I think that we are going to cast off here shortly, but were going to go ahead and start. A brief history on the canal. It definitely doesnt go all the way up to the ohio river. We wanted to connect the Eastern Shore which with what was considered the west, ohio, pennsylvania, that area. We wanted to connected to the bay, so we did was we stern building the canal. We started earlier with a George Washington dream to use the river, back then it was seen as a reasonable thing to do so we went ahead and had a canal system built on that side by using left to get around the great falls and river. Although it wasnt very reliable usage. It didnt have long time use. It was kind of broken. That were very well. We went to head and took his, dream built a canal right next to the river so we could use that water source but have something that is more controlled and reliable, compared to the potomac river, because you took a boat over the falls, he probably wouldnt last very long. So we took this canal and we run it from georgetown all the way to cumberland is where we stopped. We kind of ran into some problems, also known as the appalachian mountains. We didnt really take that into consideration when we were building the canal itself. I got stuck either going through the mountains are trying to go around them. But this canal is 100 84. 5 miles long and throughout that 100 84. 5 miles there are sunny for a lift bucks and were going to go through one of them today. That is luck 20 that we want to go through. So wet these lift blocks do is theres a big elevation difference between george town and cumberland. As you can tell, george land is up or at sea level wheres appalachian is around the its a 6. 5 elevation difference so thats a very big difference. But these list looks to is they hope us control that difference of that we are able to go both ways instead of having one big river rushing downstream and only be able to transfer goods from cumberland to georgetown. So its good to happen here. We have our bows man at the french. We do things a little bit differently from how we did it back, he has a tow line connected to the lock itself. So its going to take that line. Hes going to start pulling it in so we can pull ourselves into the lock. Hopefully you guys dont have to big of a breakfast so you dont make him do too much work. So hes going to go ahead and start pulling us and. Back then with the idea is they would have their mules connected to the boat. And the meals will be working on the toe path they would be the ones that would actually pull us. And we wouldnt have any of the crewmembers actually doing any of that work. What would happen is once we were completely inside, we would go ahead and close the two downstream gates which would pass on our way. And with that allows us to do is it allows us to meet a sealed tight area so that no water can exit out, so we can actually raise water in that area. And the system was actually credited by a man we past our time. His name was leaner the da vinci. He credit a lot of things. Unfortunately a lot of those things dont really work. But this one was actually something that we decided was a really good idea. We did a few little modifications to his drunk that he had in his sketchbook. But most of it is all the same. So what happens is this is one side of our locked or that we have here. And, so with our locked door theres too little doors here at the bottom. These little doors arent known as wickets and these markets are connected to stems that lead all the way up to the top. As you can see in front of you. Because we have a lock, we need a key to open our luck. We take a key and then we posted on top of our. Stem be turned the doors down at the bottom so it looks the water upstream downstream. So key, down then open the wicked doors down at the bottom. And i did say every lock needs a. Key this is actually a key that was spent at the bottom of the canal. We found it when we took over the National Park service. It is made out of cast iron. Its about ten to 15 pounds. Pretty heavy. And this is what our law keepers would carry around all day. Im going to stop talking because its hard to get over the Rushing Water okay. [noise] this part actually right here is the slowest part, the water is equaling out so its not rushing in like we saw obviously when we first of those locked or so it takes a little bit longer for the water to slowly equal out. When everything equals out then we also have to open up those gates. Make sure everything is put on the boat, and thats when we actually start moving. We would have lucky press that would do that especially with the wicked doors and everything. Open up the work its all about. Our lucky purse were always in charge of that. The one to my. Right all right. The only difference about this lock, its a very special blockhouse because it is the only hotel that was here on the canal. It and relax they would stay up in the second and third floor. They had to stiff emails and men had to stay separately. They were able to provide places if they were able to stay that they would stand the addict which is the honeymoon suite out it was called back then. For a little extra charge, they could stay up on that floor. And then the south and of the tavern was the new lock house where the family stayed. With this particular lock and this time it was actually the lock people for ten to three different walks. They would tend to lock 20 here but they would also lock 18 or 19 further downstream. Soft imagine one man taking care of three locks, a very hard job to do, especially when you see all the work done here at the lock. So depending on how many locks