Rethinking the C&O Canal (part 1)
[image error]The old saying goes, “You can’t fit a square peg in a round hole.” Yet for more than 90 years, historians have said that somehow 92-foot-long canal boats on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal fit into locks that could hold boats no larger than 90 feet and probably less.
It’s just one of the many questions that modern researchers are finding need to be answered about the C&O Canal. Some have easy answers that go against the accepted history of the canal. Others, like the question of canal-boat length, are still being researched.
Both have historians and National Park Service staff rethinking how the C&O Canal operated.
The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal ended business operations in 1924. Since then, books have been written about the canal, historians have researched the lives of canallers and lock tenders, and the National Park Service has documented the life of the canal. You would think that in that time, all that could be known about the canal had been discovered. It turns out that that’s not the case.
“New information available and things are happening remarkably quickly,” said Karen Gray, C&O Canal National Historical Park Librarian. [image error]
The work being done is the transcription of canal records, historic newspaper articles, and other canal documents, primarily by William Bauman, a member of the C&O Canal Association. Gray vets a lot of the information. Some pieces are posted on the C&O Canal NPS site, but she puts most of the information on the C&O Canal Association web site in the “Canal History” section. The section includes oral histories, newspaper reports from long-forgotten newspapers along the canal, books, reports, payroll records, canal boat registration documents, and family histories.
“William Bauman has done a lot of terrific work collecting and transcribing records and articles to give everyone a flavor of how the canal operated,” said Bill Holdsworth, who is both the president and webmaster for the C&O Canal Association.
The C&O Canal Association is a volunteer organization that promotes and advocates for the canal.
“There’s so much available, but it needs to data mined,” Gray said.
A careful reading of this new information has turned some long-held beliefs about the canal on their heads.
For instance, it has been written that canal boats in the 1800s were privately owned and often operated by a family. While they often were privately owned, “It was written into the boat mortgages that the boat needed to operate 24 hours a day,” Gray said. “A family is not going to be able to do that.”
Holdsworth said this is the most-surprising thing that he has learned from the new information. “Canal work was not this leisurely, bucolic life of strolling along the towpath,” he said. “Those people were working hard and moving fast along the towpath.”
Records show canallers were making the trip along the canal in roughly four days.
Gray explained that the idea of family run boats comes primarily from a 1923 U.S. Department of Labor study that was conducted at a time when 60 percent of the canal boats were run by a family.
In addition to boats not being family run, there is evidence that a single captain might have been in charge of up to four boats. What is not certain at this time is whether those boats moved together or one towed another boat or some other variation, but the records don’t support the one boat – one captain idea.
“It’s really clear that we need to rethink our original beliefs of how the canal operated,” Gray said.
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