Last weekend I walked on the C&O Canal, one of my favorite trails around Washington. Besides being blessedly flat, the towpath (originally built for the mules that pulled barges up and down the 185-mile route) combines nature and history, two of my favorite things to immerse in.

With its well-marked signs and lots of foot/bike traffic, the C&O is the longer, better-known sibling of a much smaller, mostly lost counterpart—the Alexandria Canal.

Alexandria Canal?

The falls on the Potomac River prevented trade from the interior of the new United States, despite numerous attempts to circumvent them. (Even George Washington got into the act in the late 1700s in a canal project that failed.) In the 1820s, the C&O Canal was proposed as the newest get-around. Alexandria and Georgetown—two of the three jurisdictions in the District of Columbia at the time, along with Washington City—each invested the sizable sum of $250,000 to build it. The federal government put in $1 million.

Alexandria merchants soon realized that a canal that stopped in Georgetown would benefit…Georgetown. Once again, Alexandria government officials and business men had to talk up the need for a canal investment, this time to connect the C&O with the Potomac River closer to Alexandria. Starting with the city borrowing $50,000 to buy its initial shares of stock, it became, over the decades, the literal embodiment of sunk costs.

Building the Alexandria Canal

The Alexandria Canal began with a massive aqueduct, where Key Bridge is now. According to a 1992 monograph The Alexandria Canal: Its History and Preservation by Thomas Hahn and Emory Kemp, the Aqueduct alone was projected to cost $202,000. It cost triple that, about $600,000. It took 11 years to complete. As they described it:

The 1,000-foot wooden trunk of the aqueduct was 17 feet wide and seven feet deep and 29 feet above water, with a five-foot-wide towpath on one side.

The “wooden trunk” rested on huge stone piers. From the aqueduct, on the Virginia side of the river, the canal passed roughly seven miles through present-day Rosslyn and Route 1/Richmond Highway . At what was then the outskirts of the city of Alexandria, a series of locks brought barge traffic from the canal to the river.

The Army often “seconded” engineers to work on large-scale infrastructure projects. Two U.S. Army Topological Engineers officers were responsible for design of the Alexandria Canal, with Capt. William Turnbull taking the lead on the Aqueduct and Lieut. Maskell Ewing the rest of the canal, including the Alexandria locks. Groundbreaking took place on July 4, 1831. It took 13 years to complete.

Several of Lieut. Ewing’s engineering notebooks survive. Most record measurements or materials but a few talk about the laborers and the tasks they performed. For example:

16 Oct—4 men puddling outlet walls

19 Oct—Masons during the afternoon. Setting the lower wings. Afternoon Welsh had the pile driver run forward to drive the piles of the forebay floor.

I could not find an estimate of the number of people who worked on the canal nor who they were. The text for the city’s African American Heritage Trail notes that some were probably enslaved. Other workers, if the patterns were similar to the C&O, were European immigrants. Working conditions were harsh, pay (for those who received any) often late, and food scarce.

An intriguing perspective of the project comes from a man named George Henry (thanks to the Trail guide for the reference), an enslaved man who contracted to run a commercial schooner called the Llewyllen. In recollections he published in the 1890s, he described the job to supply timber for the Aqueduct:

Just at the finishing up of the second contract, the "boss" engaged another contract to run all the piles to build an aqueduct across the river at Georgetown, which could never be built without those piles being run first. The piles were to measure from forty-five to fifty feet in length, very straight oak trees. Soon as the vessel laid up that winter, my business was with a gang of hands, picking them out and cutting them down, and another gang hauling them to the water, ready for shipping in the spring. That was my business every winter till the contract was filled. In the spring every one was landed at Georgetown under my command.

The engineer of the aqueduct, named Major Turnbull, was the prettiest and the smartest engineer of his time. So if my readers will visit Georgetown you will find that what I tell you of this history will be facts. It will surpass the ideas of any man, unless he could be on the spot, to see how it was done--to know how men could go down to the bottom of that river and work, the same as on the highway.

Operating the Alexandria Canal

On July 4, 1843, the Canal was scheduled to be “watered,” although repairs delayed the opening. According to the Alexandria Gazette, traffic began on December 2, 1843:

After all the trials and difficulties that have accomplished the work, the date at last, arrived when the Canal boats could float across the Potomac, over a splendid and perfect aqueduct, and be brought to the town of Alexandria….

The President and Directors of the Canal Co., the Mayor, and a large number of our fellow citizens, went up to the Potomac aqueduct in the morning, and there with the Engineers and other officers of the Company embarked on a Canal Boat Pioneer, and after a pleasant and short passage of a little upwards of an hour, down the Canal, reached its terminus at the Corner of Washington and Montgomery Streets..,,

May this important work succeed and prosper—may it more than realize our warmest hopes—and may it RESTORE AND PERPETUATE the TRADE and PROSPERITY OF ALEXANDRIA."

Although dozens of boats used the canal to transport wheat, coal, and other products to Alexandria, and manufactured goods and fish from the city, the canal never lived up to its hype. Hahn and Kemp transcribed an inventory from an annual report that detailed the “descending” and “ascending” business.

From April 21 to June 26, 1847, 151 boats “descended” with wood, corn, wheat, lime, and other products; 140 boats “ascended” with fish, salt, plaster, and “sundries.” That works out to average traffic of about 6 boats a day. The total tolls collected during during those 2 months was $621.02.

During the Civil War, Federal troops drained the aqueduct and used it as a bridge. Julia Wilbur wrote about crossing the Aqueduct Bridge several times when the Long Bridge (near current 14th Street Bridge) was impassable:

When we got to Long Bridge, we were told that the draw was broken and we could not cross in 3 hrs, so the only alternative was to go round by Georgetown & over the Aqueduct Bridge. Neither Mr. G nor the driver knew the way. No moon, not even a friendly star looked down upon us until we had crossed the bridge & were two or three miles this side of it. [November 22, 1862]

After the war, the Alexandria Canal Company requested the War Department restore the bridge to its water-transporting purpose and transfer it back. On September 25, 1866, the Alexandria Gazette reported:

By direction of the Provost Marshal General, commanding the charge of the Aqueduct Bridge is hereby turned over, on the part of the United States, to Messrs. Wells, Quigley, and Dungan, Lessees of the Alexandria Canal.

Two months later, on November 5, 1866,

Water was let into the Alexandria Canal during the latter part of last week and has reached the outlet lock at this city. Boats left Cumberland last week for Alexandria and are expected to arrive here on Wednesday next.

Two weeks later, it was closed for repairs, an unfortunately common up-and-down theme of canal operations. In any event, the railroad had become the dominant means of transportation. In 1886, damage to the Aqueduct, demand for a land bridge, and declining Canal revenues led it its demise. The Aqueduct was open for foot and horse traffic for several decades—although presumably a safety inspection of today would have closed it in a minute. Key Bridge was constructed alongside it in 1923, and the old bridge was torn down in 1934.

Re-Discovering the Alexandria Canal

The Canal was not forgotten but filled in by Rosslyn, Crystal City, Potomac Yard, and Northern Virginia’s other 20th century developments.

Three phases of archaeological work took place in the 1970s and 1980s, conducted under the supervision of Alexandria Archaeology. Hahn and Kemp undertook the third project in connection with the construction of Canal Center Plaza on Montgomery Street. They found evidence of Tide Lock and other canal pieces, as well as artifacts from other uses, such as boat houses and a glass factory.

Historical markers designate the location of several of the locks, and a re-creation of a lock is where the canal led out into the Potomac River. When I visited, I couldn’t help noticing the new uses on and near the river—DC Water, a solar array, a cruise boat, and MGM casino.