Erie's History and Memorabilia

St. John Kanty Preparatory School was founded in 1909, it stood at 3002 East 38th Street in Erie. The Bishop & Martyr of the Stanislaus Catholic Church, in Erie, initiated the idea of a school to service the growing immigrant population in Erie. The mission of founding the school was undertaken by Vincentian priests: Fr. George Glogowski, Fr. Paul Waszko, Fr. Anthony Mazurkiewicz, and Fr. Joseph Slupina; supported Erie pastor, Father Andrew Ignasiak (later Monsignor), in the idea of founding a Polish school that would provided college preparatory education for the children of immigrants. Erie and the Great Lakes region was chosen for its location because of two main railroads, the New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad whose tracks crossed in the city. It guaranteed good communication for most of the cities in the North Eastern United States. On June 29, 1909, they founded St. John Kanty College Association. Its main purpose was to acquire land and location and b...

The Erie Gauge War (sometimes called the Erie Railroad War) was a conflict between the citizens of Erie, and two railroad companies over the standardization of the track gauge between Erie and the New York border. It started on December 7, 1853, and ended on February 1, 1854. In 1849 the Erie and North East Railroad started laying track east from Erie to the New York-Pennsylvania border at a gauge of six-feet. At the same time, the Franklin Canal Company was laying track west from Erie to the Ohio-Pennsylvania border and the Buffalo and State Line Railroad was laying track from Buffalo to the New York border, both were at a gauge of four-feet-ten-inch (Ohio gauge). On January 19, 1852, the first train from New York state arrived in Erie, and on November 23, 1852, the first train left Erie heading to Ashtabula, Ohio. A passenger traveling from Buffalo to Cleveland would be forced to change trains at the Pennsylvania border because of the different gauges. Twenty miles down the road i...

The Erie Canal that comes to mind with most people is located in the state of New York. The canal system in New York State still exits today as part of New York’s larger canal system called the  New York State Canal System . Pennsylvania had its own canal system, which extended from Philadelphia to Erie. Within the state's canal system the Erie Extension Canal  ran, north to south, near the western edge of the state. Pennsylvania Canal system The canal era began in Pennsylvania in 1797 with the Conewago Canal, which carried riverboats around Conewago Falls on the Susquehanna River, near York Haven. Spurred by construction of New York’s Erie Canal, between 1817 and 1825, and the competitive advantage it gave New York State in moving people and materials to and from the interior of the continent, Pennsylvanians built hundreds of miles of canals during the early decades of the 19th century. These included two canals built by Pennsylvania stock companies: the S...

Not an actual railroad at all, the Underground Railroad was a series of complex secret routes, churches, institutions and privately owned homes that aided runaway slaves on the dangerous journey north. Pennsylvania, the first free state north of the Mason-Dixon line, provided many entry points to freedom. Upper Canada had banned the importation of new slaves on July 9, 1793, and all slavery throughout the British Empire ended with the Slavery Abolition Act of August 1, 1834. The United States, however, remained bitterly divided. The Underground Railroad was not run by any single organization or person. Rather, it consisted of many individuals — many whites but predominantly black — who knew only of the local efforts to aid fugitives and not of the overall operation. Still, it effectively moved hundreds of slaves northward each year — according to one estimate, the South lost 100,000 slaves between 1810 and 1850. From around 1830, until the end of the Civil War, a...

If the U.S. Navy could control the waterways comprising much of the border between the United States and British Canada, then American forces would have ready-made avenues for invasion. Conversely, the lakes and rivers could just as easily serve as invasion corridors for the enemy-vulnerable passageways allowing the British to slash through to the soft underbelly of the United States. Whoever wielded control over the lakes possessed a powerful strategic and tactical advantage. As a result, the northern lakes arena witnessed the hardest and bloodiest fighting of the war. The British, unhindered by the U.S. Navy, used the lakes as transportation routes for troops and supplies during the early months of the war. But the U.S. leadership recognized that warships were needed to form a protective shield along the country's northern and northwestern border, and by late 1812 a furious shipbuilding program had been inaugurated. By the summer of 1813, through new construction...