Chesapeake and Ohio Canal

Maryland Historical Society

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,farmers and businessmen in Maryland sought ways to enhance the navigation of major rivers that penetrated the great heartland of America―the Ohio Valley, the transappalachian west, and the upper Shenandoah Valley of central Pennsylvania. The two principal rivers of this mid-Atlantic region were the Potomac and the Susquehanna. Farther south the commerce on Virginia’s James River ended at the rapids or fall line in Richmond. All of these rivers provided opportunities and hazards as they both stimulated the commercial vision and posed significant problems of navigation.

The Potomac River above Georgetown turned into a torrent of shallows and rapids that extended for miles. The Susquehanna was navigable only during the spring freshets, while the James had navigationally hazardous rapids and shallows.

Canals “Fundamental to Nationhood”
George Washington recognized the Potomac’s great potential as a highway of commerce as early as 1754 when he was a young surveyor. Much later, in 1784 during a trip that lasted five weeks and 700 miles in the saddle to the headwaters of the Potomac and Ohio, Washington became convinced that the Potomac could be made navigable and toward that end the general and his associates organized the Potowmack [sic] Company. According to its charter, the company’s purpose was to open the Potomac River to navigation and build by-pass locks and canals with a minimum clearance of a foot of water. A canal especially running along the river would eliminate the problem of the Potomac being navigable upstream from Georgetown only 45 days a year. Washington called canals and river improvements “fundamental to nationhood.”

The impetus for this dream of massively transforming the riparian environment of the Chesapeake Bay country came from across the Atlantic. Ever since the days of Canal de Medici, which connected the Bay of Biscay in France with the rich walled city of Carcassone in 1681, men had dreamed of inland canal empires. In America, the empire was the West and the canals would be called “internal improvements” or what today would be referred to as “engines of economic development.”

Government Funds Build New Canal, Threaten Environment
With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, Potomac planters and businessmen feared that they would soon be shut out of the lucrative markets of the Ohio Valley and the West. Within a short time the Potowmack Company, which had limped along for decades and constructed but little, was reconfigured as the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal Company, whose investors persuaded Congress to appropriate $3.5 million in federal money to begin construction. Canal construction was always a major undertaking, but the C&O posed exceptional engineering challenges. A ditch had to be dug wide enough and deep enough so that boats could travel over 340 miles through and around mountains, climb elevations of 190 feet, and pass through 398 locks. Similarly the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal was proposed in 1822 as a means of connecting Philadelphia with the commerce of the Chesapeake via a canal across the narrow isthmus of Cecil County, Maryland to the Delaware River.

Unfortunately, in the flurry of canal building that followed the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, promoters gave little thought to the environmental and social consequences of these vast engineering projects. The construction of the C&O canal, for example, brought tons of silt into the Potomac River from muddy streams in the hinterland. Given the storms and flood surges of the Chesapeake region, the canal basin near Rock Creek Park in Washington quickly silted up and could handle only a small amount of traffic.

However, despite the angry floods that descended the Potomac, money and power gravitated uphill and westward toward the Ohio River. A similar drama of canal madness played itself out in Richmond with state-backed canal projects along the James that would open the West beyond Lynchburg. The Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal Company added to the network of canals in the Chesapeake Bay country. Begun in 1839, the canal linked Havre de Grace and Baltimore with the Pennsylvania canal system and Philadelphia.

Canals Limited in Profitability
Canals in Maryland were profitable for a few brief decades. The C&O Canal was able to stay profitable as a coal hauler, despite the serious competition of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, which paralleled its route. The Susquehanna and Tidewater Company and the James River Canal Company were seriously harmed by military activity during the Civil War and by 1890 were nearly defunct. A transport system of canals that worked well in seventeenth-century France and eighteenth-century England proved to be mostly a waste of money in Maryland and Virginia. Canals, however, did have a certain romantic aura and have assumed mythic importance in the history of transportation.

After the Civil War, those canals that were viable were placed under the supervision of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which now supervises canals as part of its rivers and harbors component. Today, canals serve mostly as highways for barge traffic. The only canal in Maryland that survived into the present is the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, which is now part of the Inland Waterway System.

If anything, the canal revolution in mid-Atlantic transportation and commerce demonstrated how Chesapeake waters were from the earliest period defined by private business and state governments as engineering problems standing in the way of economic prosperity. Canals were to be built quickly and cheaply, often with the use of heavily exploited African-American slaves and Irish laborers. Like most environmental transformations of our early history, no one could foresee the difficulties and skyrocketing costs that accompanied canal building. Most canal engineers had no previous experience and knew little or nothing about hydraulics. Surely, if the public had known what most canals were going to cost before being completed, it is doubtful that they would have been constructed. Suffice it to say that the engineering approach that stresses hydraulic manipulation through construction of canals, levees, dams, and channel dredging transcends the history of our republic and is still part of today’s environmental calculus.

Drago, Harry Sinclair. Canal Days in America: History and Romance of Old Towpaths and Waterways. New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1972.

Seelye, John. Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republican Plan, 1775–1825. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.