Georgetown and the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal

Founded in 1751, Georgetown quickly became a port city on the Potomac River and the logical terminus of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, whose traffic further fueled the town’s growth into a bustling industrial port by the late 1800s. Supporters had first imagined the canal as a trade route between east and west, but financial problems ended plans to continue it beyond Cumberland to the Ohio River at Pittsburgh. Construction began in 1828, and thousands of men, primarily immigrants, did the dangerous labor of digging and blasting through soil and rock, while skilled workers built the dams, locks, culverts, aqueducts, and the Paw Paw Tunnel. Although sections opened as they were finished, the full route between Cumberland and Georgetown officially opened on October 10, 1850. Stretching 184.5 miles, rising 605 feet, and averaging 60 feet wide and six feet deep, the canal included seven dams, 11 aqueducts, and 74 lift locks, with four locks in Georgetown alone. The canal was most active and profitable between 1865 and 1880, when more than 500 boats carried nearly one million tons of cargo annually between Cumberland and Georgetown, and more than 90 percent arrived in Georgetown loaded with coal. Mule-drawn coal boats unloaded beside Georgetown’s warehouses, new wharves supported the distribution of coal, stone, and timber, and flour, paper, and cotton milling prospered by using the canal as a new source of water power. Heavy traffic near Georgetown sometimes forced boat crews to wait days to unload, but canal families, after a week-long trip through rural country and small towns, looked forward to the city’s streets and entertainments. Built in the Potomac floodplain to use a steady water supply, the canal also suffered repeated flood damage, and after years of declining profits and devastating floods, operations ceased in 1924. New Deal programs later restored the first 22 miles, and after Justice William O'Douglas led an eight-day hike along the full canal in 1954, public support grew for preservation, culminating in its designation as a National Historic Park in 1971.

Washington, District of Columbia · United States