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I find it very interesting. How did you find this info?
Roger, pure serendipity. A fellow nurse was looking up a road with a VERY non-politically-correct name, near where he used to live. This site came up as an option on Google.
This picture, in particular, interests me, a view of Catawissa.
The creek in the foreground provided water for an old stone mill just a bit upstream. The road through the covered bridge eventually ran down to Sunbury.
The bridge in the middle ground was the wagon/horse road, and maybe a mile over the river is the stone formation called the Indian Head. I put some postcard pictures of the changes to the road over the years. Amazing spot- cliff face with Indian Head, then dirt road, RR tracks, Pa Canal, and then the river, all running side-by-side.
The Pennsylvania Canal, on the far side of the river, ran down to Northumberland, and this was the branch that brought coal down from the Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, and Nanticoke coal fields.
The bridge in the far background is a railroad bridge, crossing over toward Bloomsburg.
The railroad steamer you see curling in the foreground was the Catawissa RR, (which had a full yard/shops/turntable in it's day), in the mid-1800's, later to become the P&R RR, and after coming through Catawissa, it headed south toward Philadelphia, including several huge wooden trestles to ford the mountainous area south of Catawissa, if you remember the pictures of the huge stone foundations that anchored either end of one of the wooden trestles, that still exist today.
Later, the Pennsy would work it's way up the east (near) side of the river, paralleling the DL&W over on the west side.
The P&R ran parallel to the Pennsy until just before the RR bridge, where it crossed the Pennsy and then the river, if you remember the pics I put up of that crossing, it's switch tower, and the bridge.
The P&R crossed the river, curled around a mountain, and headed west then north, but it had a branch line that dead-ended in Bloomsburg. There was, north of Bloomsburg, a mile-long railroad between the Irondale Furnace and the Pennsylvania Canal, running pig iron down to the canal. It was shortened to dead-end at the station in Bloomsburg that served the P&R, and this iron-moving railroad was eventually extended up the Fishing Creek Valley and became my beloved Bloomsburg and Sullivan RR that ran through Orangeville, the town of which is some 8 miles north of Bloomsburg beyond the last mountain in the background.
jaMES