Next we travel about 15 miles northwest of washington d. C. Where we will take a boat ride, to learn the history of the chesapeake and ohio canal. I would like to introduce myself, my name is chris andrea, and i am a seasonal park ranger heres. I think were going to, cast off here shortly, but we will go ahead and start and give you a brief history, about here on the canal, and its called the chesapeake and ohio canal, and it doesnt go all the way up to chesapeake bay, our the ohio river, which was the intention of the canal we started building it in basically july 4th, of 18 hundreds and 28. And the west was up in ohio, and pennsylvania at that time, and we wanted connect pittsburgh to the chesapeake bay. So what we did, was we started making this, canal and we tried earlier and it was George Washingtons dream to use the Potomac River to transport goods, and back then it would seem as a reasonable thing to do too he had a canal system built while using a system of locks but it did not work very well so we are his dreams and that one next to become a river so we could use the water source have something more reliable. You boat over the falls, it would not last long. We ran this from georgetown to cumberland, and we sort of ran into some problems in the appalachian mountains. We did not take that into consideration, when we are building the canal itself, and it got stuck either going through the mountains, or trying to go around them. But this canal is 184. 5 miles long, and among that, there are 74 lift locks, and were going to go through some of them today actually lock 20. Whats these lift locks do, is there is an elevation difference, between georgetown and cumberland. As you can tell, georgetown is a little bit below sea level, where cumberland is right along the edge of the mountains, so there is about a 605 elevation difference. With these lift blocks do is help us control this difference, so were able to go both ways, instead of having one big richer one brig one big river rushing down stream. So its going to happen here, we have our man in the front, we do things a bit differently from we did back then. What he is going to do he has a tow line, that is connected to the lock itself, and so hes going to take that line, and hes going to start pulling it in, so that we can parcels into the lock. Hopefully you guys dont have to be cabrera of a breakfast, so not making you do too much work. So he will go ahead and start pulling us in, and back then what they would do is they would usually have their mules collect connected to the boats, and they would be basically the ones that would pull us in. The crew members would not youre usually do any of that work. Once we were completely inside of the, lock then we would close the two downstream gates that we had passed on our way in, and what that allows us to do, it allows us to make a seal tight area. So no water can exit out. We can actually raise water in that area. And this system, was actually created by a man and before our, time and his name was leonardo da vinci. He created a lot of things, a lot of things didnt work but this one was something that we decided was a really good idea. There was a few modifications to his drawings that he had in a sketchbook, but most of it is all the same, and so what happens is you can do one side of our locked or that we have here, and so with our locked door, there are two little doorstone here in the bottom, and these little doors are called wickets, and these wickets are connected to stems, that lead to the top as you can see in front of you. And since we are in a lock, we need a key to open our lock, so we take a key and we put it right here on top, and we turn these dogs these doors down at the bottom, and that changes us from going upstream to downstream. So we open those wicked doors down near the bottoms. 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. Its made out of cast iron. Its about ten to 15 pounds, and its pretty heavy. Key this is what our lock keepers would carry around all day. I will stop talking because its hard to yell over the rushing water. This part right here, is the slowest part, because the water is actually almost equaling out. It is not rushing in, like you saw when we first open those locked doors. It takes a bit longer for that water to finally equal out. And once everything has equaled out, we also have to open up those gates, and make sure that everything is on the boat, and thats when we start moving. You would have lock keepers that would do that, especially with the wicket doors. They would open up the wickets and open up the doors. Our lock keepers are always in charge of that. They would live, in lock houses. Sort of like the one that is right here to my right and the only difference about. This lock house, this is a special one because it was the only hotel that was here on the canal. So the middle section of the great falls tavern, was an original lock house. It was filmed it was actually there in 1828, it was created an 1831, they had finished the two on the north and south and. And the north end, is the hotel part of the tavern. And the bottom floor, where you have to buy your tickets from. Thats why it was called the ballroom, and it was a tavern at one point. So they did serve alcohol back then. That is where people would come, and from georgetown, they would take about a fourhour trip, and they would go ahead and go on boats just like this one, this ones called passenger boat. So they would take those trips to kind of escape the city and state 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 you could see on the third floor, which was the attic or the honeymoon suite as well, when was called back. Then so for a little extra charge they could go and stay up on that top floor. And then the south and are the tavern, where the new lock