(Located at the foot of Fulton Street, opposite the present Hippity-Hop Lunch.)
This was one of the landing points of the old Canal Boats. A road went from Riverside Drive down to a shelf of land above the water's edge.
When Emil Bott made his oil painting of Bridgewater, the area in this vicinity occupied the central portion. lie painted his picture from a vantage point on the Rochester hillside. It now hangs in the Beaver County Court House, but for years it was owned by the Samuel R. Dunlap family.
This division of the Beaver and Lake Erie Canal was built in 1831-1833. The Canal Boats were from sixty to seventy feet in length, with a freight-carrying capacity of about sixty tons. The crew consisted of a captain, a bowsman, two steersmen and two drivers. The motive power was a horse, walking a tow-path on shore.
Packets also operated along the Canal. A passenger could go aboard at New Castle and land at Bridgewater the next morning.
With the coming of the railroad in the 1850's, the Canal Boating business entered its declining years.