C&O Canal NHP
Park History
Sourced
The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal runs 184.5 miles along the Potomac River from Georgetown in Washington, D.C., to Cumberland, Maryland. Its 74 lift locks raised boats from near sea level to 605 feet, and works like the hand-built, 3,118-foot Paw Paw Tunnel and the Monocacy Aqueduct survive among more than 1,300 historic structures — by the 2013 foundation document’s account, one of the largest collections of 19th-century canal features in the park system. The park also preserves archeological evidence of 13,000 years of human habitation along the river, including prehistoric American Indian rock art. [1]
President John Quincy Adams broke ground on Independence Day, 1828, for a waterway meant to reach the Ohio River. By the time construction ended at Cumberland in 1850, the park brochure says, canals were obsolete; the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad completed the link to the West while the canal stopped far short of the Ohio. It survived as a carrier of coal until floods and debt ended it, and a major flood in 1924 finally stopped operations. The Park Service took over in 1938. In the early 1950s Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas led a march to save the towpath from becoming a parkway, which he called “a long stretch of quiet and peace.” It became a national monument in 1961 and a national historical park on January 8, 1971. [2] [1]
Black history
Black workers were on the canal from its first months: in December 1828 John Stubblefield, a free Black man, lost his left arm in a blasting accident and received $2 a month for a year. A company rule of 1857 barred Black boat captains, yet the boat register of January 1, 1878, lists at least four, among them Louis Roberson and Wilson Middleton; Andrew Jenkins captained boats from 1910 to 1923. [3]
A 2022 study prepared for the Park Service on the communities along the canal’s first 20 miles traces Black communities such as Herring Hill in Georgetown, St. Phillips Hill, Gibson Grove and Tobytown, and finds that the canal’s construction displaced African Americans, including the multiracial community of Sugar Hill in Georgetown. It notes that 1940, when the Park Service opened the canal as parkland, recurs as an end date for several Black enclaves, and asks what role the Service played in the displacement that followed. [4]
Slavery
In June 1830 the canal company’s directors and stockholders rejected President Charles Fenton Mercer’s request to purchase an enslaved workforce, but Sabrina Romain’s 2021 Park Service study finds that Black laborers, free and enslaved, were contracted to work on the canal throughout its construction, and by 1842 the company was relying on such contracts to cut costs. The canal also became a route out of slavery: Ben Addison, hired out to work in Georgetown, escaped on December 18, 1829; Charles Ringold, a blacksmith who had worked a long time on the canal, fled on April 30, 1838. [3]
At Ferry Hill Plantation, part of the park’s historic district, John Blackford held eighteen people in slavery when he died in 1839 — six men, four women and eight children; most were sold at his estate sale to unknown buyers. [5] [1]
Labor & the New Deal
Thousands of immigrants found work building the canal. In August 1832 cholera reached the work camps near Harpers Ferry; a newspaper account quoted in Harlan Unrau’s historic resource study described the dead and dying lying together in crowded shanties, workers fleeing, and laborers who were “chiefly Irishmen.” Rivalries between Irish factions turned violent: on January 24, 1834, several hundred Longfords routed about 300 Corkonians near Dam No. 5 above Williamsport, and many of those overtaken in the pursuit were killed. [6] [2]
A century later the Civilian Conservation Corps did the heavy work of converting the canal’s first 22 miles into a recreational park. Josh Howard’s 2017 study notes that every enrollee in the two canal camps at Cabin John was an African American man, when, as of mid-1938, only one Black CCC camp existed in Maryland; by January 1942 the two companies had logged 83,800 and 74,900 man-days of work. [7]
Sources
- Foundation Document, Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park (NPS, 2013)
- NPSHistory.com: Chesapeake and Ohio Canal NHP archive page — overview (from the 2011 NPS brochure) and establishment block
- Romain, “Difficulty on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal” (NPS, 2021), pp. 13 and 44–45
- WSP USA, Historic Resources Study: African American Communities Along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal, Washington, D.C., and Lower Montgomery County, Maryland (NPS, October 2022), Executive Summary
- Max L. Grivno, Historic Resource Study: Ferry Hill Plantation (NPS, August 2007), ch. 5, Slavery at Ferry Hill Plantation, pp. 37–38
- Harlan D. Unrau, Historic Resource Study: Chesapeake & Ohio Canal (NPS, prepared by Karen M. Gray, August 2007), monograph 3, Labor Force, pp. 123–130
- Josh Howard, “Our Only Alma Mater”: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the C&O Canal — Special History Study, final draft (NPS, December 2017), Introduction
FLAGGED FOR REVIEW: Interpretive materials
C&O Canal NHP in MD preserves a piece of American history that the public has trusted the National Park Service to protect and interpret. The interpretive materials at this site have been developed over years by historians, subject-matter experts, and park staff — and are now being reviewed under Secretary's Order 3431.
Why this matters: C&O Canal NHP is part of a network of over 400 national parks that serve as America's classrooms. The interpretive materials here were developed by subject-matter experts to help visitors understand the full story of this place. When historically accurate content is removed, the public loses access to its own history.
These need to be removed and not replaced. They are in a heavily flood prone area, hense their condition, and C&O Canal, a seperate NPS Park site interps these stories elsewhere
Photographs attached to this park's records in the leaked NPS review database.
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