Mifflin also rhapsodized upon the town of Conowingo in Cecil County, Maryland, on the Susquehanna some 35 miles south of his native Columbia. "Conowingo" is a Native American (Susquehannock) word meaning "at the rapids." By the 1920s, however, the very rapids that entranced Mifflin and others would be threatened by government damming and other "improvements." The original site of Conowingo has long been submerged in the so-called Conawingo Pond that facilitates the enormous Conawingo Hydroelectric Plant.

Well-known in his lifetime for his own poeticized settled landscapes, the Bucks County–based Pennsylvania Impressionist Daniel Garber took the Conowingo Dam as the subject in his 1939 same-named painting. With awe-inspiring cement and metal structures matching the river in their monumental sweep, the forms in Garber’s painting aspire to a condition scholars have called the "technological sublime," a state in which the massive creations of human beings rival an earlier, natural sublime of flora and fauna. It is difficult to tell whether the visitors at lower right are observing the majesty of the Susquehanna or the spectacle of industry.

Contemporary works by Innerst and Workman demonstrate the paradoxical give-and-take of nature and culture signaled by the Susquehanna and other rivers. The structure portrayed in Innerst’s "Old Shakey (Walnut Street Bridge)" (2006), connects City Island and Riverfront Park in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and is the river’s oldest surviving bridge. The trusswork presents a dazzling abstract pattern in the painting, yet dramatizes the manner in which the very mechanism that brings us to the river can obscure its aesthetic charge.

In Workman’s "Down River" (2006), on the other hand, the Susquehanna’s panoramic majesty is omnipresent, with no bridge or other intrusive infrastructure in sight. The artist made this view, however, from the vantage point of the Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge, connecting Lancaster and York Counties in south-central Pennsylvania. Innerst and Workman remind us of the precarious balance of nature and civilization long evoked by the Susquehanna River. They also signal the river’s continued use as a richly expressive and ecologically beguiling artistic motif.

Leo G. Mazow is curator of American art at Palmer Museum of Art, The Pennsylvania State University. He is author of Shallow Creek: Thomas Hart Benton and the American Waterways (2007).