Hes going to go ahead and start pulling us in. Back then what they would do is theyd have their mules kecked to their boat and the mules would be walking on the tow path and they would be the ones that would actually pull us in. We wouldnt have any of the crew members actually doing any of that work. What would happen is once we were completely inside of the lock we would close the two downstream gates which well 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 the things and a lot of those things didnt really work and this was something we decided was a good idea. We did a few modifications to his drawing that he had in a sketch book, but most of it is all the same. And so what happens is this is one side of the lock door that we have here and so with our lock door theres two little doors down here on the bottom. These little doors are called wickets and these wickets are connected to stems that lead all of the way up to the top as you can see in front of you. What we do sings were in a lock and we take the key and post it right here on top of our stem and we turn the doors down at the bottom so it lets the water from upstream downstream. Key to our stem and we open the wicket doors down here 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. Its made out of castiron. Its about 10 to 15 pounds. Pretty heavy. And this is what our lot keepers would carry around all day, and im going to stop talking because its really hard to yell over the rushing water, okay . This part right here is the slowest part of the filling because the water is almost equalling out so its not rushing in like what you saw obviously when we first opened the locked doors so it takes longer for the water to slowly equal out. Once everything equals out then we have to also open up those gates and make sure we open up the boat and thats when we would start moving. We would have lock keepers that would do that with the wicket doors and they would be the ones in charge of opening up the doors and opening up the wickets and everything like that. So our lock keepers were always in charge of that and they would live in lockhouses kind of like the one that is right here on my right. All right. The only difference about this lock house. It was a very special lock house because it was the only hotel 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 the south end. The north end is the hotel part of the tavern and the bottom floor where you guys all had brought your tickets from, that was called the ballroom and it was the tavern at one point so it did serve alcohol back then and so thats where people would come from georgetown. They would take a fourhour trip up here to great falls and theyd ride boats just like this one and this was a packet or passenger boat and they would take the trips to escape the city and stay here at great falls just to kind of 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 is what it was called back then. For an extra charge they could stay up on the top floor and then the south end of the tavern was the new lock house where the lock family stayed and so with this particular lock and its time it was, actually the lock keeper would tend to three different locks and they would tend to lock 20 here and they would tend to lock 19 or 18 downstream. One man taking care of three different locks is a very hard job to do especially when you saw the work thats down here at the lock. It depended on how much money he would get paid by the chesapeake and ohio Canal Company. He would get 350 and he would be able to hire an assistant so he would be able to go ahead and have him help with the rest of the lock, but the Canal Company was very smart, and they decided that they needed to hire men that have large families because if you hire the husband of a large family youd 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 some of the older children that they had and they would all be able to stay here in the lock houses for free. Theyd get the 250 along with the house and they would also get an acre of land and so what that acre of land allowed them to do is to be able to provide for themselves so they were able to do produce or have any type of farm animals that they needed like cows, chickens, pigs and anything they could have on their land so theyd be able to sustain themselves because that 250 was per year, and the peak of the canal was in the 1870s. If you were waiting on a lock in a span of 30 minutes there were 15 to 20 boats that were waiting just at the lock and so at the peak of the there were days there were 550 boats that were operational on the canals. Our mule, as you will see. Theyre not horses, a lot of people confuse them for horses or donkeys and theyre a combination of the two. Its a special combination. The male is going to be the donkey and the female is going to be the mare or the horse and that is how you will get a mule. You need a female horse and a male donkey. If you did it the other way around where you had a male horse and a female donkey you would get a henny and they dont have the working genes that we want our mules to have here on the canal. So we decided mules would be a better fit for us here on the canal, but all throughout history there is a lot of uses of horses so you would have the pony express, they would pull wagons and used throughout history for various things and the question that usually comes up is why were mules used here instead of horses and there were 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 very aware of their surrounding. Their feet also are a different shape compared to horses and theyre more oval shaped compared to horses where theyre more circular and so what that does is that makes them very surefooted and that allows them to know where theyre placing their foot at all times so theyre not very skittish like horses are whereas horses at the sight of anything they tend to rear up and it takes them a while to calm back down and whereas the mule where they know where theyre placing their feet at all times theyre not as jumpy. Back then there were snakes that would fall on the tow path constantly and with the horse you would have to wait for it to calm down. It would just stop and it sees that there is a snake there and it would go and wait for you to move it out of the way so it wouldnt cause harm to itself. Theyre also very smart. 