CHAPTER IX
The Demand for Canals and Navigable Rivers.—Washington's Search for a Route for a Canal or Road to bind the East and West.—Much Money spent in the Attempt to make Certain Rivers Navigable.—Failure of the Potomac Company to improve Navigation on the Potomac.—The Need for a Potomac and Ohio Canal to withhold the Western Trade from the Erie.—The Potomac Canal Company, re-named the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company.—Apparent Impossibility of building a Canal from the Potomac to Baltimore.—Philip E. Thomas conceives the Idea of a Railroad from Baltimore to the West.—The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company's Jealousy of this Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company.—Both the Canal and the Railroad started.—Difficulties in the Way of Both.—The Canal's Exclusive Right of Way up the Potomac to be now shared with the Railroad.—The Railroad completed to the Ohio, 1853.—A Canal from Philadelphia to Pittsburg built rapidly.—The Alleghany Portage Railway opened for Traffic in Three Years.—Washington's Efforts to accomplish the Same End.—The Railways to a Large Extent supersede the Canals.
THOMAS AND MERCER: RIVAL PROMOTERS OF CANAL AND RAILWAY
Although the Cumberland National Road proved a tremendous boon to the young West and meant to the East commercially all that its promoters hoped, other means of transportation were being hailed loudly as the nineteenth century dawned. Improved river-navigation was one of these, and canals were another. When it was fully realized how difficult was the transportation of freight across the Alleghanies on even the best of roads, the cry was raised, "Cannot waterways be improved or cut from Atlantic tide-water to the Ohio River?"
In our story of Washington as promoter and prophet it was seen that at the close of the Revolution the late commander gave himself up at once to the commercial problem of how the Potomac River might be made to hold the Middle West in fee. Passing westward in the Fall of 1784, he spent a month in the wilds of Northern Virginia seeking for a pathway for canal or road from the South Branch of the Potomac to the Cheat River. The result of his explorations was the classic letter to Harrison in 1784, calling Virginia to her duty in the matter of binding the East and West with those strongest of all bonds—commercial routes bringing mutual benefit.
The immediate result was the formation of the Potomac Company, which proposed to improve the navigation of the Potomac from tide-water, at Washington, D. C., to the highest practicable point, to build a road from that point to the nearest tributary of the Ohio River, and, in turn, to improve the navigation of that tributary.