amount of about four hundred dollars.

The total actual work done is not clearly shown by the documents,
but it is evident that the measure of success achieved was not
equaled elsewhere on similar improvements on a large scale. From
1796 to 1804 the tolls received at Rome amounted to over fifteen
thousand dollars, and at Little Falls to over fifty-eight
thousand dollars--a sum which exceeded the original cost of
construction. Dividends had crept up from three per cent in 1798
to five and a half per cent in 1817, the year in which work was
begun on the Erie Canal.

No struggle for the mastery of an American river matches in
certain respects the effort of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation
Company to bridle the Lehigh and make it play its part in the
commercial development of Pennsylvania. The failures and trials
of the promoters of this company were no less remarkable than
was the great success that eventually crowned the effort. In 1793
the Lehigh Coal Mine Company was organized and purchased some ten
thousand acres in the Mauch Chunk anthracite region, nine miles
from the Lehigh River. It then appropriated a sum of money to
build a road from the mines to the river in the expectation that
the State would improve the navigation of the waterway, for
which, it has already been noted, an appropriation had been made
in 1791, in accordance with the programme of the Society for
Promoting the Improvement of Roads and Inland Navigation. Nothing
was done, however, to improve the river, and the company, after
various attempts at shipping coal to Philadelphia, gave up the
effort and allowed the property, which was worth millions, to lie
idle. In 1807 the Lehigh Coal Mine Company, in another effort to