The Lehigh Coal & Navigation Company's artificial waterway system along the Lehigh River was an early-19th-century engineering feat, and Mauch Chunk, present-day Jim Thorpe, marked the transition between the locks, dams, and impoundments of the Lehigh Canal's Upper Division, from Mauch Chunk to White Haven, and the traditional canal of the Lower Division, from Mauch Chunk to Easton. By 1820, coal boats were navigating the steep Lehigh River using Josiah White's bear-trap lock and dam system, which increased canal depth through small artificial floods that carried loaded boats downstream and allowed one man to open lock gates within a few moments instead of requiring an entire work crew. Constructed between 1827 and 1829, Lock No. 1 was the first of 29 locks on the Upper Division. It measured about 22 feet by 100 feet and held two canal boats in single file. On the downstream side of the lock piers, roughly cut log timbers known as cribbing were laid in a ladder-like fashion, with boulders placed over the cribbing and in its hollows to prevent the canal from filling in. Lock No. 1 operated until October 1931, when canal and navigation system operations ceased because railroads had become successful and prevalent, and remnants of its walls and wood cribbing remain today.