Museums and historic places. Next we travel about 15 miles northwest of washington, d. C. To Great Falls Tavern Visitors Center where we will take a boat ride to learn more about the of the the history of the chesapeake and the ohio canal. [foghorn] i would like to introduce myself. My name is cassondra, and i seasonal park ranger here at the am a chesapeake and ohio canal. I think we are going to cast off shortly. We are going to go ahead and start and give you a brief history of here on the canal. All right, it is called the chesapeake and ohio canal, but doesnt reach the Chesapeake Bay or go up to the ohio river, and when we first started building the canal in 1828, we wanted to try to connect the Eastern Shore with what was considered the west back then. The west was up in ohio, pennsylvania, that area. We wanted to connect pittsburgh to the Chesapeake Bay. So what we did was, we started building this canal. We tried earlier, it was George Washingtons dream to use the Potomac River to transport goods back then. It was seen as a reasonable thing to do so he went ahead and had a canal system built on that side by using locks to get around the great falls and Potomac River. It wasnt a very reliable usage. It didnt actually have longtime use. It was very kind of broken, didnt work very well so we went ahead and took his dream and built a canal right next to the Potomac River so we could use that water source but have something that was more controlled and reliable compared to the Potomac River, because if you took a boat over the falls he wouldnt last very long. We ran the canal from georgetown all the way up to cumberland is where we stopped. We ran into some problems, also known as the appalachian mountains. We did not take that into consideration when we were building the canal itself, so we got stuck either going through the mountains or trying to go around them. The canal is 184. 5 miles long miles,oughout those there are 74 lift locks. We are going to go through them today. That is locked 20. What they do is, there is a big betweence in elevation georgetown and cumberland. Georgetown is at or below sea level. Cumberland is right along the edge of the appellation hiantains the appalac mountains. There is a big difference. These lift locks help us control the difference so we are able to go both ways instead of just having one big river rushing downstream and only being able to transport woods from cumberland to georgetown. Things a happen, we do little differently than they did back then. He has a towline that is connected to the lock itself, so he will take the line and start pulling it in so we can pull ourselves into a lock. Hopefully you didnt have too big of a breakfast so you dont make him do too much work. He will start pulling us in. Back then, they would have mules connected to the boat and the mules would be walking on the path and they would actually pull us in. So we wouldnt have any crewmembers actually doing any of that work. What would happen is, once we were completely inside of the lock, we would go ahead and close the two downstream dates which we will pass on our way in. Sealedlows us to make a tight area so no water can exit out, so we can actually raise water in that area. Was actually created by a man way past our time, his name was leonardo da vinci. He created a lot of things, unfortunately a lot of them didnt work but this one was actually something we decided was a really good idea. We did a few little modifications to the drawing he had in his sketchbook, but most of it is the same. What happens is, this is one side of our lock door that we have here. With our lock door, there are two little doors down on the bottom. These little doors are called wickets. These wickets are connected to stems that lead all the way up to the top. As you can see in front of you, we do this in a lock. We need a key to open the lock and we take the key and posted on top of our stems, then we turn these doors at the bottom so it lets the water from upstream downstream. The key goes into the stem end we open the wicket doors at the bottom. Needs a key, and this is a key that was found in the bottom of the canal. We found it when we took over the park, the National Park service. It is made out of castiron. It is about 1015 pounds. Pretty heavy. This is what our lock keepers would carry around all day. I will stop talking because it is hard to yell over the rushing water, ok . [sound of rushing water] this part right here is the slowest part because the water is actually almost equaling out so it is not rushing in, like you saw obviously when we first opened the locked doors. It takes a little longer for the water to finally slowly equal out. Once everything is equaled out, we also have to open those gates, make sure everything is on the boat and that is when we start moving. You would have lock keepers that would do that, especially with the wicket doors and everything. They would be in charge of opening up those doors, opening up the wickets and everything. The lock keepers were always in charge of that and they would lift live and lock houses, like the one right here to my right. Difference about this lock house is, it is a special lock house because it was the only hotel that was here on the canal. The middle section of the great falls tavern was the original lock house that was built in 1828, and it was where the first lock family would live. In 1831, we finished the two additions on the north and south end. The north end is the hotel part of the tavern. The bottom floor where you bought your tickets, that is where, it was called the ballroom and it was the tavern at one point so it did serve alcohol back then. That is where people would come from georgetown, they would take a four hour trip to great falls and would go ahead and ride boats like this one, this is a passenger boat and they would take those trips to escape the city