Near the west entrance to Safe Harbor Park in Conestoga Township stands a testament to an odd chapter in Lancaster County history — the Port of Lancaster.

The almost-forgotten 19th-century port attempted to use the Conestoga River to put Lancaster on par with the ports of Boston, Savannah and New York City.

"Lancaster's port was never really a success. It spent most of its time in bankruptcy and almost as soon as the port was built it was put out of business by the railroads," Jack Loose, a historian with the Lancaster County Historical Society, said last recently.

"But it is true. At one time Lancaster did consider itself a port city," he said. "And it was possible, by traveling down the Conestoga to the Susquehanna and then to Baltimore, to go down to our city's port and buy yourself a one-way ticket across the ocean to Paris."

The strange history of Lancaster's forgotten port dates to 1825, with the formation of the Conestoga Navigation Co.

It used slackwater navigation — and a series of nine locks — to transport goods and passengers from Lancaster city, using a terminus in what is now Lancaster County Park, to Conestoga Township, where the mouth of the Conestoga River meets the Susquehanna River.

From there, according to Ken Hoak, president and curator of the Conestoga Historical Society, mules were used to pull boats out across the width of the Susquehanna River on an edifice known as a "crib dam," a long, manmade structure extending west to York County and made from sturdy wooden boxes filled with rocks and other ballast.

The crib dam, Hoak said, made it possible for people and animals to walk shoreline to shoreline across the Susquehanna River in the mid-19th century.

"One of the many problems with the Port of Lancaster is that the canal (the Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal) you'd use to get down to Maryland is located on the wrong side of the river," Hoak said. "So to make it practical, the financiers had to construct this massive structure, one literally built across and through the Susquehanna River."

Once goods reached the York side of the river, they could be shipped using the 43-mile Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal south to Havre de Grace, Md., where products and people could be loaded onto a bay steamer headed south to Baltimore or Washington, D.C.

Unfortunately, though, because the port was entirely dependent on the weather (nothing, Loose said, could be shipped in wintertime) and because the complicated series of locks made shipping almost prohibitively expensive, the port was put out of business in 1857 with the coming of the railroads, especially lines which ran down the eastern shore of the Susquehanna, past Holtwood, from Harrisburg down to what is now Port Deposit in Cecil County, Md.

As time passed, Loose said, evidence of Lancaster's port began to disappear: floods and winter freezes caused the canal's stonework to break down, the locks were dismantled and Lancaster's attention began to shift away from the Susquehanna River and its water connections to Baltimore and, instead, toward the city's new rail links to Philadelphia.

Today, Loose said, there are only a handful of reminders of the port's existence. There are two historical markers along the Conestoga River — the one in Safe Harbor Park and another in Lancaster Township.

Also, there is the Safe Harbor Dam, a hydroelectric dam built in 1930 on the remainder of the crib dam; and the Dirty Ol' Tavern at 917 S. Prince St., originally founded as one of the port's main taverns and hotel.

Looking back at Lancaster's brief time as a "port" city, Loose said, is difficult because it isn't clear what legacy, if any, the port has left behind.

"Whenever I think of the port, I think that it was an idea ahead of its time," he said. "It was a scheme cooked up by some local business people, and no matter how much money they poured into it, they could never quite seem to get it to work."

For Hoak, the Port of Lancaster is best remembered as "a 19th-century oddity."

"How many cities in the world can claim to be a port and not even have a shoreline?" he said. "Lancaster's port … is a little-known fact that leaves most people dumbfounded."

The early to middle 19th century, he said, should be remembered as a dynamic time in which a very young United States was experimenting with "just about every conceivable method" to jump-start the construction of the new nation's infrastructure.

"Just think of it. Back then, there were people who spent their childhoods in a real Conestoga wagon, and by the end of their lives they were riding the rails in a Pullman car," he said.

"The people who lived back then, they saw some tremendous changes in their lives. For them, the Port of Lancaster … was just another quick stop along the road."

Safe Harbor Park is located along River Road in Conestoga Township, near the intersection of Powerhouse Road.

The Art Deco historical marker, which appears to have been put up by the Safe Harbor Water Power Co. in the 1930s, is located along the Conestoga River shoreline at the park's west end.

For more information on the park, call 872-9441 or visit the Safe Harbor Water Power Corporation at www.shwpc.com/recreation.html.