Old (Water) Roads
July 17, 2005
Emily and I learned to sing “Erie Canal” when we were young.. an abstract experience since canals were not exactly abundant where we lived. The song with its work-dreary melody is about slowly pulling a boat along a canal.. making 15 miles was a pretty good day. For a short window of time canals were the transportation rage in our country, and considered the best way to transport commercial loads.. filling the role of that interstate trucking does today.
The Erie canal, which linked Lake Erie to New York City, was finished in 1825. Shortly thereafter, in 1828, president John Quincy Adams broke ground to mark the construction of another mighty endeavor: the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. The goal was to join the Ohio river at Pittsburgh to the Chesapeake Bay.. into which the Potomac River flows shortly after gliding past Washington. It was a grand idea, and promised to make Washington and nearby cities such as Alexandria into trade hubs, they would be sitting on the port of choice for a vast interior section of America.
The years after 1828 were fated to introduce a yet more efficient mode of transportation. Railroad tracks were cheaper to build and transported goods much faster. The first rail line reached Washington in 1835. Those iron tentacles, multiplying across the land, made grand canal projects a poor venture, and caused the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal to stop well short of Pittsburgh and the Ohio River.. It petered out at Cumberland, Maryland, finally stretching 186 miles.
As the canal runs right alongside the Potomac River it forms a convenient riverside park, and visitors walk alongside the mud-brown still waters of the canal, imagining the wooden locks creaking open and closed in order to raise or lower a boat to the next section of the canal. Around the locks the tightly fit stone walls still stand, but the walls of the sunken canal itself are lined with grass, with a few traces of retaining rock evident here and there.
Looking toward the future is the modern reflex. We witness a never ending line of technologies and vehicles made obsolete. This last rainy Saturday we went to see a W.C. Fields film from 1941, and I was surprised to find that air-travel included sleeping space and comfortable chairs facing each other.. it looked just like a train, and I am sure that is what early air travel was modeled upon. It is also humorous to watch films from just ten years ago and note the humungous cell phones and ungainly computers. The canal is just one more outdated technology, and if it was not for the song Erie Canal, I may have grown up without any inkling of our canal system.
The original impetus for a canal came from the “Great Falls” on the Potomac River, about 15 miles north of Washington. From my picture below it will be clear that no commercial boat is going to go up or down this stretch of river. The falls led George Washington to suggest a limited canal at this point, thus saving a tiresome portage. The falls overcome, the Potomac itself could serve as a highway into the interior. It is a reminder that our history has been built upon overcoming different parts of nature.. We have built muddy canals, multipled railroad tracks, spun out a web of highways, and laid miles of cement to catch our planes..
Preserving the remains of the “C&O Canal” fixes for the future a piece of America’s struggle with nature. Its broken stone sides are as weary and old as that tune for working on the Erie Canal.