and stay here at great it,s just to get away from relax, and they would stay up in the second or third floor. The second floor was for men and female quarters, so they had to stay separately on the second floor unless they were able to provide a marriage license. If they were able to do that, they could stay on the third floor, which was the attic or the honeymoon suite. For an extra charge they could stay up on the top floor. The south and of the tavern was the new lock house where the lock family stayed. Lock, in its time it was actually, the lock keeper would tend to three different locks. They would tend to lock 20 and block 19 and 18 a little further downstream. One man taking care of three different locks is a hard job, especially, use all the work that was done at the locks. Depending on how many locks he actually tended, it would depend on how much he got paid by the canaleake and ohio company. With three locks he would get 250 and that would allow him to actually hire an assistant so he would be able to go ahead and have him help with the rest of the locks. The Canal Company was very smart and they decided that they needed to hire men that had large families, because if you hired the husband of a large family, you would get the rest of the family for free. So the rest of the family would help him, as well, working. The wife would help and even some of the older children they had. , in would all stay here and the lock houses for free. 250 dollarset the along with the house and they would also get one acre of land. With the acre of land, that allowed them to be able to provide for themselves so they were able to do produce, have any type of farm animals they needed, like cows, chickens, pigs, anything they could have on their land so they would be able to sustain themselves. That 250 was per year. In the peak of the canal, in the 1870s, if you were waiting at all lock, in a span of 30 minutes there was 1520 boats waiting at the lock. At the peak of its days, there were 550 boats operational on the canal. Our meals, as you can see, they are not horses. A lot of people confuse the mules for horses and donkeys. They are a combination of the two. The male is the donkey and the or the horse. Mare that is how you get a mule, a female horse and a male donkey. If you did it the other way around with a male horse and a female donkey, you would get something called a henny. They dont have the same type of les have ines our mu the canal so we decided mules would be a better fit on the canal. There were lots of uses of horses, so you would have the pony express, they would pull wagons and they were used throughout history for various things. The question that usually comes used, why are mules instead of horses . There are various reasons for that. You can tell a few of the characteristics that the mules get from the donkey. You can see the ears, those make them aware of their surroundings. Their feet also are a different shape compared to horses, they are more oval shaped compared to horses, where they are circular. That makes them very surefooted and allows them to know where they are placing their foot at all times. H, like are not skittis horses. Horses tend to rear up and it takes a while for them to calm down. Mules know where they are placing their feet at all times so they are not as jumpy. Back then, there would be snakes that would fall on the path. A horse would rear up and you would have to wait for it to calm down. With a mule, it knows where it is placing its foot and it sees the snake. You would wait, and move it out of the way so it wouldnt cause any harm. They are also very smart. Mules are smarter than horses, so with a horse, you can work a horse to death because horses are there to please their master. They want to do nothing more than make you happy. If you had a horse on the canal you could literally run it dead into the ground, whereas mules, i have heard you have im sure you have heard the phrase you can take mule. That as a compliment, because they are smart. You cant work a mule to death. After six hours it will stop working. It will say, i am not trying to hurt myself so you cant push me further and i will stand here until you change me out. Our mules today are dolly and ev a, two of our youngest mules, is 10. S 11 and eva they are connected by two chains in the middle of them. Tree, the back has a which isnt really a tree, a metal bar that connects the tow line to the boat. They are currently pulling us at the speeding rate of about two Miles Per Hour maybe. That can pull a little faster, but we dont usually want to go faster than this. Back then, they couldnt go any faster than this because it was a speed limit of four Miles Per Hour on the canal. Seems a little crazy, but there is a good reason as to why. If you look at the sides of the canal, you can tell some spots are kind of covered up with rock. Most of the time, there is no rock covering the sides of the canal. So if we had a boat that went any faster than four Miles Per Hour, we would start to cause awake and with that wake, with 550 boats on the canal, you would end up causing the wake to rush up on the sides of the canal and cause erosion and that would sink the sides of the canal in. That would damage the canal and make it not last as long as it should. That four miles an hour was very enforced on the canal by the lock keepers. That is why we couldnt go any faster than that. Boats on thel canal, these are what our barges would look like. They work about they were about 9190 feet long and 14. 5 feet wide. We like to cut things close we were on a tight budget on the canal so we had about three inches of clearance on each side of the boats to come in. You had to be very good at your job steering in as the tiller, because if you ended up doing any damage to the lock itself, obviously that means you are doing damage to the boat. Therefore, you had to pay for any damage you did to the lock and also to your boat. The tiller is located in the back, in the stern. With the stern you have this little cabin, called the family cabin. The family cabin was 12. 