In April 1834, Roland Curtin joined other Centre County businessmen in organizing the Bald Eagle and Spring Creek Navigation Company to create a navigable route of canals and slackwater pools from Bellefonte to a connection with the West Branch Pennsylvania Canal near Lock Haven. Authorized by the Pennsylvania Legislature, the system was planned in and alongside Bald Eagle Creek and Spring Creek, with a connection made by the State-built Bald Eagle Cross-Cut Canal. Engineer Mathew Stealey's 1835 plan called for 22 lift locks, six guard locks, and canals built to dimensions matching those on the West Branch Pennsylvania Canal. Construction contracts were awarded in 1835, and the 25-mile route was divided into Lower and Upper divisions. The Lower Division was completed in 1837, but the financial panic that year slowed further work. By the fall of 1839, the 6.5-mile section between Howard Furnace and Eagle Iron Works was finished, greatly helping transportation for Roland Curtin's enterprise. The remaining stretch to Bellefonte was completed in 1848, and on September 1, 1848, the first canal boat to travel the full length, the George Crane, arrived there with company managers and other dignitaries; another boat arrived the next day, possibly the Jane Curtin. In its early years, the navigation carried iron products, fuel, farm goods, building materials, whiskey, and merchandise, and it also transported passengers. Severe flooding in the spring of 1865 heavily damaged the system's locks, dams, and banks, and competition from the Bald Eagle Valley Railroad, opened the previous December, made restoration too costly, so most of the navigation was abandoned. At Eagle Iron Works, officials later installed a turbine in the vacated Lock 11 to replace an older water wheel system and more reliably power bellows in the blast house and bloomeries. Lock 11, beside the Eagle Iron Works blast house, was built to raise and lower boats 7¾ feet by means of hinged wooden gates and wicket valves, and boatmen themselves were responsible for working such locks because the company chose not to hire locktenders.