II
HISTORY OF THE

WATERWAYS

OF THE

ATLANTIC COAST

OF THE

UNITED STATES

II

Aubrey Parkman

January 1983

Navigation History NWS-83-10

National Waterways Study - U.S. Army Engineer Water Resources Support Center - Institute for Water Resources
AUTHORITY FOR THE NATIONAL WATERWAYS STUDY

The Congress authorized the National Wateways Study (NWS) and provided the

instructions for its conduct in Section 158 of the Water Resources Development

Act of 1976 (Public Law 94-587):

The Secretary of the Army, acting through the Chief

of Engineers, is authorized and directed to make a

comprehensive study and report on the system of

waterway improvements under his jurisdiction- The

study shall include a review of the existing system

and its capability for meeting the national needs

including emergency and defense requirements and an

appraisal of additional improvements necessary to

optimize the system and its intermodal

characteristics. The Secretary of the Army, acting

through the Chief of Engineers, shall submit a

report to Congress on this study within three years

after funds are first appropriated and made

available for the study, together with his

recommendations. The Secretary of the Army, acting

through the Chief of Engineers, shall upon request,

from time to time, make available to the National

Transportation Policy Study Commission established

by Section 154 of Public Law 94-280, the information

and data developed as a result of the study.
PREFACE

This pamphlet is one of a series on the history of navigation done

as part of the National Waterways Study, authorized by Congress in

Public Law 94-587. The National Waterways Study is an intensive review

by the Corps of Engineers’ Institute for Water Resources of past, present,

and future needs and capabilities of the United States water transportation network. The Historical Division of the Office of the Chief of

Engineers supervised the development of this pamphlet, which is designed

to present a succinct overview of the subject area.
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter I. THE AGE OF DISCOVERY AND SETTLEMENT

Chapter II. THE CANAL ERA

Chapter 111. RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENT

Chapter IV. THE INTRACOASTAL WATERWAY:

ATLANTIC SECTION - _

CHRONOLOGY

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1

15

37

57

95

113

133
Chapter I

THE AGE OF DISCOVERY AND SETTLEMENT

EXPLORATIONS

Early in the sixteenth century, only a few decades after

Columbus accidentally discovered America, European navigators

began sailing into the Atlantic coastal waters of the future

United States. In March and April 1513 the Spanish adventurer

Juan Ponce de Leon, searching for a fabled spring that restored

youth and vigor to the old and impotent, and with an eye also

peeled for gold, sailed from Puerto Rico, threaded his way

through the Bahama Islands, and landed near Daytona Beach in the

land that he named Florida. Hugging the shore to avoid the

northward-flowing Gulf Stream, he coasted down the length of the

peninsula, rounded the Florida Keys, and sailed up the Gulf

Coast as far as Charlotte Harbor.

Giovanni da Verrazano, the first recorded navigator to

voyage along the coast of the United States from the Carolinas

to Maine, was on a very different mission. A Florentine mariner

sailing for Francis I of France in the spring and summer of

1524, Verrazano was seeking a water route through an unwanted

continent to the riches of Cathay. The Americas were an

annoying obstacle in Europe's course westward to the East, and

when it became clear that no passage existed through South or

Central America, European logic and desire imperatively insisted

that a strait to the Pacific Ocean-- the Northwest Passage--must

somewhere cut across North America. Looking across what he

thought was a narrow isthmus, apparently the barrier sandspits

that separate Pamlico Sound from the Atlantic, Verrazano

believed that the Pacific Ocean was only a few miles distant.

Somehow, probably prudently avoiding shoal water and sailing far

out to sea, he missed the great Chesapeake and Delaware bays.

He entered New York Harbor, but evidently deciding that the

Hudson River was not the strait, hastily departed when

unfavorable winds blew up. Putting into Narragansett Bay, he

stayed for a fortnight in the sheltered harbor of Newport, Rhode

Island. The treacherous shoals eastward of Nantucket and Cape

Cod were so much to his disliking that he called them

“Armellini,” after Francesco Cardinal Armellino, a prelate hated

for his avarice and success in collecting papal taxes.

Stretching across Massachusetts Bay, he hit the coast of Maine

at or near Casco Bay and continued northeasterly past Nova

Scotia and Cape Breton Island to Newfoundland, whence he

returned to France. He failed to find the strait to the Orient,

but by describing the long East Coast of the United States and

Canada he influenced North American cartography--not always

beneficially-- for over a century.
Verrazano had many followers on the same errand. Every

inlet, estuary, bay, or river mouth on the Atlantic coast might

be the route to the Indies, either through the Northwest Passage

or by way of another illusory but durable entity, the Western

Sea. Fashioned by hopeful imagination from Indian stories of

inland waters, amazingly extensible and migratory on

contemporary maps, yet held to be a certainty by the beginning

of the seventeenth century, the Western Sea became an

indispensable link connecting rivers flowing into the Atlantic

with rivers leading to the Pacific.

Verrazano’s failure to report a strait south of Nova Scotia

directed exploratory navigations largely northward. John Cabot,

a Genoese under patent from Henry VII of England, had already

probed there a quarter of a century before Verrazano, but had

left little to geographic knowledge beyond uncertainties.

Believing that the Far East could best be reached by sailing

westward in the short high latitudes, Cabot, in 1497, had gained

the coast of America at Cape Breton, Newfoundland, or Labrador--

scholars debate just where --and returned home convinced that he

had visited an outlying region of China. He tried again the

next year, and disappeared. After Verrazano's voyage, Jacques

Cartier, Martin Frobisher, Humphrey Gilbert, John Davis, George

Waymouth, Henry Hudson, Samuel de Champlain, and many other

mariners about whom less is known explored northern waters from

Baffin Bay to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, all seeking the passage

that had to be there.

Not everyone thought that the passage must lie to the north,

and hard behind Verrazano into our own waters came three

navigators pursuing the same dream. Estevan Gomez and Lucas

Vasquez de Ayllon were sailing for the King of Spain, and John

Rut was out to discover the strait for England. Gomez, putting

out from Spain only two months after Verrazano had returned to

France, was directed “*to search whether amongst the multitudes

of windings and vast diversities of our ocean any passage can be

found leading to him who we commonly call the Grand Khan.”3

He raised land at or near Cape Breton in February 1525, sailed

up the Penobscot River to the head of navigation at the site of

Bangor, hoping it was the passage, and coasted on to Massachusetts. Among the numerous capes and inlets that he sighted,

scholars have identified Pemaquid Point and Boothbay, the

Kennebec and Merrimack rivers, Ipswich Bay, and Cape Ann and

Cape Cod. The rest of his voyage is less clear, but he may have

continued down the coast to Florida. Ayl1on, armed with a

patent from the king to explore some 2,500 miles of coast, to

follow any oceanic strait that he might find, and to establish a

colony, headed north along the coast from the Spanish colony of

Santo Domingo at the same time that Gomez was sailing southward.
He commanded a small armada of five ships carrying 500 men,

women, and children, and 80 to 90 horses; but the results of his

venture mocked his ambitions. He entered a river, which remains

unidentified, where his flagship ran aground and became a total

loss. Forty to 50 leagues up the coast he found another river,

evidently the Cape Fear, where he planted his colony. Here

everything went wrong, Ayllon died of fever, and only 150

survivors made it back to Santo Domingo. John Rut, who also was

out “to discover the land of the Great Khan,” sailed from

England in 1527 along the northern latitudes. But having no

relish for the ice-filled seas he found, Rut cast about to the

south and ranged along the coasts of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia,

and New England, frequently landing men to report on “the state

of those unknown regions." Most likely he continued down the

coast, but the record is blank until he turned up in the West

Indies.4

Late in the sixteenth century and early in the seventeenth

century, the exploration of American waters was heightened by

new incentives. Hopes for finding the Northwest Passage still

remained strong, but now European courtiers and merchants were

also interested in the fisheries, furs, and other resources of

North America, and in establishing settlements there. Mariners

in their employ penetrated coastal inlets and sailed far up many

rivers from Cape Hatteras to northern Maine.

