My name is cassandra sohyda, and i am a seasonal park ranger here at the chesapeake and ohio canal. I think we are going to cast off here shortly. But we are going to go ahead and start and give you a brief history of here on the canal. All right, so, it is called the chesapeake and ohio canal, but it definitely doesnt reach the the Chesapeake Bay or go all the way up to the ohio river, and is the intention of our canal 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. And so what we did was, we started building this canal. We tried earlier, it was George Washingtons dream to actually use the Potomac River as a way 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. However, 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 that 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, you probably wouldnt last very long. So, 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, and so we got stuck either going through the mountains or trying to go around them. But this canal is 184. 5 miles long and throughout those 184. 5 miles, there are 74 lift locks. We are going to go through them today. That is lock 20 that we are going to go through. What they do is, there is a big difference in elevation between georgetown and cumberland. As you can tell, georgetown is at or below sea level. Where cumberland is right along the edge of the appalachian mountains. Therefore it is about a 605 foot elevation difference. These lift locks help us control that difference so we are able to go both ways instead of just having one big river rushing downstream and only being able to transport goods from cumberland to georgetown. So what is going to happen here, we have our bows been in the front. Bowsmen in the front here. We do things a 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. So he is going to go ahead and start pulling us in. Back then, what they would do is they would usually have mules connected to the boat and the mules would be walking on the path and they would be the ones who 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 gates which we will pass on our way in. And what that allows us to do is that allows us to make a sealed tight area so no water can exit out, so that we can actually raise water in that area. And this system 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 those things didnt really work, but this one was actually something we decided was a really good idea. We did a few little modifications to his drawing he had in his sketchbook, but most of it is all the same. What happens is, this is one side of our lock door that we have here. And so with our lock door, there are two little doors down on the bottom. These little doors are called wickets. And 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. So we take the key and post it 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 and we open the wicket doors at the bottom. And i did say every lock needs a key, and this is actually 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 10 to 15 pounds. Pretty heavy. And this is what our lock keepers would carry around all day. And i am going to stop talking, because it is hard to yell over the rushing water, ok . [sound of rushing water] this part actually 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 those locked doors. So it takes a little longer for the water to finally slowly equal out. Once everything is equaled out, then we also have to open those gates, make sure everything is good 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 the ones in charge of opening up those doors, opening up the wickets and everything like that. So, our lock keepers were always in charge of that and they would live in lock houses, like the one that is right here to my right. All right . The only difference about this lock house though, is it is a very special lock house because it was the only hotel that was here on the canal. And so 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. And then in 1831, we had finished the two additions on the north and south end. The north end is the hotel part of the tavern. And the bottom floor where you you guys had all bought your tickets from, that is where, it was called the ballroom, and it was the tavern at one point, so it did serve alcohol back then. And so that is where people would come from georgetown, they would take about a four hour trip up here 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 falls just to get away from it, 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 that second floor unless they were able to provide a marriage license. If they were able to do that, then they could stay on the third floor, which was the attic or the honeymoon suite. That is what it called back then. And so for a little extra charge they could go ahead and stay up on the top floor. And then the south and of the tavern was the new lock house where the lock family stayed. And so with this particular lock, in its time, it was actually, the lock keeper would tend to three different locks. So, they would tend to lock 20 here, and lock 19 and 18 a little further downstream. So you have to imagine one man taking care of three different locks is a very job locks is a very hard job to do, 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 chesapeake and ohio Canal Company. And so with three locks he would get 250, and that would allow him to actually hire an assistant so that he would be able to go ahead and have him help with the rest of the locks. But 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. And so, the rest of the family would help him, as well, working. The wife would help and even some of the older children that they had. And they would all stay here in the lock houses for free. They would get the 250 along with the house, and they would also get an acre of land. And what that acre of land 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 that they would be able to sustain themselves. Because that 250 was per year. In the peak of the canal, which was in the 1870s, if you were waiting at a lock, in a span of 30 minutes there were about 15 to 20 boats just waiting at the lock. At the peak of its days, there were 550 boats that were operational here on the canal. Our mules, as you can see, they are obviously not horses. A lot of people confuse the mules for horses and donkeys. They are a combination of the two. But it is a very special combination. The male is going to be the donkey, and the female is the mare or the horse. And that is how you are going to get the mule. You need 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 that is called a henny. Hennies dont have the same type of working genes we want our mules have in the canal, so we decided mules would be a better fit for us here 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. So, the question that always usually comes up is, why are mules used