Chesapeake & Ohio Canal

Listen for still water. A few steps below the shops of M Street, a narrow green canal rests between brick walls and old warehouses. Ducks paddle past heavy wooden gates. Trees lean over the towpath. The air smells of wet stone and leaves. The city noise fades. This quiet channel once carried an American dream toward the west.

This is the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Most people call it the C and O. It starts here in Georgetown and follows the Potomac River for 184.5 miles, all the way to Cumberland, Maryland. The dirt path beside the water is the old towpath. Mules walked it for almost a century. Today it is one of the best loved walking trails in the country.

The story began on July 4, 1828. President John Quincy Adams turned the first shovel of earth just upstream from Georgetown. The plan was bold. The canal would link the Atlantic ports with the Ohio River and the farms beyond the mountains. But on that same day, in Baltimore, another crew broke ground for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. The canal and the railroad began their race within hours of each other.

The canal lost. Digging a channel by hand was slow and costly. Thousands of workers, many of them immigrants from Ireland, cut through rock and clay with picks and black powder. Money ran short again and again. The waterway finally reached Cumberland in 1850. The railroad had arrived there eight years earlier. The canal never crossed the mountains, and it never touched the Ohio River.

Still, the canal worked hard for over seventy years. Flat wooden boats, each about ninety feet long, floated coal, flour, and grain down to Georgetown. A loaded boat could carry about one hundred tons of coal. Mules pulled the boats with long ropes, walking the towpath at about three miles per hour. Whole families lived aboard. Children tended the mules. Captains blew horns to wake the lock-keepers at night.

The water here is calm because locks control it. The canal climbs more than six hundred feet between Georgetown and Cumberland, using 74 lift locks. Four of those locks sit in this neighborhood. Walk along the water and you will find them: stone chambers with wooden gates at each end. A boat entered, the gates closed, and water raised or lowered the boat like a slow elevator.

In its best years, this stretch of Georgetown smelled of coal dust and fresh flour. Mills and warehouses lined the banks. Georgetown was already old then. It was founded in 1751 as a tobacco port, decades before the city of Washington existed. Tobacco gave way to wheat, and wheat gave way to coal. The canal kept the port alive long after the big ships moved elsewhere.

Nature ended the business. The Potomac flooded again and again. A great flood in 1889 broke the canal company, and the waterway passed to its old rival, the railroad. Another flood in 1924 wrecked the channel one final time. Commercial boats never returned. The canal sat quiet, filling with weeds and mud.

In the 1950s, planners proposed to drain the canal and build a road on top of it. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas loved this towpath. In 1954, he invited newspaper editors who supported the road to walk the whole canal with him, all 184.5 miles. The hike took eight days. By the end, the editors changed their minds. The road was never built.

In 1971, the canal became a national historical park. It is now a long, thin museum of stone, water, and trees. The towpath carries runners, cyclists, and bird watchers from Washington all the way to Cumberland. Herons fish where coal boats once waited in line. In warm months, guided boat rides sometimes run on this Georgetown stretch, and rangers tell the old stories.

As you walk, read the small details. Rope marks are worn into iron and stone at the lock edges. Mile markers count the distance from Georgetown. Heavy beams swing the gates. Peer down into a lock chamber and imagine ninety feet of boat rising slowly beside you, a mule waiting in the shade ahead.

Stand still for a moment on the towpath. The water barely moves. Somewhere under the surface lie tools, horseshoes, and the patience of thousands of workers who dug this channel by hand. Their canal lost its race with the railroad. Yet the railroad is gone from Georgetown, and the canal is still here, carrying people at walking speed. Perhaps that is the best speed for seeing the world.