Simon Ferdinand and John Walker, sent by Sir Humphrey

Gilbert in 1579 and 1580 to find a suitable site for a colony,

examined Penobscot Bay and possibly also Narragansett Bay. In

1584 and 1585 Ferdinand, Philip Amadas, Arthur Barlowe, and Sir

Richard Grenville, on similar assignments for Sir Walter Raleigh

that resulted in the ill-fated Roanoke colony, found inlets

through the Carolina Banks (the long series of narrow islands

that Verrazano had assumed to be an isthmus between two oceans),

nosed about in Pamlico and Albemarle sounds, and ascended several

of the rivers that flowed into them.5 In 1602 Bartholomew

Gosnold explored for English merchants the coast of New England

from southern Maine to Buzzards Bay. To him we owe the names

Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and the Elizabeth Islands. He

temporarily established a small trading post on Cuttyhunk Island

to barter with Indians and, apparently only incidentally, kept

an eye open for “finding a passage . . . to the South Sea and

China. "

6 The next year Martin Pring, on a purely trading

expedition, followed the same course as Gosnold, but entered

several waterways that Gosnold had overshot, including Massachusetts and Cape Cod bays. For some five weeks Pring made a summer

trading camp at a deep and protected anchorage that for many

years was identified as Plymouth Harbor but is now thought to be

Provincetown Bay. In 1605 George Waymouth, who three years

before had searched Canadian waters for the Northwest Passage,

3
sailed along the coast of Maine to find a colonial refuge for

English papists and fishing grounds for his merchant backers.

He discovered Monhegan Island, put into an excellent anchorage

that he named St. George’s Harbor, as it is sti11 called today,

and sailed up the broad St. George River estuary.7

The year before Waymouth sailed into Maine waters, Samuel de

Champlain had taken the first of three voyages between 1604 and

1606 on which he systematically explored and charted the coast

from Cape Breton Island to southern Massachusetts. While searching for a favorable site for a French colony, he was always on

the lookout-for “a passage which should lead near to the great

lake . . . where the water is salt: [a boon] as well for the

navigation of ships . . . as for the shortening of the way more

than three hundred leagues.” The great lake was Lake Huron,

which from Indian reports Champlain came to believe could “be

“

8 nothing else than the South Sea. In the course of his three

voyages Champlain navigated the Penobscot River and the lower

reaches of the Kennebec River. He entered Eastport, Machias,

Gloucester, Boston, Plymouth, Barnstable, Nauset, and Chatham

harbors and sailed through Vineyard Sound as far as Woods Hole.

Like many later mariners, he grounded on a reef off Cohasset or

Brant Rock and experienced difficulties among the shoals around

Monomoy Island. He sighted Portsmouth Harbor and stopped at the

mouth of Saco River, but sailing across Casco Bay he missed9the

fine harbor of Portland, as had other explorers before him.

Champlain's report of his voyages was the only fruit of his New

England venture. Sieur de Monts, who sponsored the colonial

project, lost the king's support, no French settlement was made,

and the history of New England became quite different from what

it might have been.

Chesapeake Bay, with its many inlets and feeding rivers, was

like deeply indented New England a magnet for European navigators. From 1560 the Spanish had an interest in the bay as a

site for a naval base to protect their treasure galleons from

pirates and privateers as they sailed from Havana northeasterly

with the Gulf Stream along the North American coast before

turning eastward for home. As this would be an expensive

undertaking, however, nothing was immediately done. The first

known English ship into the bay was a vessel of the first

Roanoke expedition of 1584 piloted by Simon Ferdinand, who

claimed to have been there previously with Spanish mariners.

The next year the colonists of Roanoke worked their way in a

small boat around Cape Henry and explored the southern shore of

the bay, Hampton Roads, and the lower estuary of York River.

Now that the English had a position on the American coast, the

alarmed Spanish, intent on destroying it and replacing it with a

Spanish settlement, sent Vicente Gonzalez in 1588 to make a
‘%

L

reconnaissance. But not knowing the colony’s location, Gonzalez

sailed past the small inlets through the Banks leading to Roanoke

Island and took his ship into Chesapeake Bay. There he searched

up the western shore and down the eastern, and departed without

finding a trace of the English.10

After that, exploration and settlement in the great bay was

left solely to the English, for the defeat of Spain’s great

Armada in 1588 destroyed Spanish power to contest it.

Christopher Newport, who transported the first colonists to

Jamestown, on instructions from King James worked his way up the

James River to the falls at present Richmond. More importantly,

Captain John Smith, who assumed leadership of the colony, spent

much of his first two years at Jamestown exploring the bays and

estuaries of the neighboring coast. Smith was under orders from

the Virginia Company to find a way to the Pacific and was

determined in any event to test Indian statements regarding such

a passage. In 1607 he went up the James and the tributary

Chickahominy River, looking for a lake at its source--the lake

that Englishmen at home continued to believe lay just beyond the

Blue Ridge Mountains and fed rivers flowing to the Pacific. The

next year he poked into numerous bays and creeks in Chesapeake

Bay, searching for good harbors and sites for settlement as well

as for the passage. He went up the Potomac, Patapsco, Sassafras,

Patuxent, and Rappahannock rivers, but the route to the “big sea

water” that supposedly lay somewhere to the northeast of

Chesapeake Bay always eluded him.ll

The Captain, still having hope, sent to his friend Henry

Hudson maps that indicated a passage to the western ocean might

be found north of the Virginia colony, somewhere about the 40th

latitude. Hudson, after having failed twice in the employ of

the English Muscovy Company to find a Northeast passage to China

through the arctic seas north of Europe, had entered the service

of the Dutch East India Company, which assigned him to try once

again. Before leaving Holland in 1609, he received Smith’s

letter, which inclined him to disobey instructions and look to

the west. Therefore, failing again to pass Novaya Zemlya, the

long barrier island north of Russia, he doubled back to North

America. He coasted south to Chesapeake Bay, then reversing his

course and examining the coast more carefully, discovered

Delaware Bay, but could find no deep and open channel. Working

past the confusing sand dunes and keys off the New Jersey shore,

he entered New York Harbor, close to the 40th latitude, early in

September, probably the first white man to do so since Verrazzano

almost a century before. The low screen made by the shores of

Long Island, Staten Island, and Sandy Hook had hidden well the

only river of the Atlantic coast that provided an entry into the

interior at all comparable to that of the St. Lawrence. Hudson
was able to navigate his vessel up the river that bears his name

for 150 miles before he had to use small boats to explore

farther. 12

The Hudson River was not the passage to the Orient, but

rather to the richest fur country south of the St. Lawrence.

Hudson's employers were not interested in the fur trade, but

other Dutchmen were. They returned to the river the next year

to pursue the exceedingly lucrative trade, and within a few

years expanded their operations. In 1614 Adriaen Block

navigated the treacherous Hell Gate, pushed eastward through

Long Island Sound, visited Narragansett Bay, rounded Cape Cod,

and sailed into Massachusetts Bay. In the course of this

exploration he discovered another long north-and-south river.

Crossing the awkward bar at the mouth of the Connecticut River

in Long Island Sound, he sailed upstream for 50 miles nearly to

present Hartford. Later the Dutch set up a depot there to tap

the fur supply of the long, rich valley. Meanwhile Cornelis

Jacobsen Mey sailed south to chart Delaware Bay, bestowing his

names, Cornelis and Mey, on the Delaware capes. In 1616 Captain

Cornelis Hendrickson sailed up the Delaware River as far north

as the Schuylkill, and in this region, too, the Dutch set up

trading posts and established a settlement. 1 3

In the same year, 1614, that Block and Mey were exploring

southern New England and Delaware Bay, Captain John Smith spent

11 weeks working southward from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod, carefully investigating the shores and waterways of the region, which

to him owes its name, New England. By this time several navigators had made their way along the New England coast, but Smith

was the first to put into many of its harbors, and his meticulous

record of physical features was of enormous value to later

mariners. In his Description of New England, a remarkably

accurate depiction published in 1616, he comments that he had

“sounded about 25 excellent good Harbours: in many whereof there

is anchorage for 500 sayle of ships of any burden; in some of

them for 5000. *’14 On his return to England he presented Prince

Charles with a map that for accuracy of detail and clarity of

presentation far surpassed the charts made by Champlain and other

navigators. Speaking of it, Smith explains:

I have drawn a Map from Point to Point, Ile to Ile, and

Harbour to Harbour, with the Soundings, Sands, Rocks and

Land-marks as I passed close aboard the Shore in a little

Boat; although there be many things to be observed which

the haste of other affairs did cause me omit. For set in

in being

ledge by

power to

any that

Salvages

sent more to get present commodities than knowdiscoveries for any future good, I had not

search as I would; yet it will serve to direct

should goe that waies, to safe Harbours and the

habitations. 15
THE LINES OF SETTLEMENT

The search for the Northwest Passage never shortened passage

to the East, but it added vastly to European knowledge of North

American geography and helped open the way for colonization.