here instead of horses . And there are some various reasons for that. You can tell a few of the characteristics that the mules get from the donkey. You can obviously see their ears. Their ears make them aware of their surroundings. Their feet also are a different shape compared to horses. They are more ovalshaped compared to horses, where they are circular. And so what that does is that makes them very surefooted, and that allows them to know where they are placing their foot at all times. So they are not skittish, like horses are. Whereas horses, at the sight of anything, they tend to rear up, and it takes a while for them to calm down. Whereas mules know where they are placing their feet at all times so they are not as jumpy. So back then, there would be snakes that would fall on the path constantly. So with a horse, you would get it reared 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 that there is a snake there. You would wait, and move it out of the way so it wouldnt cause any harm to itself. They are also very smart. Actually mules are smarter than horses are, and 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 to make you happy. And so if you had a horse here on the canal, you could literally run it dead into the ground, whereas mules, im sure you have heard the phrase stubborn as a mule. Can now take that as a compliment, because they saying that you are smart, not that you are stubborn. 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 it looks like are dolly and eva, and they are two of our youngest mules. Dolly is 11 and eva is 10. You can see they are connected together by two chains in the middle of them. Eva on the back of her has a tree, which isnt really a tree, but a metal bar that connects the tow line to the boat. And they are currently pulling us at the speeding rate of about two miles an hour, maybe. They could pull us a little faster, but we dont usually want to go faster than this. Back then, they couldnt go any faster than this, because there was a speed limit of four Miles Per Hour on the canal. Seems a little crazy, but there is a very good reason as to why. If you look on the sides of the canal, you can tell some spots are kind of covered up with rocks. But 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 a wake, and with that wake, with 550 boats at the peak 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 our canal in. That would damage the canal and make it not last as long as it should. So, that four miles an hour was very enforced here on the canal by our lock keepers. That is why we couldnt go any faster than that. So, our typical boats here on the canal, these are what our barges would look like. They were about 90 to 91 feet long and about 14. 5 feet wide. And i did say 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 our 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 your boat. Therefore, you had to pay for any damage you did to the lock and also to your boat. The tiller will be located in the back, this is the stern. With the stern you have this little cabin, called the family cabin. And this family cabin was 12. 5 by 12. 5 feet, so extremely small. The only space that you had in there for room, you would have your cooking done back here, and then some cleaning of any sort, you would have a toilet back here, which the toilet was a bucket. And then you would have maybe one or two beds back here. In the front, this is the bow. And this barn right here was the barn, where our extra set of mules were held. Therefore, i said 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 15 miles, so we could continue working throughout the day. On top of that, the barn was also the place where most of the family would sleep because they were big families here on the canal boats. So if there wasnt enough room back here in the family cabin, where their beds were, they would end up sleeping here in the barn. Through the middle of the barge, this is where the cargo was kept. Coal was our main cargo on the canal. It was used to heat homes through the various ports that were in between cumberland and georgetown. Used for cooking and goods like that. You would have goods coming from georgetown, though, as well. Georgetown was kind of a factory town back then, so you had mills producing grains and wheat and everything. 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. So, this was a twoway traffic back then. And there was only one tow path that we had that was used for our mules. So the question, im sure you guys are all thinking of it, how are two boats going in opposite directions going to pass each other . We are going to all pretend that there is a boat coming downstream right now at us. They are loaded up with coal, and so if they are loaded up with coal, that means they are 120 tons. And we are about eight tons, maybe. That means they have the right because it is a lot harder to start and stop their boat and it would be our boat. So we would go ahead and tell our mule driver that he needs to stop the boat. Our tiller back there would yell at canal saying, and the one we use here is hee yip yaw. So, that was our canal saying that we used and all that means is our mules stop on cue, and they push them to the further side of the towpath. With that, we would push our boat to the berm side and that would let the tow line sink down to the bottom of the canal. So once the line has completely sunk, the downstream boat can go ahead and cross over 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 were a whole lot longer than this. We are actually cutting it really close turning us around. Said, these were very familyoriented 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 or there was nothing that was in our way. On the back of the boat, you would have the mother. The mother 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 actually get them right to work. We would go ahead and have them walking with the mules. So at the age of nine, they would start working. I promise, it wasnt child labor. And so 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 any problems. And so what we would do is we would take something that looked like this, this is an old mule harness. We would go ahead and take this top section right here. We would go ahead and take the rest of this off and use the top section right here. You can obviously can see there is a rope attached to it. You might see where this is going. If not, i have a picture, so its awesome. This is a family in georgetown, the mom is off to the side doing her laundry. She didnt want her kids running around the port of georgetown, so she went ahead and tied them up. So, in the winter, we would actually close for four months. It would usually start in early november. We would go ahead and close down, and then wouldnt open back up until maybe april, is what we would do. And 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 