More about the C&O

The Monacacy Aqueduct

The Chinese built aqueducts and the Romans built aqueducts. In fact, the Romans built lots of aqueducts all over their empire. Running into one in France or Spain would not surprise. But there? In western Maryland?

On my next visit to DC, the first couple of days were spent in the uplifting environment provided by the Jefferson Library Reading Room in the Library of Congress. I cullled through a dozen or so books, pamphlets, and documents related to the C&O.

Jefferson Reading Room 

Reading over my notes now, I was struck immediately by how much American history was wrapped up in the C&Os history. Here's a sampler:

Captain John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, explored the Potomac in 1608 in search of a passage to the Pacific. His notes mention a native village called Tahoga (present day Georgetown) settled along a tributary (present day Rock Creek) that feeds into the Potomac (at Mile 0 on the C&O.)

Just past Rock Creek, Smith encountered the start of fifteen miles of navigational treachery provided by a series of falls and rapids culminating at Great Falls (Mile 14). The Potomac, Smith reported back, was a poor choice for westward expansion.

Rapids at Great Falls

As early as 1747, George Washington, a young surveyor for the Ohio Company, promoted the idea of a canal that could skirt the falls from Georgetown to Great Falls and so open up further growth of the colonies into the Ohio Valley. His idea was ignored until after the Revolution when then retired General Washington formed the Patowmack Co. and proceeded to persuade the Virginia and Maryland Assemblies to get behind the project.

The Canal at Great Falls with the famous Tavern in the background.

Those who lived and worked along the C&O came to refer to it most commonly as "The Old Ditch." But it took on other names as well, one of which was "President Washington's Dream."

The Potomac (and the Chesapeake Bay that it empties into) is the dividing line between Virginia and Maryland. As such, during the Civil War, the river and the canal were the literal border dividing the Union and the Confederacy. Appropriately, it became the locus of countless skirmishes, starting before the war began with John Brown’s raid on the armory at Harper’s Ferry (Mile 60). Antietam, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, took place just a mile or two from the Canal (Mile 70). On a bike trip in May, I passed caves alongside the Canal that locals hid in during the fighting.

After the Civil War, the canal returned to business as usual. But throughout its history, that was never saying much. From the beginning, the canal was fraught with overruns and natural disasters. Which gets me back to my original surprise at seeing an aqueduct in western Maryland. I had always thought of aquaducts as coming from another age. Another time in history.

It turns out that was almost right. Here's the story of the canal in a nutshell: the very day in 1828 that the canal was officially begun, the first railroad track was laid outside Baltimore, MD headed westward. By the time the canal reached its terminus in Cumberland, MD in 1850, the railroad had already been operating out of there for 8 years. The fate of the Canal was sealed from its beginning. Industrial progress would be its ruin. 

Over time and further canal failures, the C&O would take on another nickname. The locals came to call it "George's Pipe Dream." Captain John Smith may have called it right from the start when he said the Potomac was a poor choice for westward expansion.

The railroad at the Canal's terminus