American waterways now took on a more vital purpose. No longer

merely imagined avenues to riches beyond, they became the essential highways for the new settlements. The Atlantic coast is a

“drowned’* coast, its land and rivers having been submerged by

the prehistoric sinking of the continent’s edge. This produced

an indented coastline with innumerable bays and estuaries, into

each of which flows one or more rivers providing access for varying distances to the interior. -.— Majestic rivers like the Hudson,

the Delaware, the Potomac, and the Savannah, and many smaller

streams such as the Piscataqua, the Charles, the Patapsco, and

the Cooper, linked the coastal plain with seaports and through

them with Europe. At a time when travel and transportation by

waters was easier and more economical than by land, and often

the only means of communication in the new colonies, the rivers

and their tributaries largely determined the lines of settlement

and the course of trade.

In early Virginia, farms and plantations lined the James,

York, Rappahannock, and Potomac rivers up to the fall line.

Almost every farmer kept a boat on a nearby creek or river, and

the larger plantations had wharves for handling their own tobacco

at points which seagoing vessels of the day could reach. The

first settlers of Maryland established themselves on the

St. Mary's River, a small tributary of the lower Potomac, where

supplies could be brought in from neighboring Virginia and from

New England. From there the colony developed up the north bank

of the Potomac and around the great water road of Chesapeake Bay.

William Penn instructed his colonists to select on the western

side of the Delaware River a spot “most navigable, high, dry and

healthy, . . . where most ships may best ride, of deepest draught

of water, if possible to load and unload at the bank . . .

without boating. "

16 On the site chosen, where the Schuylkill

joins the Delaware, the city of Philadelphia was laid out. The

smaller nearby colonies of Delaware and New Jersey grew from

settlements hugging close to Delaware River and Bay and to the

east shore of the lower Hudson.

New Netherland, later New York, owed its beginnings to the

Hudson passage to Iroquois fur country. The colony’s Dutch

promoters, hoping to add permanence to their trading-post enterprises, encouraged immigration, and thinly scattered settlements

developed along the river to Albany. South Carolina grew from a

nucleus at Charleston, which had a good harbor at the point

where, as South Carolinians later boasted, “the Ashley and Cooper

rivers join to form the Atlantic Ocean.’* North Carolina settle7
ments grew up on the Cape Fear River and on Albemarle and Pamlico

sounds. Georgia, founded on the southern border of English

America as a military barrier against the Spanish in Florida,

began as a fortified town at the mouth of the Savannah River.

The Spanish, to protect their treasure fleets from French and

English marauders, had founded St. Augustine on Florida's

Atlantic coast in 1566. Few settlers, however, came to the

colony, and Florida during three centuries of Spanish rule

remained little more than a military outpost of Mexico and Cuba.

New England’s heavily indented coastline encouraged more

scattered early settlement than elsewhere. Within a decade

after the Pilgrims of the Mayflower fronted their colony on a

good harbor within the shelter of Plymouth Bay, a dozen or more

fishing and trading posts dotted the New England coast at inlets

from Penobscot Bay to Massachusetts Bay. The Pilgrims established posts on the Penobscot River, on the Kennebec River at

the site of modern Augusta, and, shortly after the Dutch opened

their post at Hartford on the Connecticut River in 1633, set up

another at nearby Windsor. The Massachusetts Bay colony started

with the founding of Boston at an excellent harbor and the establishment at the same time of six or seven other towns close by

on good water connections. The other New England colonies

similarly had their beginnings in groups of towns dispersed on

rivers and bays. Rhode Island developed from the communities of

Providence, Portsmouth, Newport, and Warwick, which ring

Narragansett Bay. Connecticut was formed by the amalgamation of

the Connecticut River settlements of Hartford, Windsor, and

Wethersfield with New Haven, Branford, Guilford, Stamford, and a

half-dozen other port towns on Long Island Sound. New Hampshire

got its start with Portsmouth on the Piscataqua River, Dover and

Exeter on tributaries of the Piscataqua, and Hampton on the

Hampton River, ten miles to the south. Maine originated from

Kittery, York, Wells, Saco, New Harbor, and other isolated towns

strung along its coast from the Piscataqua River to Pemaquid

Point.17

THE COURSE OF TRADE

During the colonial era settlement extended up the river

valleys as far as the fall line, and there generally stopped.

Some outlying communities existed above the line, and a few

hardy souls penetrated into and even beyond the Appalachian

Mountain chain stretching from Maine to Georgia, but not until

after the Revolution was population movement very strong beyond

the reach of navigable waterways. Throughout the whole period

land travel remained both difficult and costly and roads

appallingly bad. It was not until 1722, a century after New

England was settled, that a team was driven for the first time

from Connecticut to Rhode Island. And as late as 1818 the Niles
Weekly Register reported that two-thirds of the market crops of

the Piedmont were raised within 5 miles of some river and the

remainder not more than 10 miles from water that could be

rendered navigable. The value of the rivers was easy to

appreciate: in New York, where-the Hudson was the highway, the

average cost of carrying a bushel of wheat 100 miles was only

two pence, whereas the cost was a shilling, or six times as

much, in Pennsylvania, where 40 wagons, 160 horses, and 80 men

were required to transport the same amount of freight handled by

two or three men on a scow in New York.18

Waterways connected the colonies with the world and with each

other. Down the rivers and from the ports went the tobacco of

Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina; the rice and indigo of

South Carolina; the grain, flour, cattle, and meats of the middle

colonies; the fish, saltmeats, lumber products, ground vegetables, livestock, and simple manufactures of New England; and

the furs, hides, ship timber, and naval stores of New England,

New York, Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Into the

waterways and up to the towns and farms came tools, hardware,

utensils, luxury articles, and other commodities from England and

the continent; sugar, rum, molasses, diewoods, ginger, and other

exotic products from the islands of West Indies; and fruits and

wines from Spain, Portugal, the Mediterranean, and the Wine

Islands. A busy coastal traffic also developed, through which

the products of each region were exchanged. In New England and

the middle colonies the water connections along the coast were

also integral links in overseas commerce. Boston, New York, and

Philadelphia each served as an entrepot to which small vessels

carried the products of the surrounding area for export in oceangoing ships and from which foreign goods were transported by the

coasters to the dozens of smaller ports in each trading

network.19

The colonial settlements had the good fortune to be

abundantly provided with natural harbors having the rare combination of considerable shelter and sufficient depth of water.

Unlike many foreign ports, where extensive and expensive breakwaters or moles were required for protection against the

violence of ocean waves and storms, early American ports could

develop on sheltered estuaries and bays. Some ports, like

Baltimore, Philadelphia, Norfolk, and Savannah, lay from 30 to

152 miles inland from the sea. Others, like Portland, Boston,

and New York, opened more directly on the ocean, but were nevertheless relatively well protected by natural breakwaters of

islands and headlands.
Although nature cut some East Coast harbors deeper than

others, and at the entrances to many of them had the annoying

habit of forming bars from river silt or from shifting shore

sands, their depths were generally adequate to the demands of

the time. Vessels throughout the colonial period and for more

than a half-century after were of diminutive size compared to

the cargo carriers of today. Much of the coastal trade between

Atlantic ports was carried by shallow-draft sloops and schooners

that could enter harbors with shoal entrances. The sloops,

rigged fore-and-aft with a single mast, were often under 25 tons

and rarely more than 100. Sometimes they were equipped with

centerboards instead of fixed keels, which could be drawn up

when traversing shoal waters. Schooners, rigged fore-and-aft

like sloops but with two masts, usually ranged in size from 50

to 150 tons. Originating in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1713

or 1714, the schooner was destined to stand for a century and a

half as the favorite and distinctive rig of American waters. It

was peculiarly adapted to the requirements of New World navigation, where on many rivers and estuaries the wind tended to draw

up or down the channel, and passage involved a great amount of

beating to the windward in short tacks. For such service the

fore-and-aft rigged schooner, which could sail closer to the

wind, was superior to square-rigged vessels of similar size.

