A lock worked by opening upper valves to raise water in the lock to the level of the upstream canal, lowering the upper gate for a boat to enter, closing the upper gate, opening valves in the lower gates to empty water from the lock and lower the boat to the level of the downstream canal, and then opening the lower gates so the boat could proceed. The twenty-nine high lift locks of the Upper Grand Division of the Lehigh Canal were unlike other locks in the world. Designed by Edwin A. Douglas in the 1830s, they lifted and lowered wooden canal boats from ten feet to as much as thirty feet. The canal's co-founder and creative managerial genius, Josiah White, wrote in his journal that one lock had a thirty-foot lift and filled or emptied in less than three minutes, and that engineers had objected to the plan until he came to E.A. Douglas and employed him. Along its twenty-six miles, the canal's locks compensated for a drop in elevation of six hundred feet. Twenty dams maintained water supply and created slackwater for easy navigation. This section of the Lehigh Canal had slightly over five and a half miles of canal dug sixty feet wide at the top, forty feet wide at the bottom, and five feet deep. The Lehigh Canal between Mauch Chunk, present-day Jim Thorpe, and White Haven became known as the Upper Grand Section, and the canal from Mauch Chunk to Easton as the Lower Section. In early June 1862, thirty hours of heavy rainfall sent hundreds of thousands of cut logs into the river, and raging uncontrollably downstream, they battered and destroyed the locks and dams of the Upper Division of the Lehigh Canal. A newly constructed rail line then replaced the damaged canal, and ruins along the Lehigh River channel remain from that vanished way of life.