The day Hal Clark helped save the Delaware Canal after it was ravaged by 1957 flood
In many ways, I can relate to Harold “Hal” Clark. We both started in journalism in our youth, Hal as an errand boy for the Iowa Daily X-Ray newspaper in Charles City where he was born in 1890. Me? I got started in high school as a sports correspondent for the Fresno Bee newspaper in California. Both of us learned early the powerful influence that newspapers can have on issues of public interest.
Covering the devastation of dust storms in Kansas profoundly molded Hal into an environmental activist. He eventually relocated to New Hope where he wrote a column for the Beacon newspaper in the borough’s sister city of Lambertville on the opposite shore of the Delaware River.
He came to love the Delaware River valley as I do, including the beautiful course of the Delaware Canal and its towpath edging the river through Bucks County. Hal became a guiding light of the Delaware Valley Protective Association founded in 1933 to protect the river and prevent the canal from being neglected, sold or paved over. A year earlier shipping coal from Easton to Bristol on canal boats pulled by mules came to an end following a century of lucrative service. Trucks had taken over that job.
State government converted the canal into a 60-mile-long state park. Maintenance of its 23 massive wooden locks and periodic flood damage ran up huge costs. So much so that in 1957 the state threatened to abandon the waterway after a major Delaware River flood ravaged the canal. Gathering momentum was a plan to subdivide it into many pieces and sell it off to abutting property owners. Politicians in Northampton County led the charge. To them, canal preservation was too costly and benefitted too few, specifically the artist colony in New Hope, as they put it.
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The House appropriations committee subsequently eliminated $229,000 (worth $2.8 million today) in maintenance funds. With money running out, the state’s Department of Forests and Waters ordered the canal drained. On May 27, a department official, alarmed by what was quietly happening, contacted the 2,000-member protective association and Hal Clark. He had just been elected president, a role he would fill for the next 25 years.
Supporters described him as “an almost irresistible force” in protecting both the canal and the river valley from spoilage. He could be pushy and annoying to opponents, especially when he lit a cigar to envelop them in smoke. But the key was bringing public pressure on state government through newspaper exposure.
Hal went right to work. He made phone calls to political leaders in Harrisburg and drafted a news release telegraphed to 26 daily and weekly newspapers all across the state. “On the afternoon of May 27th, not 15 legislators were aware of the Delaware Canal; by the following morning all of them were – and some even wondered if uranium has cropped up in the channel,” noted Bucks County Traveler magazine.
Hal’s story became a national sensation. “For ten days – backed by the press, TV and radio ― the lovers of the canal never let up until they won their point,” noted the Traveler. In Solebury, for instance, 800 protest telegrams piled up on an agent’s desk waiting to be transmitted to Harrisburg. The legislature abruptly changed course, shelving the plan to drain the canal and adding $78,000 back into the maintenance fund.
In the end, Hal Clark’s successful effort proved the adage shared with me by former GOP county Commissioner George Metzger from his office in Doylestown in the 1970s. With a big grin from across his desk, he announced, “I learned long ago never to argue with anyone who buys ink by the barrel.”
Sources include “Harold Hewitt Clark” on the artists database of the James A. Michener Art Museum; “How to Keep a Canal” by Pat Greene published in the August 1957 issue of “Bucks County Traveler”, and “Pennsylvania’s Delaware Division Canal: Sixty Miles of Euphoria and Frustration” by Albright G. Zimmerman published in 2002. Also help from Susan Taylor of Friends of the Delaware Canal.
Carl LaVO can be reached at carllavo0@gmail.com. His two-volume “Bucks County Adventures” series is available at bookstores in Newtown, Doylestown and Lahaska.
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This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Delaware Canal in Bucks County saved by power of press post 1957 flood