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 if you have a horse on the canal you can run it dead into the ground where as mules, im sure youve heard the saying stubborn as a mule. You can take that as a compliment. Theyre saying that youre smart and not that youre stubborn. With a mule we cant work it to death. After six hours it will stop working and it will say im not trying to hurt myself therefore you cannot push me any further and im going to stand here until you change me out. Our mules today look like dolly and eva are our two mules pulling us today and theyre two of the youngest mules. Dolly is 11 and eva is 10, and you can see that they are connected together by two chains that are in the middle of them and then eva on the back of her has a tree which isnt really a tree, but its a metal bar that connects our tow line to our boat and they are currently pulling us at the speeding rate of about 2 miles an hour maybe, all right . They could pull us a little bit faster, but we dont usually want to go faster than this and back then they couldnt go faster than this because there was a speed limit of 2 miles an hour on the canal. It seems crazy, and there is a good reason why. If you look on the sides, some spots are covered up with rocks, but most of the time there are no rocks covering the sides of the canal and so if we had a boat that went any faster than 4 miles an hour we would start to cause a wake, and with that wake, since you had 550 boats here on the peak of this canal you would end up causing the wake to brush up on the sides of the canal and cause erosion and that would sink the sides of our canal in, and kind of damage the canal ask make it not last as long as it should. So that 4 miles an hour was very enforced here on the canal by our lock keepers. And thats 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 are about 90 to 95 feet long and about 14 1 2 feet wide. I did say we like to cut things close and we are on a tight budget here on the canal and we have three inches of clearance on each side of our boat to come in from the lock. So you had to be very good at your job steering in as a tiller because if you ended up doing damage to the lock itself obviously that means youre doing damage to your boat and you had to pay for any damage that you did to the lock and to your boat. The tiller is located in the back. This is the stern and with the stern this is a cabin. This is called the cabin and this family cabin was 12 1 2 x 12 1 2 feet. It was extremely small. The only space you had in there for room was you would have your cooking would be done back here and then some cleaning of any sorts. You would have a toilet back here, which their toilet was a bucket and you would have one or two beds that were back here. Up theer in the front, this is our bow and this little barn right here was the barn. It was where our extra set of mules were held and therefore i said they would only work six hours. We would have two sets of mule, making four mules in total so we could go ahead and change them out so we could continue working throughout the day. On top of that, the barn was also where most of the family would sleep because there were also very 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 on the barn and all throughout the middle of our barge, this is where our cargo was kept. Coal was our main cargo here on the canal. It was used to heat the 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, as well. Georgetown was the factory town back then so you did have mills that would produce your grains and meats and you would have timber that would come from there. Any type of furniture, textile goods, clothing and all of that 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, is how are two boats if theyre going in opposite directions going to pass each other . All right. We will all pretend that there is a boat coming downstream right now at us. Theyre loaded up with coal and so if theyre loaded up with coal that means theyre about 120 tons and were about 8 tons maybe. So that means they have the right of way because its a whole lot harder to start and stop their boat than it would be our boat and so that would go ahead and tell our mule driver that we need to stop our boat. Our tiller back there would use a saying and its the tee yep ya. Our mule stopped right on cue and they pushed it to the further side of the tow path and with that we would approximately our boat to the further side and that would let the tow line sink to the bottom of the canal and once the boat has completely sunk, the downstream boat can cross over the tow line and what will happen now is we will turn our boat around. Back then, like i said, you wouldnt be able to do this because the boats were longer than this and we are cutting it close turning us around. And so, like i said, 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 dangers, making sure the tow line 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. She could steer while sewing and men couldnt say women werent good at driving because we were driving all of the time. The children at 9 years old we would get them right to work and we would get them walking with our mules and so at the age of 9 theyd go ahead and start working. I promise, it wasnt child labor. If they were younger than the age of 9 we obviously had to do something with them, they couldnt work and they couldnt be running around the boat causing problems. So what we would do is we would take something that looked like this. This is an old mule harness and we would take this top section right here so wed go ahead and