The C and O Canal. George Washington's most expensive bad idea, and it starts right at your feet.
See those locks — the stone chambers stepping up from the water? There are four of them right here. They climb like a staircase. Each one raises a boat about eight feet.
This is the beginning of a hundred and eighty-four miles of canal. Seventy-four locks. Six hundred and five feet of elevation change. It ends in Cumberland, Maryland.
Which is not where it was supposed to end. It was supposed to reach the Ohio River. It never got close.
Washington toured the Potomac in seventeen eighty-four. He decided this river was the key to everything — the way to connect the coast to the interior. He chartered the Patowmack Company and became its first president. The Virginia legislature gave him fifty shares — worth roughly what you'd pay for a nice house today.
He was so committed he left those shares in his will. They were supposed to fund a national university in the District of Columbia. The
company never paid a single dividend. It folded. The university was never built. His canal shares were worth nothing.
But the dream didn't die with Washington. It just got more expensive.
On July fourth, eighteen twenty-eight — President John Quincy Adams showed up to break ground on the new canal. Two thousand people watched. He gave a speech. Then he picked up a shovel and hit a tree stump.