you are draft of your heaviest book was about four, so you had to make sure you had enough room between the bottom of the canal and the bottom of the bow. So obviously we have creeks that run into the canal and they bring in sediment that ends up causing sandbars or just making it hard for us to maintain that six feet. So in the winter months, when we closed down, there were no boats running. We would drain out certain sections of the canal so that we would be able to use a good old shovel and go ahead and dig out the dirt that was in there so we could keep it at a minimum of six feet deep. Once we finally got the maintenance all 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 that are called inlet locks. And it was a twopart system, so the inlet locks connect right to the Potomac River. And there is also a dam connecting to those inlet locks, 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. And only the first 22 miles of the canal nowadays actually has water, and then 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. And our School System back then was very different. You had a series of books that you had to go through. So, no matter how old you were or what grade you were particularly in, if you couldnt get past the first book you had then you couldnt move on to the second one. The first book consisted of mostly things like your abcs, how to count, and also how to write. And once you got to the second and third book, it got more complicated. You learned how to put words together, how to add and subtract and things like that. So 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. However, our locks keepers were oncall 24 7, so they were constantly working, no matter the time of the day. So, they were always having to be ready to work. And how they would know that they needed to have the lock ready and everything is, usually on the boat we would have a horn. As you guys heard when you were called here on the boat, we would blow the horn and the captain would yell hey locks so that would notify the lock keeper they needed to be ready. A good thing about lock houses is that they are actually all white. So what that does is that makes it easier to see through the night. So 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 that they were coming in. The canal here has lots of history. The cno Canal Company, actually went bankrupt because the potomac being our water source, it also causes a lot of trouble and damage because whenever it floods, unfortunately we flood, as well. And this was a pricey job to be done here. It took a lot more money than we had expected to actually finish the completion of the canal, which stopped in 1850 when it reached in cumberland. So we ended up going bankrupt, and our competitors at the time, the baltimore and ohio railroads, actually took over operations for us in the canal. And 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. So, they went ahead and took over operations for us and they did have to do a lot of reconstruction after flooding from the potomac. And so, the last flood that we had when they were in control of us was in 1924. And they decided that 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, back then there was only about six boats running on the canal, so it wasnt really in use as much as it was. [fogorn] cassandra so, it wasnt in use as much use as it was because the railroads ended up getting the technology that they needed, like the air brakes and the couplings between the two carts, so they became more efficient in transporting those goods. So in 1924, we werent used as much, so we went ahead and closed down the canal. And then about 12 years later, the National Park service went ahead and bought the chesapeake and ohio canal from the railroad for about 2 million. So, they got a really big steal for 184. 5 miles long and all of the acreage that they got. And then in the 1950s, they decided that with all this land and all of it dug out already, that it would actually make a really good pathway to actually create a highway on it, known as the cno parkway is what they wanted to call it. They wanted to go ahead and remove all the Historical Properties that were here so they could create that highway to connect cumberland to georgetown. Obviously it was not a good idea, and it is still here today, and the reason why our 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 the canal very much and was very saddened by the fact that the National Park decided it would be a good idea to turn this into a parkway, so he went ahead and challenged two Washington Post editors that wrote an editorial saying that 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. Remember the whole length of it . It is 184. 5 miles long. So obviously after that 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. So obviously it stays here today, and william o. Douglas was kind of that footstep to saving the park see you guys can enjoy it today instead of sitting in traffic on a parkway going probably the same mileage we are going right now. We are going to go ahead and do the same thing we did when we entered the lock the first time. But instead of raising the water, we are going to lower the water and we are going to do it the same way we did it when we came in the first time. We are going to use those wicket doors that are connected to the stems, and then go ahead and turn those lock keys so we can open the doors and let that water out. [sound of rushing water] so, we went ahead and opened up our gate. And unfortunately what that means is 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. But i hope you guys enjoyed your ride here on the charles f. Mercer. And if you did have any last minute questions, dont hesitate bowsmen or our tiller. Thank you for joining us on the charles f. Mercer and i hope you guys enjoyed your ride, ok . [applause] you did a fine job. Cassandra thank you. [chatter] have been watching a weekly , ones, american artifacts cspan3s American History tv. You can watch all these and other programs online at cspan. Org history. Each week until the 2020 election, American History tv brings you archival coverage of president ial races. Next, the 1984 Vice President ial debate between income and last 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 41 . Ms. Ferraro was the first woman nominated for the vice presidency by a major party. This debate from philadelphia is just under an hour and a half. [applause] good evening. Good evening from the civic center in philadelphia, pennsylvania. I am the president of the league of women voters, sponsor of tonights Vice President ial debate between republican george bush and democrat geraldine ferraro. Our panelists for tonights debate are john, National Correspondent for u. S. News world report, jack white, correspondent for time magazine, norma quarles, correspondent for nbc ,