5 by 12. 5 feet, extremely small. The only space you had in their youroom, you would have cooking done back here, and some cleaning of any sort, you would have a toilet dock here back here, it was a bucket. You would have one or two beds back here. In the front, this is the bow. This barn right here was the barn, where our extra set of mules were held. They would only work six hours, we would have two sets of mules so we could go ahead and change them out every six hours or about 50 miles so we could continue working throughout the day. Where of that, the barn most of the family would sleep because they were big families here on the canal boats. If there wasnt enough room back here and in the family cabin, they would end up sleeping in the barn. Through the middle of the barge, this is where the cargo was kept. Coal was the main cargo on the canal. It was used to heat homes through the various ports in between cumberland and georgetown. It was used for cooking and things like that. You would have goods coming from georgetown, as well. Georgetown was the factory town back then, so you had mills producing grains and wheat. You would have timber that would come through, and you would have furniture, textiles, clothing, all of that would come from georgetown and would be shipped up north to the various ports in between there. This was a twoway traffic back then. There was only one tow path that we had that was used for our mules. The question, im sure you are thinking of it, how are two boats going in opposite directions going to pass each other . We are going to pretend there is a boat coming downstream right now at us. They are loaded up with coal, so if they are loaded up, that means they are 120 tons. We are about eight tons maybe. That means they have the right because it is a lot harder to start and stop there boat and it would be our boat. Driverould tell our mule that he needs to stop the boat. The tiller back there would yell at canal saying, and the one we yaw. So thatp was our canal saying and that on q andr mules stop they push them to the further side of the towpath. With that, we would push our boat to the berm side and that that would let the tow line sink down to the bottom. Once it has sunk, the downstream boat can go ahead and crossover the towline and what will happen is, we are going to turn our boat around. Back then, you wouldnt be able to do this because your boats are longer than this. We are cutting it really close turning us around. These were very family oriented boats. We would have the father would usually be on the front of the boat, he would be in charge of looking out for any danger, making sure the towline was safe and there was nothing in our way. On the back of the boat, you would have the mother, who would be in charge of steering along with doing chores, mostly sewing, so the men could no longer say women are not good at driving because we were back there driving all the time. The children, if they were of a certain age, about nine years old, we would get them right to work. We would go ahead and have them walking with the mules. At age nine, they would start working. I promise, it wasnt child labor. If they were any younger than the age of nine, we obviously had to do something with them. They couldnt work but they couldnt be running around the boat causing problems. What we would do is, we would take something that looked like this, this is an old mule harness. We would take this top section and we would go ahead and take the rest of that off and use the top section right here. You can see there is a rope attached to it. You might see where this is going. If not, i have a picture, which is awesome. This is a family in georgetown, the mom is doing the laundry. She didnt want her kids running around the port of georgetown, so she went ahead and tied them up. Would closer, we for four months. It would usually start in early november. We would go ahead and close down, and wouldnt open back up until maybe april, is what we would do. When we did close down, a lot of times, that is when we did maintenance on the canal because back then, it had to be kept about six feet deep because your heaviest boat depth was about four, so you may had to have enough room to the bottom of the canal. We have creeks that run into the canal and they bring in sediment that causes sandbars or just making it hard for us to maintain that six feet. In the winter, when we closed down, there were no boats running. We would drain out certain sections of the canal so we would be able to use a good old shovel and go ahead and dig out the dirt in there so we could keep it at a minimum of six feet deep. Once we finally got the maintenance done, we would go ahead and let water back in, and how we would do that is, we couldnt use the potomac but it is a good water source so we would have locks called inlet locks. It was a twopart system, so the inlet locks connect to the Potomac River. There is also way also a dam connecting, so that would allow the water from the potomac to rush into the canal and we would have a backup source of water just in case we had problems with the Potomac River. Only the first 22 miles of the canal actually has water now and it gets spotty throughout. Kids, doesnt sound like they had a very good life but during the four months they were closed the canal, they would actually go to school for those four months. Our School System back then was very different. You had a series of books you had to go through. No matter how old you were or what grade you were particularly in, if you couldnt get past the first book you had you couldnt move on to the second one. The first book consisted of mostly things like your abcs, how to count, and