house was. Its where we stayed. And so with this particular lock, it was actually, when they were ten to between three and ten different shots. So you have to imagine one man taken care of three different blocks, its a very hard job to do, especially as you, saw all the work thats done here at the lock. So depending on how many locks he actually tended, it would depend on how much money he got paid by the company. So it three locks, he would get about 250 dollars. And what that would do it it 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 they needed to hire men that had large families because if you hired the husband of a large family, 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 that they had. And they would all be able to stay here at the lock houses for free. They would get the 250 dollars along with a house, and i would also get an acre of land. So that a camera and allow them to do, was to be able to provide for themselves, to produce, have farm animals like they needed. Anything that could have an inland so they could be able to sustain themselves, because that 202 dollars was per year. At the geek of the canal, which was in 18 seventies, if you are waiting at a lock, in a span of 30 minutes, there were about 15 or 20 votes that were waiting for the lock. At the peak of its days there was about 550 boats that were operational here, on the canal. As you can see, they are obviously not horses, but a lot of people confused him for horses and donkeys. They are a combination of the two. But its a very special combination. So the mail is going to be the donkey, and the female is going to be the mayor, or the horse. And that is how youre gonna get a manual. You need a female horse and a male donkey. If you did it the other way around, you would get something that is called a hany. And they dont have the same type of working jeans that we want our mules to have here in the canal. So we decided mules would be a better fit for us in the canal. But all throughout history, there is a lot of uses of horses. So you have the pony express, they pull wagons. And they were used throughout history for various things. So the question that usually comes up is why are mules used here instead of horses . Theres some various reasons for that. You can tell if you have the customers sticks the mules get from the monkey, you can obviously see the years, they make them very 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 more circular. But that does is it makes them very sharp foot it. And that allows them to know where they are placing the foot at all times. So they are not very skittish, like horses are. Whereas horses, at the sight of anything, they tend to rub and it takes a while for them to come back down. Whereas our mules, since they know where they are placing their feet at all times, they are not as jumping. So back then, there would be snake start would fall on the path constantly, or so with a horse, he would get it read up and then you would have to wait for it to calm down. With the mule it would stop because he knew where it was placing its foot. You can go ahead and wait for you to move it out of the way so that it wouldnt cause any harm to itself. They are also very smart. They are actually, mules are smarter than horses are. So the colors, 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. So if you had a horse here in the canal, you could literally run it dead to the ground for working. Whereas mules, im sure you guys had heard the searing saying stubborn as a mule, you cannot take it as a compliment because they are saying that you are smart, youre not saying that youre stubborn. With a mule you cannot work it to death. After about six hours its gonna go ahead and stop working. Its gonna say im not trying to hurt myself. Therefore, you cannot push me any further. And im just going to stand here until you change me out. Our mules today, these are dolly and eva. What they are two of our youngest ones. Dolly is 11, and eva is ten. And you can see that they are connected together, by two chains that are in the middle of them. Hence eva, on the back of her, has a tree, which isnt really tree, but its a metal bar that connects our telelines to our boat. And they are currently pulling us at this beating rate of about two miles an hour, maybe. They could pull us a little faster, but we dont usually want to go any faster than this. Back then they actually couldnt go any faster than this, because there was a speed limit of four miles an hour, here, on the canal. It 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 that some spots are kind of covered up with rocks, but most of the time, there are no rocks that are covering the sides of the canal. So if we had a boat that went any faster than four miles an hour, we would start to cause awake, and with that wake since you had 550 votes on the peak of the korean, you would end up causing the wake to brush up on the sides of the canal and cause erosion. And i would go ahead and sing the size of our canal. And kind of damage to canal, and make it not last as long as it should. So that four miles an hour was very enforced by the lock keepers, on the canal. And that is why we couldnt go any faster than that. So our typical boats here on the canal, these are white our barges would look like. They were about 90 to 91 feet long, and about 14 in a have feet wide. I did say we like to cut things close, we are in a very tight budget here, on the canal. So, we had about three inches of clearance on each side of our vote, to come in, on the lock. So you had to be very good at your job to get in, as a seller. Because if you ended up doing any damage to the lock itself, obviously, that means youre doing damage to your boat. Therefore, you had to pay for any damage that you did to the lock, and also to your boat. The teller would