First authored by OConnor- The Schuylkill and Susquehanna Navigation Company was a limited liability corporation founded in Pennsylvania on September 29, 1791.[1][2][3] The company was founded for the purpose of improving river navigation which in the post-colonial United States era of the 1790s meant improving river systems, not canals. In this Pennsylvania scheme, however, two rivers, a large river, the Susquehanna and a smaller one, the Schuylkill were to be improved by clearing channels through obstructions and building dams where needed. To connect the two watersheds, the company proposed a four-mile summit level crossing at Lebanon Pennsylvania, a length of almost eighty miles between the two rivers. The completed project was intended to be part of a navigable water route from Philadelphia to Lake Erie and the Ohio valley.

The original engineering concept developed by the Society as well as the navigation company's charter had been to build a canal up to the Schuylkill valley to Norristown, improving the Schuylkill river from there to Reading; while from Reading a canal was to extend to the Susquehanna, via Lebanon. This would have required a four-mile summit crossing between Tulpehocken and the Quitipahilla with an artificial waterway connecting two separate river valleys; namely the Susquehanna and the Schuylkill watersheds. Its successful completion would have made the middle reach, the first summit-level canal in the United States. The term refers to a canal that rises then falls, as opposed to a lateral canal, which has a continuous fall only. In this case, the proposed canal at 80 miles in length would rise 192 feet over 42 miles from the west at the Susquehanna river to the summit and then fall 311 feet over 34 miles to the Schuylkill river to the east. It was to be the "golden link" between Philadelphia and the vast interior of Pennsylvania and beyond.

This proposed summit crossing offered a severe test of 18th-century engineering skills, materials and construction techniques. For both designing and operating a water-conveyance transportation system through an area where sinkholes are common, and surface water is scarce. Ultimately, the 1794 engineering concept was flawed as the water supply for the summit crossing was inadequate and the technology for minimizing supply losses was still another century away. While the 1794 construction was never completed, the company's successor, the Union canal was faced with the same challenges of sealing the canal bed to conserve water. The summit crossing never was able to handle the canal traffic. Even with two reservoirs constructed at the summit as feeders to the canal, the Union canal still required pumped water from a waterworks at the junction of Swatara Creek and Clarke's run and later from a second waterworks on Furnace Creek on the Quitipahilla. At the first works, there were four pumps necessary to provide summit water but only two could be powered by river water, the other two had to be powered by Cornish steam engines, a technology available in 1828 when the canal opened but not in 1791. By 1885, the successor company, the Union canal was sold at a sheriff sale, being unable to cope with railroad competition, poor planning, and the technical challenges posed by a summit crossing underlain by the carbonate bedrock of Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. Had the Schuylkill and Susquehanna navigation company been successful in completing the canal in 1794-95, it probably would have succumbed to the same poor planning and summit geology as its successor did. Much like the Potomac canal (1785-1828), between the beginning of the Navigation company in 1791 and its merger and completion by its successor company in 1828, the Union canal of Pennsylvania (1811-1885), "...civil engineering had come to America and Americans had become civil engineers."[4]

Despite all of these problems, in 1791, the enthusiasm for this venture was such that it didn't seem at all impossible that Pennsylvania would have succeeded in securing the commercial prestige which the (Erie) canal captured for New York State. By 1795 however, the navigation company's project was a commercial failure. The result was that with the onset of the Erie canal still some thirty years into the future, Philadelphia lost the early initiative in water transportation. Despite Philadelphia and Pennsylvania's "heroic efforts" to hold their share of the internal trade which in 1796 was forty percent more than New York; by 1825 with the opening of the Erie canal, Philadelphia's trade was forty-five percent less than New York.

New York's rise to pre-eminence among American cities was an important development but was not a foregone conclusion. At the time the Schuylkill and Susquehanna navigation company was chartered, Philadelphia was the leading American city; its residents, as well as others, generally expected it to take on more of a metropolitan role as the nation became independent, and prepared the city for that role. Instead, Philadelphia slid into second place. By 1807, New York was the acknowledged commercial capital of the nation; by 1837, it was the American metropolis. Philadelphia's dismal failure to build the "golden link" thirty years before New York opened the Erie canal was a major factor of that slide into second place.