While schooners, and even large sloops, were employed in

off-shore trade, square-rigged brigs and ships were more common

on the longer sea voyages. The two-roasted brigs usually displaced from 150 to 250 tons, and the three-roasted ships seldom

more than 3000 A vessel over 200 tons was considered large, and

a 400-ton ship was looked upon both in Europe and the colonies

as being too large for successful operation. Small vessels best

met the needs of the highly dispersed trade that prevailed both

here and abroad before railroads, good highways, or developed

canals and river works could concentrate export shipments in a

few major ports. Because each port and waterway was the focal

point of its own small hinterland, and there was comparatively

little concentration of export shipments prior to loading,

cargoes were loaded and discharged in many places. Small vessels

could enter and easily maneuver in the several hundred small

ports on the Atlantic coast and the many small ports of foreign

countries. They could quickly find sufficient cargo and depart,

whereas larger vessels might have to wait for some time or sail

with partly filled holds. Moreover, as trade was dispersed,

spasmodic, and speculative, and all merchant ships were tramps

with no fixed routes or schedules, merchant shipowners preferred

to spread their risks by employing two or three small vessels

rather than a single large one.

10
With full-rigged ships seldom exceeding 300 tons, and with

shipmasters content to wait for 5- to 9-foot tides to carry them

over harbor entrance bars, the numerous Atlantic harbors

generally had sufficient depth of water just as the colonists

found them. Newburyport at the mouth of the Merrimack River,

and Salem on Massachusetts Bay, with mean low-water depths

diminishing to 7 or 8 feet, became maritime metropolises and

leading shipbuilding centers turning out large full-rigged ships

as well as smaller craft. Charleston, with some 12 feet at low

water and 17 feet at high, and Savannah, with a channel 7 feet

deep at low water and about double that at high tide, became the

major ports of the South. Even a place like Kennebunkport in

Maine, a small hamlet located on an exceedingly small river,

with water at low tide as little as 4 feet in places, could

develop into a thriving mercantile port building everything from

sloops to full-rigged ships.21

Some harbor improvement was no doubt attempted in the

colonial period, but evidence is sketchy. In three studies of

the port of New York, for example, the only references to

colonial port improvement, except for the construction of

commercial facilities such as docks, wharves, and weighthouses,

are the brief comments of one study that in 1662 the Dutch built

a small breakwater to protect ships against floating ice from the

Hudson, and that when the English took over the colony their

improvements included the construction of bulkheads along the

waterfront.22 Dredging appears to have been performed for the

first time in America in 1729 at the mouth of the Mississippi

River, but evidence indicates that probably the only attempt

made on the East Coast during the colonial period was in 1774,

when Philadelphians employed a horse-powered grab dredge to

clear out ship slips. Dredging was not likely to be tried much

in any event, for prior to the application of steam power to

dredging equipment, doing the job by man or animal power was

slow, laborious, and at best minimally effective.

Whatever the harbor depth, the channel had to be found and

followed. Local authorities as a matter of course adopted the

age-old device of marking channels with buoys, and at some major

harbors pilots were necessary for all vessels except the smaller

coasters. Portland Harbor, with a straight, deep channel and a

run of only 3.5 miles from open sea to docks, was easy to enter.

Norfolk, though 30 miles from the sea, had the same advantage of

a deep and clear entrance. Boston Harbor, 17 miles from the

ocean, had sufficiently deep water, but its channel threaded

through rocky islands hazardous to the mariner in darkness,

storm, or fog. The entrance to New York Harbor appeared to the

uninitiated to be a 6-mile breadth of good water between Sandy

Hook and Coney Island, but a broad sandbar stretched between the

two shores, and the main ship channel was only a few hundred

11
yards wide. Small craft could use three lesser channels, but

close to each lay dangerous sandbanks. Philadelphia, just over

100 miles from the sea, Baltimore, 152 miles, and Savannah, 30

miles, all had long winding channel approaches that invited

grounding. 24 Illustrative of the measures taken was the action

of the colonial assembly of New York in 1763 empowering the

governor to appoint one master and three or more wardens for the

port of New York. Their duties included examining and commissioning all pilots, keeping buoys in repair, and maintaining

lighthouses. At Boston Harbor, piloting was one of the functions

of its early lighthouse keepers, who were also the collectors of

impost fees.25

—

The lighthouse was another ancient aid to navigation that

the colonists began to employ to a limited extent. The first

American lighthouse was Boston Light, located on Great Brewster

Island (then called Beacon Island) at the entrance to the harbor,

which was kindled on 14 September 1716. The enterprise was set

in motion by Boston merchants led by one John George, who

petitioned the General Court for this protection to the ‘*Lives

and Estates of His Majesty's subjects.” The cone-shaped tower

was made of rough-cut stone and was at first illuminated by

tallow candles. These were later replaced by lamps burning whale

or fish oil. New York’s lighthouse resulted from a lottery

organized in 1762 to raise the money for a tower 85 feet high at

Sandy Hook. Newspapers described it as the best light on the

continent, an easy boast as at the time only three others

existed. Local authorities administered lighthouses until 1789

when the Treasury Department of the federal government assumed

control of the 12 stations then operating along the seaboard.

Eight were located on the busy but troublesome waters of New

England. The northernmost lay at Portsmouth, New Hampshire; five

warned of Massachusetts coastal dangers at Newburyport, Cape Ann,

Boston, Gurnet at the entrance to Plymouth Bay, and Great Point

on Nantucket Island; and two blinked out from New England's

southern coast at New Haven, Connecticut, and at Beaver Tail at

the entrance to Narragansett Bay. The four lights to the south

were at Sandy Hook; Brant Point, New Jersey; Cape Henlopen at

the mouth of Delaware Bay; and Charleston, South Carolina.26

THE COASTAL RIVERS

Rivers during the colonial period, like harbors, generally

provided satisfactory navigation in their natural condition.

Most major rivers were not seriously obstructed below the fall

line, and the head of sloop navigation was often a considerable

distance inland. The Hudson was a splendidly navigable waterway

for some 150 miles above New York to Troy. The head of tidewater

and sloop navigation on the Delaware was at Trenton, about 140

miles from the sea. In Virginia the three great river ports of

12
Alexandria, Fredericksburg, and Richmond developed on the

Potomac, Rappahannock, and James rivers, each approximately 100

miles from Chesapeake Bay. Even on New England's comparatively

shorter streams, vessels could sail 30 miles up the Penobscot to

Bangor, 45 miles up the Kennebec to Augusta, and 52 miles up the

Connecticut to Hartford. Smaller but important rivers up and

down the coast permitted sloop navigation at different tide

stages a dozen or more miles inland to busy commercial towns

such as Haverhill, Massachusetts, on the Merrimack; Norwich,

Connecticut, on the Thames; and New Brunswick, New Jersey, on the

Raritan. Many streams that today are little more than winding

brooks were also once commercial arteries of some significance.

Observers in the nineteenth century noticed a diminution in the

size of rivers compared to that in the eighteenth, a phenomenon

possibly resulting from deforestation. Bound Creek in New

Jersey, for example, now only a brook between Elizabeth and

Newark, once had wharves and landings for the accommodation of

sloops ● And the town of Exeter, New Hampshire, on a small branch

of the Piscataqua River now used only by small recreational

craft, was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a

shipbuilding community ranking in importance with Portsmouth.27

Above the head of sloop navigation, flatboats, skiffs,

bateaux, wherries, and other shallow-draft vessels plied the

rivers. The Durham boat, developed on the Delaware River to

fill the need for a sizable carrier that could go against the

current, was a favorite craft on many streams. Box-like, with

straight and parallel sides extending to about 12 feet from the

ends where they curved to the stem and stern posts, the Durham

boat was usually about 60 feet long, 8 feet wide, and 42 inches

deep from gunwale to keel plank. It drew from 3 to 5-1/2 inches

of water when light, and about 28 inches loaded, and could easily

carry 150 barrels of flour or 600 bushels of corn. Going downstream it floated with the current, helped along at times by long

oars or by a sail attached to a removable mast. The sail was

sometimes used going upstream, but more often the boat was poled.