he actually tended meant how much money he got paid by the chesapeake unlock company. So for two locks to get about 250 dollars. That would allow him to actually hire and assistant so 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 who have large families, because if you hired the husband of a large family, you 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 the some of the older children that they had. They would all be able to stay here and lock houses for free. They would get the 250 dollars along with the house and they would also get an acre of land. With that acre of land allowed them to do is to be able to provide for themselves. They were able to make produce, have any farm animals like cows, chickens, pigs, and i think they could have on their land so they would be able to sustain themselves because that 250 dollars was per year. The peak of the canal which was in the 18 seventies. If youre waiting at a lock, a span of 30 ministers about 15 or 20 votes that were waiting at the lock, so at the peak of its days, there is about 550 votes that were operational here on the canal. So the mules as you can see, theyre obviously not horses, a lot of people confuse them for horses and donkeys. They are a combination of the two. 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. That is how you gonna get a male docking in a female horse. If you had a male horse in a female donkey he gets something thats called a hany, and hands dont have the same type of working jeans that we want our mules to have here on the canal, so we decided mules would be a better fit for us on the canal. All throughout history, theres a lot of hit uses of horses, you have the pony express, horse and wagon. They were used throughout history for various things, so the question the easily comes up as you why or mules used here instead of horses . For various reasons, 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 very aware of their surroundings. Their feet also are a different shape compared to the horses, theyre more oval shaped compared to the horses whose are more circular. What that does is make them very surefooted, and allows them to know where theyre placing the foot at all times, so theyre not very skittish like horses are. Horses at the side of anything, they tend to rare up and it takes for a little bit of time for them to come back down. Where is the mules, because they know where theyre placing the feet at all times, theyre not as jumpy, so that said , with the horse you get reared up, and youd have to wait for it to calm down, with the manual, it would just stop because it knows where its placing its foot, and it sees that theres a snake there, and it will just wait for you to move it out of the way, so it would not cause any harm to itself. They are also very smart. Mueller 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, so if you had a horse on the canal, you could run it dead into the ground by working. Where is with mules, im sure youve all heard the saying, stubborn as a mule. You can now take that as a compliment because theyre just saying that you are smart, they are not saying you are stubborn. With the mule, we cant work it to death. After about six hours, its gonna go ahead and stop working. Itll say im not gonna try to hurt myself, therefore you cannot push me any further, and im just gonna stand here until you change me out. Our mules today are pulling us today, our two of our youngest mules. Dolly is 11 and even is ten. You can see that they are connected together by two chains that are in the middle of them. Even on the back of her as a tree which is not really a tree but it is a metal bar which connects the toll lines to our boat. They are currently pulling us at the speeding rate of about two Miles Per Hour maybe. All right . They can pull us a little faster but we usually dont want to go any faster than this, and back then they couldnt go any faster than this, because there was a speed limit of four hours four Miles Per Hour here on the canal. Sounds a bit crazy but theres a very good reason why. If you look on the sides of the canal, you can tell that some spots are 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 a wake and with that wake, since you have 550 votes here at the peak, on the canal he would cause the wake to rush up in the size of the canal and cause erosion and that would go ahead and sing the size of the canal. Emma and that would damage the canal and make it not last as long as it should. That four miles an hour was very enforced here by the lock keepers. Thats why we couldnt go any faster than that. So our typical goats here on the canal, these are what our barges would look like. They were about 90 to 91 feet long, and about 14 and a half feet wide. I did say we like to keep things close, we are on a very tight budget here on the canal. We had about three inches of clearance on each side for the vote to come into the hawk, so we had to be very good at your job staring in as the teller, because if you ended up doing any damage to the lock itself, obviously that meant youre doing damage to your boat, therefore you had to pay for any damage you did to the lock and to your boat. The till or, this is we look at the back, this is the stern, with the stern you have this cabinet right here. This is called the family cabin, and his family cabin was 12 and a half by 12 and a half feet. Its extremely small. The only space the you had for their four room, was a cooking would be done back here, some cleaning of any sorts, you have a toilet back here, toilet with a bucket. And you have maybe one or two beds back here. Up here in the front, this is our bow. This