be located in the, back this is a stern. And with this during you have this little cabin right here, this is called like family cabin. And this family cabin was four and a half by 12 and a half feet. So it was extremely small. The only space that you had in there for a room, you would have your cooking that would be done back here, in some cleaning of any sorts. We will have a toilet back here, which was a bucket. And then you would have maybe one or two bedstuy were back here. Up here in the front, this is our bow, it is little barn right here was the barn. Its where the extra set of mules were held. I said they were only work six hours, so you would have two sets, making foreign thought, also that we can go ahead and changed him out every six hours, or about 15 miles, so that we can continue working throughout the day. On top of that, the barn was also the place where most of the family would sleep, because you are also very big families here, on the canal boats. So if there wasnt enough room back here, in the family cabin where the beds, where they would end up sleeping in the barn. And then all throughout the middle of our barn, this is where the cargo was kept. Coal was the main cargo on the canal. It was used to the very sports that were in between one cumberland and georgetown. Used for cooking and goods like that. You would have goods coming from georgetown, though, as well. Georgetown was kind of the factory town, back then. So you did have meals i would produce grain in weeks and everything. You would have timber that would come from there. Any type of furniture, textile goods, clothing, all that would be coming from georgetown. It would be shipped up north, to the various ports in between there. So this was a twoway kind of traffic back then. And there was only one toll path that we had, that was used for our meals. So the question, im sure youre all thinking of it, is how our two boats if theyre going in opposite direction,s going to pass each other . Were gonna pretend that there is a boat that is coming downstream at us. They are loaded up with goal, that means there are about 120 tons, they were about eight tons maybe. So that means the ride of way, because it is a whole lot harder to star and stop there, both than it would be our boat. So i would go ahead and tell our driver that we need to stop our boat. Howard taylor back there would yell a canal saying, in the canal saying we is here is the following. A so that was our canal saying that we used, and all that means is, our mule stop right on cue. And they push him to the further side of the toe path. And with that we would push our boat to their further side of the burn side. And we would go ahead and lead our collide sink down to the bottom of the canal. So once our timeline has completely sunk, but downstream boat can go ahead and cross over our tall line, and whats gonna happen now, were actually gonna turn our boat around. Back then, like i said, you wouldnt be able to do this because your boats were a whole lot longer than us. And we are actually cutting a really close turning us around. So, like i said, these were very family oriented boats. We would have the father, who would usually be on the front of the boat. He would be in charge of looking out for any dangers, making sure the tone line was safe or there was nothing that was in our way. On the back of the vote you would have the mother, their mother would be in charge of scaring along with doing chores, mostly certainly. She could she would steer the, science and no one can say one arent good drivers, because we were driving all the time. Children if they were of a certain age, nine years old, would actually get the right to work. We would go ahead and have them walking with our mules. So at the age of nine, they would go ahead and start working. I promise, it was in child labor. So if they were any younger than the age of nine, we obviously had to give them something to do, they couldnt work but they couldnt be running around the boat causing any problems. So what we would do, is we would take something that looked like this, this is an old mule harness. We were going take the top section right here, and we will go ahead and take the rest of that off, and use the stop section right here, you can obviously see there is a rope attached to it. So you might see where this is going, if not, i have a picture, so its awesome. So this is a family in georgetown, the mom is on the side doing her laundry. And she didnt want her kids running around the port of georgetown, so she went ahead, and take them up. So, in the winter we would actually close for four months. It would usually started in early november, would go ahead and close down, and they wouldnt open back up until maybe april. Its what we would do. And when we did close down, a lot of the times we did our maintenance here on the canal. Because back then it had to be kept about six feet deep. Because your draft of the heaviest boat was about four. So you had to make sure you had enough room in between the bottom of the canal, and the bottom of your boat. So, obviously, we had little creeks that run into the canal. And they would bring in sentiment, that ends up causing stand, wires or maybe making it harder for us to maintain that six feet. So, in the winter months, when we closed down, there was no boats running, would go ahead and join out certain sections of the canal. This way but we would be able to have a little trouble, 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 lead water back in. How we would do that is we can use the potomac, but its a good water source, so we would have blocks that were called in a wet locks. It was a two part system. So these connect right to the Potomac River, and there is also a dam that is connected to this. So it go ahead and allow the water from the potomac