in present day Beaver County, and six dams. A lock is a stone chamber with wooden gates used to raise boats from one level to another, usually adjacent to a dam. A typical lock on the Beaver Division lifted the boats about eight feet. The locks were numbered south from New Castle, so the two at Rochester were numbers 16 and 17. They were called the Girard Locks, for a Philadelphia financier who invested in the canal, and were larger than the other locks, big enough to pass small steamboats."

Little Beaver Historical Society posted
Great photo of the Girard Lock on the Beaver Division Canal in Rochester . To give you an idea where this is the bridge you see in the background is where the current Rochester Bridgewater Bridge is located.