Transportation

With the opening of Indian lands on the north side of the Ohio River, ferries began carrying settlers and goods across as early as 1785, including Chrisler's Ferry at Shippingport and Thomas Smith's Ferry at Smith's Ferry, and the county's last ferry, Shippingport Ferry, ended service in 1964. Before railroads, the Ohio River served as a main artery to the country's interior, bringing people and goods into Beaver County by road and canal for westward river travel and fostering thriving boat works in Boalesville, Phillipsburg, Freedom, Sharon, Industry, Glasgow, and Shippingport, where flatboats, keelboats, canal boats, and steamboats became one of the county's first manufacturing industries. In 1803, Meriwether Lewis and the Corps of Discovery passed through Beaver County on the Ohio River by keelboat, and in 1805 and 1806 former Vice President Aaron Burr had a small fleet built in Bridgewater for his expedition to create a western empire. The Beaver Division of the Pennsylvania Canal opened in 1834 from Rochester to New Castle, reached Lake Erie in 1844, and closed in 1871 as railroads grew, while the Sandy and Beaver Canal operated from 1848 to 1854 between Glasgow and Bolivar, Ohio, for 73 miles with 30 dams and 90 locks. Merrill Lock and Dam opened on the Ohio River west of Vanport in August 1904, named for Colonel William E. Merrill, head of the Army Corps of Engineers, and was replaced by Montgomery Island Lock and Dam in 1936. Before 1800, the Tuscarawas Indian Trail, also called the Great Trail, was the first well-used path through Beaver County, running from present-day Pittsburgh through the county to the Tuscarawas Valley in Ohio. A wooden toll bridge built over the Beaver River in 1815 between Brighton and New Brighton was among the earliest bridges in western Pennsylvania, and in 1897 the Rochester-Monaca suspension bridge became the first traffic bridge across the Ohio River between Pittsburgh and Wheeling, West Virginia. Pennsylvania's 1905 Automobile Act required drivers to have an operator's license, and Beaver County's speed limit was 8 miles per hour. In 1921 the county had 17 miles of improved roads and planned to pave another 52 miles by the end of the year, and on November 26, 1951, the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened an interchange on Route 18 near Koppel. Construction of the Beaver Valley Expressway, now I-376, began in 1966 and was completed to New Castle in 1992. Railroads arrived in Beaver County in 1851 and eventually supported more than 30 passenger stations, while freight trains still remained common. Trolleys began service in 1885 and soon connected the principal towns along the Beaver and Ohio Rivers; by 1925 they ran 1,521,238 car miles and carried 11,589,454 passengers before being fully replaced by public buses in 1937. By 1920 small airfields had opened in Patterson Heights and Conway, the first airmail left Conway in 1938, Beaver County Airport opened in Chippewa Township in 1953, and on September 8, 1994, US Airways Flight 427 crashed in Hopewell Township, killing all 132 people aboard.

Beaver, Pennsylvania · United States