Uncharted Lancaster
Uncharted Lancaster reveals the county’s most fascinating stories—local history with odd twists, forgotten places, and the occasional brush with the supernatural. Each episode explores the hidden histories and long-buried secrets of Lancaster County, where legend, landscape, and local lore collide.
Uncharted Lancaster
The Susquehanna Ice Railroad of 1852
In the winter of 1852, an unrelenting cold turned the Susquehanna River into an icy barrier, threatening to halt commerce and mail along one of the nation’s most important rail corridors. This episode tells the extraordinary story of how the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad responded—by building a temporary railroad directly on the frozen river between Havre de Grace and Perryville.
Rather than risk a locomotive on the ice, engineers used stationary steam engines, ropes, and pulleys to carefully slide loaded freight cars across the frozen expanse. For more than forty days, thousands of tons of goods crossed the Susquehanna without a single recorded accident. The episode also explores how this remarkable feat was later immortalized in a commemorative lithograph distributed by the Adams Express Company, preserving one of the most inventive—and unlikely—chapters in American transportation history.
To learn more, visit UnchartedLancaster.com.
Here’s your chance to purchase a beautiful reproduction of the 1852 lithograph showing the Adams Express Company railroad tracks crossing the frozen Susquehanna at Havre de Grace, Maryland, in 1852. Order your copy here.