Page:Life of Isaiah V Williamson.djvu/57

Rh producing cotton cloth worth $2,000,000, or more.

Three packet lines to Liverpool were talked of, in order that the business of importing for Philadelphia merchants, which for a time had fallen into New York hands, could be restored to the city. As to internal trade, he learned that a surprising amount of business was being done by wagons, especially westward throughout the State. A single house in Philadelphia loaded two hundred for Pittsburgh in one year, with an average weight of two tons.

Williamson became interested, also, in the two canals then in the process of building, the Chesapeake and Delaware, and the Union; in the stupendous work of the Schuylkill Navigation Company by which navigation had just been opened the whole way from Philadelphia to Reading and the coal mines; and especially in that organization of a couple of years before, the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company, having the purpose "to bring to market the valuable stone coal which abounds in a mountain situated on the margin of the Lehigh, about forty-six miles above the