little barn here as where our set of mules was taken. They would only work six hours, you have two sets of mules, making four meals in total. So you could change him out every six hours, or about every 15 miles so we can continue working throughout the day. On top of that the barn was the place where most of the family would sleep, because there were also very big families here on the canal boats. If there wasnt enough room back here in the family cabin where the beds were, they would end up sleeping here in the barn. All throughout the middle of our barge, this is where the cargo was kept. The main cargo here on the canal was coal, and it was used to heat the homes at the various ports that were between cumberland and georgetown. It was used for cooking and goods like that. He would have votes coming from george town as well. Georgetown was a factory town back then. So you did have factories it would produce your grains in weeds. Any type of thin furniture, textile goods, clothing, all that would be coming from georgetown. It would be shipped up north to the various ports up there. This was a twoway kind of traffic back then and there was only one told pat that we had that was used for or mules. So the question, im sure you guys are all thinking of it, how are two votes if they dont going in opposite directions going to pass each other . Were gonna pretend visible coming downstream right now at us. They are loaded up with coal, so if theyre loaded up with coal, and means there are hundred and 20 tons about, we are about eight tons maybe, so that means they have the right of way because its a whole lot harder to stop and start their boat that it is our boat. So we will go ahead and tell our meal driver that we need to stop our boat. The teller back there would yell canal saying, and the canal saying we use here is teeny you ripa. That was our canal saying that we use this all that means that army will stop right on cue. They push him to the side of the toe path. With that, we would push our boat to the further side of the burn side, and we let our tall line sink down to the bottom of the canal. Whats your toe line is completely sock, the downstream boat can go and cross over our tall line and whats gonna happen now as were actually gonna turn our boat around. Back then, as i said he wouldnt be able to do this because your boats were a little longer than this, and we are cutting it really close turning it around. And 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, we would be in charge of looking at for any dangers, making sure the toe line was safe, and that there was nothing in the. Way on the back of the boat, he would have the mother, the mother being in charge of staring, along with doing chores, mostly selling. So the man can no longer say that women are no get a, driving as we were back there driving all the time. The children if they were of a certain, age about nine years old. They would be put right to work, and we have them walking with the mules. So at the age of nine, they would go ahead and start working. I promise or wasnt child labor. And if they were any younger than the age of nine, they obviously had to do something with them. They couldnt be running around about causing problems. So what we would do is we would take something that looked like this. This is an oatmeal harness, we would go and had and take this top section right here, we would take the rest of this right often is the top section. Obviously theres a rope attached to it, see might see where this is going. If not, i have a picture which is awesome. And so this is a family in georgetown. The mom is doing her laundry, and she didnt want her kids running around the port of bridge down, so she went and tied them up. Yeah so in the winter we were actually closed for four months. It would usually start in early november. I will close down and wouldnt open up until maybe april. Thats what we would do. When we dig closed down, it was there were a lot of times we did our maintenance here on the canal, because back then it had to be kept at about six feet deep, because you have this boat the draft was about four. Sought to make sure you had enough room between the bottom of the ball in the bottom of the canal. Theyre creeks that run into this canal, they bring in sediment, that ends up causing sand dunes. That makes us hard to maintain the six. Feet so in the winter months when we closed out, there were no boats running, we would go ahead and drain certain sections of the canal, so we would be able to use a good old shovel, and take out the dirt that was in there so we could keep it at that minimum of six feet deep. Once we finally got the maintenance all done, we go ahead and let water back in. How we would do that as we couldnt use the potomac but its a good water source so we would have locks that are called inlet locks. It was a two part system. So the inlet lock create a right to the potomac river. Theres also a dam thats create connected to the. Locks we allow the water from the potomac to rush into the canal then we have a backup source of water just in case we had problems with it. Only the first 22 miles of a mile nowadays have water and then it gets very spotty throughout. So the kids doesnt sound like they had a very good life. But during the four months that the canal was closed they would actually go to school for those four months and our School System back then was very different. We had a series of books that we have to go through so no matter how old you were and were great you particularly were in if you couldnt get past the first book you had then you couldnt move on to the second one. And with the first but