Frick's Lock

The story

Frick's Lock — properly Fricks Locks — was a small farming village that grew up around locks 54 and 55 of the Schuylkill Canal, built in the early 1820s on land bought from farmer John Frick. When the canal opened in 1824, boats full of anthracite and produce passed through by the thousands each year, and the hamlet prospered off the traffic.

The railroads killed the canal trade around the turn of the century, and floods finished the waterway by the 1920s, but the village lingered as a quiet cluster of farmhouses. Its real ending came from across the river: beginning in the 1960s, the Philadelphia Electric Company assembled the land for the Limerick Nuclear Generating Station, which sits directly opposite. By the time the plant came online in 1986, every resident of Frick's Lock had been bought out and moved.

Eleven historic buildings survived the clearance. In 2011 the power company (by then Exelon) donated the village and its structures to East Coventry Township, which preserves it as a historic district — a founding-era canal hamlet frozen beneath a modern reactor's plume.

What remains today

Eleven preserved structures — the Frick farmhouse, other homes and outbuildings — clustered at the end of Fricks Locks Road beside the old canal cut.