The crew, using 12- to 18-foot poles shod with iron, set the

pointed tip in the riverbed and, pushing as they went, walked

back the length of the boat on planks about a foot wide, called

‘*walking boards,” laid on the thwarts on each side. Sometimes it

was possible to draw the boat along by grasping overhanging

branches, or “pulling the brush” as it was called, At particularly difficult rapids iron rings were attached to rocks and

the boat was pulled upstream by boathooks or ropes.

Local authorities occasionally improved river navigation.

Adjoining towns on the lower Connecticut River sometimes

deepened the channel lying between them, as did Hartford and

Wethersfield in 1686. From time to time the legislature of

colonial Virginia authorized associations of gentlemen to raise

13
subscriptions for clearing rivers of logs, sandbanks, or other

obstructions. In South Carolina the assembly assumed occasional

responsibility on sections of streams by appointing commissioners

authorized to make assessments of labor and money on local

residents who would benefit from improvements. In 1770 citizens

of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, wanting to make commercial travel

on the Delaware above Philadelphia less hazardous, appointed

commissioners to remove obstructions in the river and generally

improve navigation. Collecting subscriptions to cover the

expense, the commissioners surveyed the river between Trenton

and Easton and hired men and boats to remove the worst of the

rocks. At Trenton Falls, where the river dropped ten feet in a

distance of about 1,200 yards, the channel was changed and buoys

were placed to mark it. The next year the legislatures of Pennsylvania and New Jersey sanctioned these efforts by declaring

the Delaware a common highway and by empowering the commissioners

to continue; but, as before, individual donations provided the

necessary funds. In 1773 a group of New Jersey residents took it

upon themselves to organize a lottery to raise 3,000 pounds to

clear and deepen the channel of Elizabeth-Town Creek so that

boats might be brought to a landing in the center of town. 29

River improvement in the colonial period, however, like harbor

improvement, was obviously not a very extensive practice.

14
Chapter II

TRANSPORTATION REQUIREMENTS

“+-

.

From the first days of the Republic Americans recognized that

the transportation facilities of the colonial era no longer

sufficed. The Revolution disclosed the isolation of the colonies

from one another and the difficulties of moving men, military

supplies, and goods up and down the seaboard. Roads were few and

poor, all but the smallest rivers had to be ferried, and British

warships menaced the customary traffic of coastal sailers.

Thoughts turned inevitably to inland water connections. During

and after the Revolution an unprecedented number of Americans

surged westward. New settlements sprang up beyond the fall line,

creating incentives to extend navigability farther inland by

constructing passages around the falls. The growth in inland

population also promoted the establishment of cities near the

head of tidewater to provide transfer facilities for the trade

on the upper rivers. Royal edicts such as the Proclamation of

1763 no longer restricted the flow of settlers into the more

distant regions beyond the Appalachians. The number of people

living west of the divide increased from a few thousand when the

war began to 120,000 by 1790, laying the foundation for the

states of Tennessee and Kentucky. These new westerners also

needed access to markets.

Wars in Europe, which lasted almost without respite from

1793 to 1815, intensified the need for better transportation.

The wars forced the belligerents to remove mercantilist

restrictions on foreign trade with their colonies, threw the

commerce of the world largely into American bottoms, and created

an enormous demand for American foodstuffs and other supplies.

Flour nearly doubled in price, sending a tide of migration into

new grain-growing regions of western New York, western

Pennsylvania, and still more remote areas along the Ohio River

and the shores of Lake Erie. The cost of long overland hauls,

however, placed many newly settled regions beyond the range of

profitable use. Western Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio

could reach markets by way of the Mississippi River, but with

New Orleans for some years in Spanish hands this was a

politically uncertain avenue. For even more years the distances

involved, time consumed, primitiveness of transport, and chance

availability of ships at New Orleans--made this route an

economically marginal one. In the lower South the cotton

industry arose at this same time, stimulated by an increasing

demand for the fiber in Europe and Whitney’s invention of the

cotton gin in 1792, which cheapened production to a fifth of its

15
former cost. Populations spread westward into upland sections

suitable for cotton culture, adding to the pressures for better

connections with the ocean highway.

A NATIONAL SYSTEM

The pressures for improved transportation facilities were

not only economic and military, but also political. Improved

communications would help tie together a still fragile new

union, especially if they ended the isolation of the West. How

to keep regions without an outlet for their produce except by

way of New Orleans or the St. Lawrence loyal to the United

States was for some years a matter of serious national concern.

In 1808 considerations of commerce, defense, and political

integrity led Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin to

prepare at the request of the Senate a comprehensive plan for

tying the new nation together with government-sponsored roads

and canals. Gallatin’s great achievement was not to offer much

that was new in the way of specific plans, but to combine many

local improvement schemes then being urged or already undertaken

into a coherent national system to be constructed under the

aegis of the federal government.

To improve communications between the northern and southern

states, Gallatin proposed the construction of canals across four

*“necks” of land between Boston Bay and Albemarle Sound, North

Carolina, which would open an almost continuous natural “tide

water inland navigation’” from Massachusetts to Georgia. To this

should be added “a great turnpike extending from Maine to Georgia

passing through all the principal seaports.” To bring the

settlers beyond the mountains into easy communication with the

East, the Secretary recommended the construction of roads over

the Appalachian divide to connect the Susquehanna or the Juniata

River to the Allegheny, the Potomac to the Monongahela, the James

to the Kanawha, and the Santee or the Savannah to the Tennessee.

He further recommended that the navigation of the eastern rivers

of these four great land and water routes be improved, principally by constructing canals around falls. To open communication

between the East and the Great Lakes, where advantage could be

taken of a natural gateway through the mountains, Gallatin

advised the construction of canals to connect the Hudson River

with Lake Champlain, the Hudson River with Lake Ontario, and

Lake Ontario with Lake Erie around Niagara Falls.

Because such “internal improvements” would unite the nation,

improve its defense, and advance the economy, Gallatin proposed

that the federal government either do the work itself or

subsidize private companies. He considered the projects of such

obvious value that the state involved would readily consent.

16
President Jefferson, however, always cautious about federal

authority intruding upon the states, proposed an amendment to

the Constitution that would “remove every impediment” to the

1 great national plan. But events interfered. Foreign difficulties leading to the War of 1812 gripped the nation's

attention, and Gallatin's superb. “Report on Roads and Canals’*

was shelved.

Belligerent interference with American shipping, American

retaliatory restrictions on trade, and then the war itself

served to accentuate the need for internal improvements. The

embargo and the war diverted much of the capital employed in

shipbuilding and commerce to manufacturing, and better roads and

waterways were essential for the larger home markets desired.

The British blockade reduced coastal shipping to a trickle,

forcing American goods to move over inland routes. Coastal

roads clogged with traffic, wagons backed up for miles at river

ferries, and teams took weeks and even months to go from Boston,

New York, or Philadelphia to Charleston. In some localities

serious shortages of goods normally carried by sea pushed prices

to new heights. Rice cost three times as much in New York as in

Charleston; flour cost three times as much in Boston as in

Richmond. The absence of good roads and dependable water

communications also helped to frustrate American military

campaigns on the northern and western frontiers.2

With these experiences in mind, President Madison in 1815

urged upon Congress “the great importance of establishing

throughout our country the roads and canals which can best be

executed under national authority.’” As had Jefferson, Madison

suggested that any defect of that authority could be remedied by

3 constitutional amendment. Representative John C. Calhoun of

South Carolina promptly sponsored the so-called **Bonus Bill,”

which provided for a national system of internal improvements

funded by monies due the government from the newly chartered

second Bank of the United States. A strong nationalist at this

point, Calhoun viewed internal improvements as a broad national

question. But the debate and vote in Congress revealed that

many of his colleagues were more concerned with state and

sectional self-interest. New England, whose roads were relatively good, was almost solidly opposed. The measure, she

feared, would increase an already serious drain of her people to

the West and would promote the commerce of New York, Philadelphia, or Baltimore to the disadvantage of Boston. The South,

which was well supplied with navigable rivers but had the

poorest roads in the country, was largely opposed because she

believed that other sections would benefit more than herself.