consisted of was mostly things like your abcs. Had to count. And also how to write. When she got through the second and third book it got a little more complicated. You found out how to put words together. Had to add and subtract and things like that. Didnt have to know much as a canal kid but they didnt need to know the basics of adding and subtracting, reading and writing, all of that. However, our law keepers were on patrol 24 7. They were working no matter at the time of day. So they always have to be ready to work. And how they would know that they have to have the lock ready and everything is usually on the boat we would have the horn. As you heard, you are called on the boat. We would blow that horn and it would notify the lock keeper that they have to be ready. The good thing about lock houses is that they are actually all white. What it does is makes it easier to see at an eighth of the people that were running 24 hours a day you could go ahead and see them at night and they would be able to blow their horn and notify the lucky prince that they were coming in. The canal here has lots of history. We as a Company Actually went back and corrupt because our water source it also causes a lot of trouble and damage because whatever it floods, unfortunately we fled as well. This was a very pricey job to be done here. It took a lot more money than expected actually finish the completion of the canal which stopped in 1850. When it reached in cumberland. We ended up going bankrupt and our competitors at the time, the baltimore railroads actually took over operations for us here in the canal. And so they kind of meter that we didnt use it as frequently as we did in the 18 seventies because obviously they want to be the Main Transport for an equal 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. So the last flood that we had when they were control over us was in 1924 and they decided it was too much money to do the repairs that were needed to be done after the flood. So they went ahead and close the canal for good. In 1924, back, then there are only about six boats running here on the canal so it wasnt really in use as much as it was. [noise] it wasnt him as much used as it was because the railroads ended up getting the technology that they needed like the air brakes and the couplings between the two parts. So they became more efficient in transporting those good so in 1924, we werent used as much. So we went ahead and closed down the canal. And about 12 years later, the National Park service actually went ahead and bought the canal from the railroad for about 2 million dollars. So they got a very big steal for 48 and a half miles long and on the acreage that they got. In the 19 fifties, they decided that with all of this land and all of it dug out already, it would actually make a really good pathway to actually create a highway on it, known as the parkway is what they wanted to call it. So they wanted to go ahead and remove an historical property here so they could create that highway to connect cumberland to george tim. Obviously, it wasnt a good idea, and it is still here today. The reason why our candle is still here today is because there is one man that was very fond of the canal, and he was also a Supreme Court justice at the time. William oh douglas. He loved the canal very much it was sudden but that the National Park that it would be a good idea to turn this into a National Park way. What he did was go ahead and challenge to National Post editors that had written a editorial saying that it would be a good idea to change this into a parkway. And went ahead and challenge them to hike the whole length of the book. Now remember the length of it as 104 point miles long. Obviously after that very long they saw of the things that were on the canal and that maybe its not too much of a good idea to turn this into a parkway. So obviously its state here, today william oh douglas list kind of that faced up to saving this park so you can enjoy it today. Instead of sitting in traffic on a parkway probably going to simulate we are going right now. We are going to do the same thing that we did when we entered the walk the first time instead of raising the watergate to lower the water, and we are going to do with the same way that we did it when we came in the first time. We are going to use those doors that are connected to our , and go ahead and turn those law keys so we can go ahead and open those doors and let the water out. [noise] [noise] so we went ahead and opened up our, gates and virtually what that means is that whats our gates are open we have to get to shore somehow, and i along with my back mill are the people that have to bring you back to shore. With that being, said actually have to get off the boat unfortunately. But i hope you enjoyed your ride. And if you had any lastminute questions please dont hesitate to ask our baseman or artillery. On behalf of the National Park, thanks for joining us here and i hope you enjoyed your ride. Okay . You did a fine job. [applause] youve been watching our weekly series you can do this and all of our other programs online at cspan. Org slash history. Weeknights this month were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan 3. Tonight we explore the american story with a look at the National Park service. We visit a parks across the country. Including Mount Rushmore national memorial. Some a Montgomery National historic trail, and gateway arch National Park, featuring a mixture of Natural Beauty and history. Watch beginning at 8 00 eastern and enjoy American History tv every weekend on cspan 3
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