take the rest of that off and use this 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. Its awesome and so this is a family in georgetown. The mom is off to the side doing her laundry and 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 close for four months. It would usually start in early november. Wed go ahead and close down and it wouldnt open being bah up until maybe april is what we would do, and when we did close down it was a lot of time that we did our maintenance 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 the bottom of the canal and the bottom of your boat and we have little 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. In the winter months when we close down there are no boats running and we would drain out certain seks of the canal and we would use a good old shovel and go ahead and dig out the dirt that was in there so we could keep it at the 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 its a good water source so we would have locks called inlet locks and it was a twopart system and the inlet locks connect right to the Potomac River and there is a dam connected to those inlet locks. So wed allow the water from the potomac to rush into the canal and wed 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 has 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 they were closed in the capital, they would go to school for these four months and our School System back then was very different and you had a soaries of books you had to go through. So no matter how old you were or what grade you were particularly in if you could arent get past the first book you couldnt move on to the second one and what the first book consisted of were your abcs, how to count and also how to write and once you got to the second and third book it got more complicated and you would learn how to put words together and how to add ask snd subtract. They didnt need to know much as a canal kid, but they needed to know the basics, reading, writing and all of that. However, our lock keepers were oncall 24 7. They were constantly, working,o matter the time of the day and they always had to be ready to work and how they would know that they needed to have the lock ready was usually on the boat we would have a horn as you guys heard when you were called on the boat and wed blow that horn and our captain would yell hey, lock, so they would notify the lock keeper to be ready. A good thing about lock houses is theyre all white. It makes them easier to see through the night so those people that were running 24 hours a day could go ahead and see them at night and would be able to blow their horn to notify the lock keepers that they were coming in. The canal here has lots of history. We as the cno Canal Company actually went bankrupt because as 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 very pricey job to be done here. It took a lot more money than we had expected to 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 here in the canal, and so they kind of made sure that we didnt use it as frequently as we did in the 1870s because 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 in the potomac so the last flood that we had when they were in control of us was in 1924 and 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, back then there were only six boats running here on the cappal so it wasnt really in use as much as it was. So it wasnt in as much use as it was because the railroads ended up getting the canal breaks so they became more efficient in transporting those goods. So in 1924 we didnt we werent used as much so we went ahead and closed down the canal and then about 12 years later the National Park service actually went ahead and bought the chesapeake and ohio canal from the bno railroad for 2 million. They got a steal for 184. 5 miles long and the acreage that they got. And then in the 1950s they decided with all of 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. So they wanted to remove all of the Historical Properties that were here so that they could create that highway to connect cumberland to georgetown. Obviously, it wasnt a good idea and the reason why our canal is here is because there was one man that was very fond of the canal and he was a Supreme Court justice at the time, william o. Douglas. He loved the canal very much and was very saddened at the fact that the National Park decided it would be a good idea to turn this into a parkway and what he did is 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 him to hike the whole length of the canal the whole length is 184. 5 miles long and after the very long hike they saw the beautiful things that were here on the canal and decided that maybe its not too much of a good idea to turn this into a parkway. So obviously its saved here today and william o. Douglas was the foot step toward raising this park instead of sitting in traffic on a parkway going probably the same mileage were going right now. So well do the same thing we did when we earned the lock. The first time. Instead of raising the water well lower the water and we did it the same way we did it when we came in the first time and well use the doors that are connected to our stems and turn those loshing keys so that we can open those doors and let that water out. Keys so that wen those doors and let that water out. O keys so that we can open those doors and let that water out. C keys so that we can open those doors and let that water out. K keys so that we can open those doors and let that water out. So we went ahead and opened up our gates and unfortunately what that means once our gates are open we have to get back to shore somehow and i along with the back mule are the person that have to get you back to shore. So with that being said i have to get off the boat, unfortunately, but i hope you enjoyed your ride on the charles f. Merciy emercier, and if you questions please dont hesitate. On behalf
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