Location(s)

In the centre of the town, a large basin is formed by damming the Conemaugh, to accommodate the great fleet of canal-boats plying between this place [Johnstown] and Pittsburg.  The basin is surrounded by Warehouses, boatyards, and other conveniences for receiving and delivering goods.  Some eight or ten have forwarding houses here, and during the summer it is a stirring, busy place. (Sherman Day, 1843)

            The Allegheny Portage Railroad helped to transform Johnstown from “a very quiet village, with tall elder bushes growing in the streets” (Solomon Roberts, ca. 1834) to a leading industrial town of 19^th century Pennsylvania.  In just twenty years, the town boomed, especially its coal and iron industries.  Immigrants from eastern Europe flooded into the city to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the great expansion of mining and manufacturing establishments, especially the Cambria Iron Works.  By the time the APRR was replaced by the Pennsylvania Railroad in the mid-1850s, Johnstown had become America’s steel city.

            In Johnstown, as in Hollidaysburg, freight and passengers were transferred between the canal and the APRR at the canal basin.  A community of supporting structures and companies grew up around the basin.  Because it serviced both canal traffic and rail traffic, facilities for both locomotives and boats ringed the basin, including boat sheds and yards, locomotive shops, turntables, boat planes, a water station, a carpenter’s shop, weigh scales, a woodyard, and warehouses.  Since the closing of the APRR and the canal, the basin has been filled, and there are few signs that it ever existed in Johnstown, with the exception of a canal-era hotel building.