The middle states of Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey,

apparently with similar thoughts, voted two to one against the

measure. The West, badly needing internal improvements,

17
strongly approved, but local jealousies nevertheless produced

some opposition. Only New York and Pennsylvania gave almost

unanimous support. Both had promising routes to the West

through their territories, New York hoped for federal aid in

building the Erie Canal, and Pennsylvania hoped to reach the

South by way of a Chesapeake and Delaware Canal and to see

Pittsburgh profit immeasurably by the opening of the Falls of

the Ohio to navigation. Ultimately Calhoun’s bill squeaked by,

but President Madison, firm in his belief that a constitutional

amendment was necessary, vetoed it.4

Internal improvements at federal expense nevertheless seemed

assured. In 1819 Calhoun, now Secretary of War, elaborated at

the request of the House of Representatives a program much like

that put together by Gallatin. Ignoring the constitutional

question, Calhoun stressed the defensive value of a “judicious”

system of roads and canals. He also advocated the extensive use

of Army Engineers in making surveys and plans. Army Engineers

were already involved in the work of improving internal communications and were to become even more so in the next several

years. In 1816 the War Department, acting on the assumption

that England would have to be fought again at some future date,

had created a Board of Engineers for Fortifications. Initially

consisting of Colonel William McRee, Major Joseph G. Totten,

Captain J.D. Elliot of the Navy, and Brigadier General Simon

Bernard, a French military engineer employed under congressional

authorization by President Madison to assist the Corps of

Engineers, the board sought to create a comprehensive defensive

system based on the armed services, fortifications, and interior

land and water communications.

On essentially military assignments, Army Engineers

identified transportation routes while making western

explorations. They made navigational surveys of the nation’s

great inland lakes and rivers and of rivers and harbors along

the Atlantic coast. They laid out military roads and

occasionally other highways. State governments and private

corporations, faced with a critical shortage of civil engineers,

called on the War Department for engineering assistance in

making canal surveys. The Engineer Department within the War

Department ordered the Board of Engineers to formulate plans for

breakwaters at the mouth of Delaware Bay, as called for by an

act of Congress, and Congress directly turned to the Army

Engineers to determine the most practicable means of improving

the navigability of stretches of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers

and to provide a plan for improving the entrance to the harbor

of Presque Isle, Pennsylvania, on Lake Erie. 5
President Monroe, while at first taking the strict

constructionist attitude of his predecessors toward internal

improvements, was by 1823 satisfying his constitutional scruples

by holding that Congress could make appropriations for improvements of national benefit if control of the improvement companies

remained within the states. He also recommended that the Corps

of Engineers survey the route of a canal to be built by private

enterprise connecting Chesapeake Bay with the Ohio River and the

routes of several proposed canals to connect the Ohio with Lake

Erie.6

With federal encouragement of internal improvements

conspicuously on the increase, Congress on 30 April 1824 passed

a General Survey Act authorizing the President to employ Army

and civil engineers to make surveys, plans, and estimates of

roads and canals of national importance. Its evident purpose

was to lay the foundations for a program of appropriations for

internal improvements, with federal subscription to the stocks

of companies undertaking them. To implement the act President

Monroe appointed a Board of Engineers for Internal Improvements

consisting of General Bernard, Colonel Totten, and John L.

Sullivan, a prominent civil engineer. Under the direction of

the board, Army Engineers examined all the major land and water

routes proposed by Gallatin and Calhoun, and many other routes

as well. The board began formulating plans for great national

arteries of transportation. But the scheme of Gallatin and

Calhoun for a rational, integrated system of internal

communications developed under federal leadership was never

realized.

The vote on the General Survey Act had again ominously

revealed that particularist interests were far stronger than

nationalist concerns. Successive Congresses and chief executives

approved federal grants to help build specific roads and canals,

and the average annual appropriation for internal improvements

increased with each administration through that of Andrew

Jackson. But bitter state and sectional jealousies,

constitutional arguments that often seemed forced and unreal,

and extremes of partisan politics all served to thwart plans

that looked to the broad national interest. Increasingly, the

General Survey Act became merely a vehicle for providing

engineering assistance to state and private agencies.

Complaints against this practice

duties on Army Engineers finally

the act. The tremendous task of

America was thus left largely to

state and private enterprise.7

and the pressure of other

resulted, in 1838, in repeal of

developing transportation in

the conflicting ambitions of

19
EARLY CANAL CONSTRUCTION

Artificial waterways were the most favored mode of

transportation. The construction of turnpikes beginning in the

1780s had by the 1820s greatly improved overland transportation.

But roads were not economically feasible for hauling anything

except the most compact and valuable goods. Bulky products like

wheat and corn could not be transported at a profit beyond 100

miles at the most. Contemporaries calculated that four horses

could pull a wagon weight of one ton 12 miles a day over an

ordinary road and one-and-a-half tons 18 miles a day over a turnpike. Comparatively, four horses could draw a boatload of 100

tons 24 miles a day on a canal.

From the late eighteenth century, when canals began to prove

their worth in England, forward-looking Americans like George

Washington, Robert Morris, and Albert Gallatin had visualized

major waterways penetrating deep into the American hinterland.

It was easier to conceive great waterways, however, than to

construct them. America’s eastern terrain was not, like

England's, one of gentle contours. The science of civil

engineering in America was in its infancy, and would-be

engineers learning as they went often committed costly errors.

Excavating machinery still belonged to the future, and canals

were formidable challenges in an age of hand tools, gun powder,

wheelbarrows, and horse-drawn carts. Canals also required heavy

expenditures, and large pools of venture capital did not yet

exist in the United States. Even when a few early enterprises

overcame these obstacles, they were such financial failures as

to discourage further investments. It was not until construction

on the epic Erie Canal was under way several years and seemingly

conquering all difficulties that the Canal Era in the United

States really began.

Prior to that time many canal companies were organized.

Before the year 1793 eight states had incorporated a total of 30

companies, and between 1776 and 1823 New Hampshire alone

chartered 20. Some companies intended to construct lengthy

overland canals, but most planned to improve river navigation by

building short canals around falls and rapids. Many soon

abandoned their efforts. Before work began on the Erie, only

about 100 miles of canal had been constructed, and few canals

were more than 2 miles long. 9

The Riverine Canals

Although the canals bypassing river falls were not long,

they were often impressive engineering achievements. Some

required more than a half-dozen locks to make their descents,

and almost all needed one or more dams or wing dams to divert

water into their locks and ditches.

20

-

 _
Canal construction in New England began in 1792 on the

Connecticut River at South Hadley, Massachusetts. Dropping 50

feet in two-and-a-quarter miles, the river at this point was

impassable even for canoes. Undertaking a difficult task for

the time, the canal company, the “Proprietors of the Locks and

Canals on Connecticut River,” in one place cut a gorge 300 feet

long and 40 feet deep through solid rock. For about a decade

the company used an "inclined plane” to raise and lower boats

from one river level to the other. Employed here for the first

time in America, this device was perhaps suggested by Dutch

stockholders. It was a 230-foot-long stone and timber ramp upon

which the boats rode on a carriage that was hauled up or eased

down by chains connected to water wheels. In 1805 the company

replaced the inclined plane with five locks.

Meantime, other companies constructed locks and dams at four

falls farther up the river, making the Connecticut navigable for

flatboats for more than 200 miles above its mouth. A difficult

passage, however, still remained at Enfield Rapids about 11 miles

above the head of sloop navigation at Hartford. A long canal was

required, and the high estimated cost deterred investors.

Shippers got through inconveniently by transferring their goods

to smaller boats or by passing the rapids at times of high water.

It was not until a threat to Hartford arose from a plan to divert

the Connecticut Valley trade to New Haven by a canal from that

city to a point on the river above the rapids that a company

formed in 1824 succeeded in digging a canal around them. The

company went to work in earnest in 1827, and the Enfield Canal,

six miles long with three locks, opened in 1829.10

The Merrimack River, rising at the same height as the

Connecticut but reaching the sea by a course only half as long,

saw even more construction. In 1796, Newburyport interests

built a canal around Pawtucket Falls at present Lowell,

Massachusetts, to permit lumber to pass downriver to the

shipyards at Newburyport and other towns on the lower Merrimack.

