74 (Boats must pass guard locks 4 & 5 for each trip.)
Status
National Park
History
Original owner
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company
Principal engineer
Benjamin Wright
Other engineer(s)
Charles B. Fisk, William Rich Hutton
Date of act
1825; 199 years ago (1825)
Construction began
1828; 196 years ago (1828)
Date of first use
1830; 194 years ago (1830)
Date completed
1850; 174 years ago (1850)
Date closed
1924; 100 years ago (1924)
Geography
Start point
Georgetown, Washington, D.C. (originally Little Falls Branch) (Canal extended down to Georgetown in 1830)
End point
Cumberland, Maryland (originally Sections to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
Connects to
Alexandria Canal (Virginia), Goose Creek, and Little River Navigation
The 1917 video "Down the Old Potomac (Part 1 of 3)" shows the canal during its operating days. Some of the information is inaccurate. For example, it says that "barges" (more correctly "boats") passed through 86 locks descending 800 feet to tidewater; in fact, there were 77 locks descending 610 feet.
The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, abbreviated as the C&O Canal and occasionally called the Grand Old Ditch,[1] operated from 1831 until 1924 along the Potomac River between Washington, D.C. and Cumberland, Maryland. It replaced the Potomac Canal, which shut down completely in 1828, and could operate during months in which the water level was too low for the former canal. The canal's principal cargo was coal from the Allegheny Mountains.
Construction began in 1828 on the 184.5-mile (296.9 km) canal and ended in 1850 with the completion of a 50-mile (80 km) stretch to Cumberland, although the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad had already reached Cumberland in 1842. The canal had an elevation change of 605 feet (184 meters) which required 74 canal locks, 11 aqueducts to cross major streams, more than 240 culverts to cross smaller streams, and the 3,118 ft (950 m) Paw Paw Tunnel. A planned section to the Ohio River at Pittsburgh was never built.
The canal is now maintained as the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park, with a trail that follows the old towpath.
^"The Grand Old Ditch: the C&O In American Transportation History " Archived May 20, 2014, at the Wayback Machine
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