A few hundred feet east of Jacob Rickenbach's stone house, just behind Curtin Rickenbach's home, the small
creek flows through a meadow and actually undercuts the canal bed by means
of a perfectly preserved and very pretty culvert, shown below. The stone
culvert was built probably before 1820 by the Schuylkill Navigation Company at
the time the canal was built, to allow the creek to pass under the canal bed.
This drawing(from the collection of Schuylkill Navigation
information at Reading Area Community College) , from a survey in 1878, shows
the dimensions of the culvert. At the time the culvert had a wooden retaining
barrier, now absent.
The photograph below shows the culvert today.
The view is to the west (toward the houses mentioned above), and the canal runs
from right to left over the culvert.
The creek continues another 30 feet behind
where the above photo was taken, and enters the Schuylkill River (below).
The view below shows where the creek enters
the culvert on the west side of the canal, with Curtin
Rickenbach's house in the background. In times of flood, the culvert
actually caused the creek to back up and flood the meadow seen below, often
flooding the basement of the house.
Photographs by Tom Rickenbach, Oct. 2001