Farther up the river, subsidiaries of the Middlesex Canal Company

had by 1814 constructed, as part of the company’s extensive

navigation system, six more sets of locks and canals to bypass

more than a dozen falls and rapids. The largest work was the

Amoskeag Canal at present Manchester, New Hampshire. A mile

long and equipped with several dams and nine locks, it overcame

a descent in the river of 45 feet.ll

In Maine, the Kennebec River was navigable for 65 miles to

Waterville, but no seaport lay at its mouth about 30 miles up

the coast from Portland. In 1795 a short canal constructed

between the Kennebec and Casco Bay along the line of the Stevens

River allowed a more direct connection to that city’s

wharves .12

21
Canal construction improved navigation on other rivers down

the Atlantic seaboard. The Susquehanna River and its tributaries

provided water transportation for a huge area of interior

Pennsylvania and southwestern New York, but for more than 40

miles above its entrance into Chesapeake Bay it was choked by

rapids and falls. Between 1792 and 1798 a stock company dug a

l-mile canal around Conewago Falls, the worst obstacle, just

below Columbia, Pennsylvania, and improved the river by sluices

for some 17 miles farther down.

13 Flatboats and arks could

now come down the river more easily, but to get back up was

still difficult and often impossible.

The Potomac Canal Company, organized in 1785 with George

Washington as president, set out to open the Potomac River to

Cumberland, Maryland, over 200 miles above tidewater and 300

miles from Chesapeake Bay, and to connect it by road to the Ohio

River. By 1818 the company had constructed crude chutes without

locks around the three upper falls of the Potomac, locked canals

around the Great and Little falls above Georgetown, and locked

canals to pass five falls on the branch Shenandoah River, bankrupting itself in the process. The work on the falls above

Georgetown was both a remarkable piece of engineering and

extremely expensive. At Great Falls, where the river descends

76 feet in little more than a half-mile, the eastern end of the

canal and the last two of five locks were be cut from solid

rock. The 37-foot descent of Little Falls required four locks

in a canal 2 miles long.

The James River Company, chartered in 1785 and reorganized

as a state corporation in 1820, had a comparable plan of

improving navigation on the James River and linking it by

turnpike to the Kanawha River, a tributary of the Ohio. This

project also owed its conception to Washington, who was the

company’s honorary president for a decade. The company

constructed and later enlarged a canal around the falls above

Richmond and built another canal where the river breaks through

the Blue Ridge. It also completed the turnpike connecting the

James and Kanawha rivers and sporadically made river navigation

improvements. But it was still far from its goal of providing

adequate transportation through to the West when, under the

influence of Erie fever, it was again reorganized as a private

company in 1835.15

The state of South Carolina also participated directly in

improving river transportation, and for several years after

establishing a Board of Public Works in 1819 invested heavily in

building locks and canals at falls. By 1825 small boats could

make a trip of more than 300 miles from Cambridge to Charleston

by passing through three state-built canals on the Saluda River

and another on the Congaree and then through the Santee and

22
Cooper Canal constructed earlier by private enterprise. South

Carolina also constructed canals at two places on the Wateree

River, a large tributary of the Santee flowing down from the

north, opening the river to navigation for about 200 miles from

Charleston. .

In North Carolina, the Roanoke Navigation Company, chartered

in 1812 to improve navigation on the Roanoke River, had by 1823

constructed nearly nine miles of canal around the falls near

Weldon, where, within a few miles, the river drops 100 feet.

The canal terminated at its lower end, however, at a basin at

Weldon, 1,800 feet from the river. As the extension to the river

entailed the construction of six more locks at considerable

expense, nothing more was done for several years and goods on

reaching this point had to be drayed and transshipped. Upon

insistence by the state that the company accept its stock

subscription--which the directors considered inadequate--and

complete the waterway, the company resumed work in 1828 and the

canal opened to through traffic in 1834. Shortly afterward the

Roanoke River flooded, breaking the sides of the lower locks.

Refusing to rebuild them, the company argued, as it had before,

that produce could be carried from the basin to the river by

land as easily as it could pass through the locks. Within a few

years railroads drew away a large part of the trade that had

formerly gone down the lower Roanoke, and the canal was no

longer considered of importance to the commerce of the

region.

Early Overland Canals

Only three major canals were constructed before the Erie

Canal was pushed across New York State, but compared to that

ditch, they, too, were small undertakings. The longest was the

Middlesex Canal in Massachusetts. Started in 1793 and completed

in 1803, it ran 27 miles from the Merrimack River above Pawtucket

Falls to the Charles River near Boston Harbor. Initiating a

competition between ports that was to be a prominent feature of

the Canal Era, its proprietors planned to divert the traffic of

the Merrimack, which carried much of the trade of New Hamphsire,

from Newburyport to their own city of Boston. Upon completion

of the Merrimack River canals in 1814, canal boats with capacities of 30 tons could travel from Boston to Concord, New

Hampshire. Smaller boats could continue farther up the river

and up the tributary Pemigewasset River to Plymouth, 113 miles

from the sea. Despite the canal's value to the territory it

served, it was a financial failure from its first day of business

to its last, 50 years later. Local conditions permitted competition from teamsters in carrying general goods, and when the

growth of manufacturing created a demand for raw materials that

23
was favorable to the canal, railroads reached out to gamer this

trade and eventually diverted to their cars every ton of traffic

formerly moving by water. 17

The Santee and Cooper Canal of South Carolina, constructed

between 1792 and 1800, was a 22-mile waterway cut between the

two rivers to give the agricultural products of central South

Carolina a better outlet to Charleston. The Santee and its

tributaries drained the whole South Carolina uplands, but its

entrance to the sea, some 50 miles northeast of Charleston, was

choked by a swampy delta and a shallow bay. From there boats

had to pass to Charleston inside a broken string of sea islands,

by turn risking shoal water and open ocean. The first boat to

make the less hazardous passage through the Santee and Cooper

Canal, in July 1800, carried a cargo of salt from Charleston up

the Cooper, Santee, and Congaree rivers some 200 miles to

Columbia. Although it opened the interior of South Carolina to

water transportation, the Santee and the Cooper Canal} like the

Middlesex Canal, never made money. Construction was more costly

than had been expected. Then the rise of the cotton industry in

the uplands in place of cereal production soon ended all shipment

of grain to the coast. Cotton, far lighter in weight and more

precious in value, could better bear the cost of transportation

by land, especially since transport on the rivers was plagued by

frequent mishaps, low water, and delays. Railroads also began

to compete for the upland traffic in the 1840s, and the canal

was finally abandoned in 1858.18

The Dismal Swamp Canal, a 20-mile waterway between the

Pasquotank River flowing into Albermarle Sound and the Elizabeth

River of Virginia near Norfolk, was designed to give North

Carolina a short and sheltered outlet to a deepwater port. Begun

in 1793 it was the only segment of Gallatin's proposed intracoastal waterway under construction when the Secretary wrote his

report. For years, however, sporadic work produced little more

than a muddy, shallow ditch which not even flatboats carrying

shingles cut in the swamp could navigate until 1805. The first

craft other than a shingle flat to travel its course was a 20-ton

boat in 1814, and it was not until a year-and-a-half later that

another such passage was recorded. The first vessel to make the

trip completely loaded with North Carolina cotton, flour,

tobacco, and hogs was a 35-ton schooner in 1823. In 1826

Congress directed the Army Engineers to make surveys and

estimates for improving and enlarging the canal so that it might

serve as part of a chain of canals contemplated along the

Atlantic coast. To pay for the reconstruction Congress

ultimately purchased $200,000 worth of Dismal Swamp Canal Company

stock. In 1829 barges carrying up to 92 tons, as well as sloops,

schooners, and rafts, began plying the enlarged waterway.

Traffic steadily increased, and the canal at last became a

paying enterprise and an important part of the transportation

system of eastern North Carolina.

