Gathering the Bones XXIV: Ohio or Bust!

 

California, Pennsylvania, is in the heart of Pennsyltucky, with all that goes with it, mainly closed coal mines. (Wikipedia reports that the local Vigilant Mine once produced the largest lump of coal in the world.) It is, however, the home of Pennsylvania Western University, which is, I am devastated to report, the new name since 2022 of the California University of Pennsylvania. First they renamed the Rough Riders, and now this! At least we still have the Miami University of Ohio, right? (Right.) The United States is just so darned big that these obscure schools can be real things, although clicking through to the Wiki suggests that  PennWest is on the bubble these days. Can't imagine why people in Pennsyltucky might be disgruntled about stuff. 

Anyway, it's probably called "California" on the basis of a joke about how once you've made the climb out of Brownsville you're practically in California. I don't know that. I made it up, in fact. But now it's a joke on a Blogger page, so real enough for me! Actually it isn't even halfway to Wheeling, West Virginia, where the National Road reaches the Ohio. 

You had to figure that a group of winsome lasses would do a version of Clementine as a slice of Americana. It's regrettably not Lana Del Ray, but check out the costuming!

It's hard to stress enough the importance of the National Road for the American psyche. The Whiskey Rebellion was fought along it, and it was the signature exemplar of the "improvements" that were said to be beyond the Federal government's power under the Constitution. It's the cradle of libertarianism, in other words. (L. Neil Smith seems to have won all the Prometheus Awards for Best Lilbertarian science fiction novel on the go in his time, but it's okay because he wrote three Lando Calrissian novels, too. In retrospect I can't believe that a youthful me didn't twig to the bullshit when he named his alternate dimension libertarian America "the Confederacy.")

But I talked about the National Road and the mountains they crossed last time in this topic. Today I want to talk about something so absolutely insane that it didn't even get into a science fiction novel: The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.

So, yeah. A canal between sea level at the Chesapeake Bay, specifically the mouth of the Potomac, and the Ohio. 

 

 

A view from a scenic overlook of Brownsville, Pennsylvania. This is the hill the canal was to descend, albeit into Pittsburgh, not Brownsville.

The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal does exist. It is 297km long, and stretches from Washington, D.C., to Cumberland, Maryland, which I do not believe is the absolute head of the Potomac, but is as far as a canal boat can reasonably penetrate past the water gap of the Potomac. And by "reasonable" I mean that the proposed next leg of the canal was to cross what rail historians are pleased to call the Eastern Continental Divide to the confluence of the Youghiogheny and the Casselman, using 246 locks over 70 miles to ascend 1961ft. (It's good that it wasn't 2000ft. That would be crazy.) From there a mere 78 locks would straighten out the Youghiogheny and the Monongahela from their confluence into Pittsburgh, a distance of a mere 85 miles and requiring only 78 locks to descend 619ft. 

That being said, the engineers who submitted this report in 1825 also estimated its cost at $22 million. The Erie Canal came in at $7.143 million on its completion that year. so maybe the engineers were trying to let the promoters down gently. If so, they failed disastrously. The promoters commissioned another study that brought in the coasts at $4.8 million, and construction commenced in 1828. 

The  Cassalman River Bridge was the longest single-span stone bridge in America 
upon ifs 1814 completion. By Kjssws - Own work, Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6097998

 

To take a deeper dive into the political context, the canal is cited (in the Wiki, so I'm not calling this an iron-clad fact) as James Madison's last official act as President.  The historian, and apparently not a single other person in the whole world, will recall this as the election of the "corrupt bargain," in which, per his supporters, Andrew Jackson was cheated of the Presidency when the election was thrown to the House by the failure of any of the four candidates to secure a majority in the electoral college, John Quincy Adams cast the decisive vote for himself as President, even though Jackson had won a comfortable plurality of 40.445% of the vote. The historians gently designate this as the "End of the Era of Good Feelings." That's a good description of the next four years, in which Jackson filibustered the nation with his claims that the election had been, er, not rigged, that would a bit on the nose. Anyway, it was a bad thing, and it was also a Democratic-Republican thing, and no wonder the outgoing Democratic-Republican President found something in the kitty for the Chesapeake and Ohio. (The Erie Canal was funded by the state of New York and a list of quasi-anonymous British investors, less said about Patriots and Loyalists and patents and expropriations and straw buyers, the better.) The Canal was to be exempt from taxation to guarantee its profitability. 

This might be why Jackson's Vice-Presidential running mate in 1828 was Martin Van Buren, and not John Calhoun, and of course that choice never had any bad consequences for anyone. 

Construction of the Cumberland and Ohio continued through 1850, when it was terminated at Cumberland, at the end of the first stage, with a mere 74 locks, and a back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that the $11 million final cost makes the original engineer's report plausible taking into account reasonable overruns and inflation. But but but 2000ft! What do I know, is the moral, I guess. In March of 1837 an proposal to extend the Canal via the Monocacy to Baltimore, which sounds a lot more reasonable than the Middle Section was rejected for lack of water at the summit, which sounds as though people were having learnings. That being said, I see an 1874 proposal for a 13.5km tunnel under the highest part of the section, which suggests that lessons  had not been entirely learned. 

Although the Canal is known for bringing Allegheny coal to tidewater, I find this table in the Wiki, which I snip to avoid formatting issues of freight carried in 1845, by which time the canal was closing on Cumberland through some difficult terrain, and so serving almost exclusively the Potomac valley of western Maryland.

A bushel of wheat is nominally 80lb, making wheat and wheat flour by far the most important regional bulk export, which I don't suppose is news to much of anyone, but still interesting. 

Originally, the Chesapeake and Ohio was the brainchild of George Washington. Like the promoters of the C&O after him, Washington projected a canal to the Ohio and operated one on the Potomac, the Potowmack, which was overtaken by the C&O, and, of course, there's another political connection with the Democratic-Republicans, but I'm writing this paragraph to bring this "survey" done by Washington in 1784 to the reader's attention. I suppose that nothing says that a map has to be oriented north-south but this map seems to imply that the Youghiogheny will take the canal west to the Ohio, as opposed to north to the Monongahela. Or maybe I'm being a bit overcritical. Like the bits about the "Glens of the Yougo, though, George. Very poetic, and impossible to read in the scrape I post here. 

Washington was wearing his promoter hat here, the latest in a series of them, of whom the enigmatic Nemacolin and the surprisingly almost-as-enigmatic Colonel Thomas Cresap are the most important precursors. Cresap, who was almost certainly not born in 1694, and whose death date is not established either, which seems like a remarkable failure of family history, given that Cresap is the Stammvater of a considerable American lineage, also lacks a grave of record, but the monument often mistaken for it is at Alum Hill on the course of the Chesapeake and Ohio. My guess is that Nemacolin and Thomas Cresap were the same person, and that Cresap was buried as Jacob Bowman in St. Peter's churchyard in Brownsville at some point in the 178os, but that's just a guess. Nineteenth Century American hstorians were as unenthusiastic about extending the timelines of the country's Catholic churches as they were enthusiastic about inventing early Baptists and Presbyterians.

And on that note of wild speculation, I leave you. I am on vacation this week, and will be off to Kamloops on Thursday, which leaves me plenty of time to start the postblogging for March, 1956. I know that you readers can't wait to find out if Ike is going to run in '56! At least British politics is 100% sane and nothing totally off the wall is brewing there.