to rush into the canal. And then 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 it gets very spotty throughout. Sorry kids, doesnt sound like they had a very good life. But during the four months that they were closed the canal, they would actually go to school for this for months. And i was called system back then it was very different. You had a series of books that you had to go through, so no matter what or how would you, where would greet you were particularly, and if you couldnt get past the first book that you had, then you couldnt move on to the second one. I want the first book insisted of, it was mostly things like your abc, hes had account, and also how to write. And once you go to the second and third, book it got a little bit more complicated. You learn how to put words together, how to add and subtract, things like that. So they didnt need to know much here in 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 lucky keepers where uncalled went for seven. 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 luck ready and everything is usually on the boat, we dont have a horn, as you guys heard when you are called here on the boat, we blow that horn in our captain would yell a lock so that it not a fight the lock number that they needed to be ready. A good thing about lock houses is that they are actually all white. So it does does is it makes it easier to see through the night, so that there is people who are running 20 hours a day, they could go ahead and see them at night, and they would be able to blow their horns to notify the law keepers that they were coming in. The canal here has lots of history. We asked this Company Actually went bankrupt, because as the potomac being our water source, it also causes a lot of trouble at damage. Because whenever it floods, unfortunately, we reflect as well. And this was a very 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 cumberland. When they have going bankrupt and our competitors at the time, the baltimore railroads, took over the operations for us, here in the canal. They make sure that we didnt use it as frequently as we did in the 18 seventies, 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 do, 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. 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 ohio canal for good. In 1924, back then there was only about six votes running here in the canal, so it wasnt really in use, as much as it was. What horn so it wasnt in as much use as it was, because a railroads werent getting the technology they needed like the air breaks in the cup links between the two guards. So they became more efficient in transporting those goods. So 1924, we werent used as much, so we went ahead and close down the canal. And then about 12 years later, the National Parks service actually went ahead and bought the ohio can now from the railroad, for about 2 million dollars. So i got a really big steel, for 100 and 84. 5 miles long, in a lakers a guy. And then, in the 19 fifties, they decided that with all this land and all the ways to get already, they would actually make a really good pathway to actually create a highway on it. Known as the senior park ways, what they want to call it. So they wanted to go ahead and remove all the Historical Properties are here, so that they could create that highway to connect cumberland to georgetown. Obviously, it wasnt a good idea, and is still here today. And the reason why our canal is still here today, is because there is one man that was very fond of the canal. He was also a Supreme Court justice at the time, william oh douglas. He left the canal very much, i was very saddened of the fact that the National Parks decided it was be a good idea to turn this into a parkway. So what he did, he went ahead and actually challenged to Washington Post editors, that are written in territorial, setting that it would be able to get changes central park way. He went ahead and challenge them to hike the whole length of the canal. Remember the whole length of, it its 84 hundred 84. 5 miles long. So they saw the beautiful things that were here on the canal, and decided that maybe its not too much of a good idea to actually turn this into a park way. So, obviously, its safe here today. And William Douglas was kind of that footstep to saving the spark, so that you guys can enjoy it today. Instead of sitting in traffic, on a parkway going probably, the same eyelids were going right now. So were gonna go ahead and do the same thing that we did when we entered deadlock. The first time, but instead of raising the water, were going to lower the water, and were gonna do at the same way that we did it when we came in the first time. Were gonna use these doors, that are connected to our stance. And then go ahead and turn those so we can open those doors and let that water out. So we went ahead and open up our gates. Unfortunately, what that means, once our gates are open we have to get back to shore somehow. And i, along with our back mule, i am the person has to get back to. Sure with that being said, i actually have to get off the boat, unfortunately. But i hope you guys enjoy your ride, here on this boat. And if you have any lastminute questions, please dont hesitate to ask our bounce mint or our tell. Are upon the National Park service, thank you guys for joining us, here on this boat. I hope you guys enjoy the ride, okay . [applause] thank you youve been watching our weekly series american artifacts, on cspan 3, American History tv. You can view this and all of our other programs online, at cspan. Org slash history. American history tv on cspan 3. Exploring the people and events that tell the american story look at it about an hours drive southwest of pittsburgh, in rural west pennsylvania, middle k
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