how to write. Once you got to the second and third book, it got more complicated. You learn how to put words together, how to add and subtract. They didnt need to know much on the canal as a canal kid, but they did need to know the basics of adding and subtracting, reading, writing and all of that. Keepers were oncall 247 so they were constantly working, no matter the time of day. They were always having to be ready to work. How they would know they needed to have the lock ready and everything is, usually on the boat we would have a horn. As you heard when you were called here on the boat, we would load the horn and the ocksin would yell hey l to notify the lock keeper they needed to be ready. Sok houses are all white, that makes it easier to see through the night. People that were running 24 hours a day could go ahead and see them at night and would be able to blow the horn to notify the lock keepers they were coming in. Has lots ofre history. Company, weanal went bankrupt because the potomac being our water source, it causes a lot of trouble and damage because whenever it floods, unfortunately we flood, as well. This was a pricey job to be done here. It took a lot more money than we expected to finish the completion of the canal, which stopped in 1850 when it reached cumberland. Bankrupt, and our competitors at the time, the baltimore and ohio railroads, took over operations for us in the canal. So they kind of made sure that we didnt use it as frequently as we did in the 1870s because obviously they wanted to be the Main Transport for any coal or cargo. They went ahead and took over operations for us and they did have to do a lot of reconstruction after flooding from the potomac. So the last flood that we had when they were in control of us was in 1924. They decided it was too much money to do the repairs that needed to be done after that flood, so they went ahead and closed down the chesapeake and ohio canal for good. In 1924, there was only about six boats running on the canal, so it wasnt really in use as much as it was. [horn] hey locks. It wasnt in use as much because the railroads ended up getting the technology that they needed, like the air brakes and couplings between the two carts so they became more efficient in transporting those goods. In 1924, we werent used as much, so we went ahead and close closed down the canal. About 12 years later the National Park service went ahead and bought the chesapeake canal from the railroad for about 2 million. Steal for really big 184. 5 miles long and all of the acreage that they got. In the 1950s, they decided that with all this land and all of it dug out already, it would make a really good pathway to actually create a highway on it, known as the cno parkway. They wanted to go ahead and remove all the Historical Properties that were here so they could create at highway to connect cumberland to georgetown. Obviously it was not a good idea and it is still here today and and the reason why the canal is still here today is because of one man who was very fond of the canal and he was also a Supreme Court justice at the time, William O Douglas. He loved canal very much and was saddened by the fact that the National Park decided it was a good idea to turn this into a parkway so he went ahead and challenged two Washington Post editors that wrote an editorial saying it would be a good idea to change this into a parkway, and went ahead and challenged them to hike the whole length of the canal. It is 184. 5 miles long, so obviously after the very long hike, they saw all the beautiful things that were here on the canal and decided that maybe it is not a good idea to turn this into a parkway. Andt stayed until today William O Douglas was the footstep to saving the park so you can enjoy it today instead of sitting in traffic on a parkway going probably the same mileage we are going now. We are going to go ahead and do the same thing we did when we entered the lock the first time. Instead of raising the water, we will lower the water and we will do it the same way we did it when we came in the first time. We will use the wicket doors that are connected to the stems, and go ahead and turn those lock keys so we can open the doors and let the water out. [sound of rushing water] we went ahead and opened up the gate. That means once the gates were open we have to get back to shore somehow, and i along with the person who has to get you back to shore, with that being said i actually have to get off the boat, unfortunately. I hope you enjoyed your ride on the Charles F Mercer. If you have any last minute questions, dont hesitate to ask our tiller. Thek you for joining us on Charles F Mercer and i hope you enjoyed your ride, ok . [applause] you did a fine job. Thank you. [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] you have been watching our weekly series american artifacts on cspan3s American History tv. You can view this and other programs online at cspan. Org history. Next, the 1984 Vice President ial debate between incumbent Vice President George H W Bush and new york congresswoman geraldine ferraro. The candidates answered questions from a panel of journalists on topics ranging from abortion to u. S. Covert operations in central america. The republican ticket of Ronald Reagan and george bush defeated democrats Walter Mondale and congresswoman ferraro in the general election, winning the popular vote 59 40 1 . Ms. Ferrero was the first woman nominated for the vice presidency. This is just under 90 minutes. Eastern, historical interpreters portraying Thomas Jefferson and George Washington engage in a conversation about their roles in the revolutionary war and the Constitutional Government that followed. We hear about their exploits and where their politics and policies divert. Following that, at 8 55 p. M. Eastern, we hear about the decades long
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