24
THE INSPIRATION OF THE ERIE

In view of the record of canal construction, the building of

the Erie Canal was an act of faith. Authorized by the New York

legislature in 1817 and completed in 1825, “Clinton's Big Ditch”

stretched 363 miles from Buffalo on Lake Erie to Albany on the

Hudson. It was the longest canal in the world and the greatest

construction job that Americans had ever undertaken. Its high

cost of $7 million was met, not by private investors, but by the

state. Engineering problems were greater than any previously

confronted in canal building, but the lack of professional

engineers was overcome by the appointment of able, though

untrained , people to Plan and supervise construction. They

devised -ingenious arrangements of cables, pulleys, wheels, and

gears for bringing down trees and uprooting stumps. Instead of

the usual shovel and wheelbarrow, they used specially designed

plows and scrapers for moving earth. Even before its completion,

the Erie Canal was a phenomenal financial success as well as a

transportation triumph. The middle section of the canal from

Utica to Rome opened in 1819, and successive sections as they

came into use quickly filled with traffic. Within seven years

after the canal opened to through traffic, tolls brought in

enough money to repay the whole cost of construction. 20

The Erie funneled much of the commerce of the West to New

York City. The area through which it passed, much of it formerly

unsettled wilderness, boomed with prosperity. Boston,

Philadelphia, and Baltimore --New York’s commercial rivals--felt

that they too must find ways of tapping the western market, and

the idea took hold that almost any region reached by a canal

would so prosper as to merit the investment. The Erie’s success

provided the stimulus that finally got the great canal-building

boom under way. The huge sums necessary for construction were

supplied to a large extent either directly or indirectly through

public aid. Congress made substantial contributions by granting

public domain to canal companies in the West and by purchasing

stock in the Chesapeake and Ohio, Chesapeake and Delaware, Dismal

Swamp, and Louisville and Portland canal companies. It was the

states, however, that made the major capital contributions. In

some cases, as in New York and Pennsylvania, they directly owned

and operated extensive canal systems. More often states

purchased or guaranteed the stock of private companies, the

heaviest investments being made by Pennsylvania, Virginia, and

Maryland. Sometimes states permitted newly organized banks to

invest a portion of their capital endowment in the stock of a

canal company, as did Maine, or they granted canal companies

themselves banking privileges, as did Rhode Island and New

Jersey. The Middle Atlantic states granted valuable monopoly

rights rather than financial assistance to the promoters of the

so-called “anthracite canals.” Municipalities, such as New

Haven, Connecticut, and various banks also invested in canal

companies.

25
NEW ENGLAND CANALS

Of the major canals of the eastern seaboard, three were

constructed in New England. The Cumberland and Oxford Canal in

Maine, chartered in 1820 and completed in 1827, connected Sebago

Lake with Casco Bay near Portland. Although only 20 miles long,

it was supplemented by lake and river navigation that reached

another 30 miles inland, and for many years it was an important

outlet for products of the southeastern corner of the state.

More successful than other New England canals, it did not

succumb to railroad competition until the 1870s.22

The Blackstone Canal, constructed between 1824 and 1828,

linked Worcester, Massachusetts, with Providence, Rhode Island,

45 miles away. Worcester was surrounded by good farming land,

but the area had been slow in developing because of the heavy

expense of hauling produce to the Boston market. Despite

irregular service resulting from too much or too little water

and from poor maintenance, the canal proved to be a considerable, if brief, boon to the area. Trade increased, villages

sprang up, and mills and factories developed along its line.

When a railroad from Worcester to Boston was completed in 1835,

however, business declined rapidly, and when Worcester was

connected by rail to Providence in 1847, traffic ceased

entirely.23

The longest and most costly, and also the least successful,

of New England canals was the New Haven and Northhampton,

chartered in 1822 and after many difficulties opened in 1835.

Connecting with the Connecticut River at Northhampton,

Massachusetts, some 40 miles above Hartford, it was designed to

capture for New Haven the trade of the river's rich upper

valley, as Enfield Rapids, when the project began, still

hindered navigation to Hartford. Poorly constructed though

costing well over a million dollars for its 78-mile course,

constantly short of capital, repeatedly damaged by floods, and

always short of water in dry seasons, it seldom carried enough

traffic to cover expenses. In 1847 it was abandoned.24

New England’s construction of canals fell considerable short

of it vision and schemes. An old plan of Boston merchants

dating back to 1791 for a canal from the Charles River to the

Connecticut River, “to take the trade from Hartford,” was

revived on grander lines. One proposed route would run the

canal through Worcester, stopping the drainage of trade by the

Blackstone Canal, connect with the Connecticut, taking that

river’s trade from both Hartford and New Haven, and continue

across the Berkshire Mountains to the Hudson River near Albany,

where it would divert to Boston much of the Erie trade going to

New York. In 1825 the Massachusetts legislature ordered surveys,

26
and canal commissioners reported eloquently on the benefits of

the enterprise. But the legislature, recognizing that costs

would be huge and engineering difficulties almost insurmountable,

turned its attention to railroads.25

Canal promoters in Maine contemplated several large

projects, which would direct state trade to the St. Lawrence

River or to Boston, that never reached the survey stage.

Ambitious canal schemes in New Hampshire and Vermont, however,

progressed to the point where Army Engineers surveyed several

routes under the authority of the General Survey Act. One route

connected Rutland, Vermont, with the Champlain Canal, which the

state of New York had built in conjunction with the Erie Canal

to connect Lake Champlain to the Hudson River. The other routes,

while consisting of numerous sections, each with its own state

or private sponsor, would together have formed three great lines

of navigation reaching across New England from Lake Champlain to

the Atlantic, one terminating at Portland, another at Portsmouth,

and the third at Concord on the Merrimack. Intersecting the

principal rivers of the region--the Connecticut, the Merrimack,

the Androscoggin, and the Kennebec, which the Army Engineers

also surveyed with a view to improving navigation--the canals

would have formed with the rivers a huge transportation grid

serving five states. Railroads, however , quashed the projects

even before the Engineers had time to complete their reports and

designs. 27

One other canal proposed for New England was to have a

future, though it had to wait nearly a century. This was a

waterway that would eliminate the dangerous passage around Cape

Cod and shorten the sailing distance to New York. In his “Report

on Roads and Canals," Gallatin had proposed a route from Boston

Harbor to Narragansett Bay along a course surveyed by the state

of Massachusetts in 1806. In 1824-1825 the Army Engineers made

another survey of this route, but they were more interested in a

shorter one that cut across the base of the cape between

Barnstable Bay and Buzzards Bay. Less than eight miles long,

the route was traversed most of the way by rivers flowing north

and south, with the ridge between them rising only about 30 feet

above sea level and at one point only three-quarters of a mile

wide. The Plymouth colonists had crossed here by boat and foot

as early as 1623 to trade with the Narragansett Indians and later

with the Dutch at New Amsterdam. By 1676 people were talking of

cutting “a passage from the South Sea to the North.” In 1697

and again in 1776 the General Court of Massachusetts appointed

committees to investigate the feasibility of such a canal, but

with no result. In 1791 the legislature ordered a third survey,

and in 1818 a Boston company chartered that year made yet

another. Plans and estimates for a canal, however, were not

forthcoming until the Corps survey. Although there seemed to be

27
no doubt about the canal’s practicability, no serious obstacles

to construction, and no great costs involved, neither Congress,

nor Massachusetts, nor private enterprise took any further

action. The project languished until 1860, and then it was

another 54 years-before the canal was finally

MIDDLE ATLANTIC CANALS

The Anthracite Canals

built.28

The Middle Atlantic states saw the greatest activity in

canal building, with three distinguishable groups of waterways

constructed. One complex, known as the “anthracite canals” was

constructed to carry this new fuel from eastern Pennsylvania to

New York and Philadelphia markets. The northernmost canal, the

Delaware and Hudson, ran from Honesdale in northeastern Pennsylvania to the Delaware River, which it crossed by means of a dam

and slackwater and later by a suspension aqueduct. The canal

continued northeasterly across New York for a total of 108 miles

to Rondout on the Hudson near Kingston. Started in 1825 and

completed in 1828, the canal did a tremendous business making an

increasingly popular fuel available to New York and New England

cities. Originally a small waterway that could accommodate boats

carrying only 25 or 30 tons, it was enlarged several times until

boats of 140 tons capacity could be used. Enormously profitable,

the canal company paid its investors good dividends for many

years with the peak of its traffic not being reached until

1872.29

The Lehigh Canal, completed in 1829 to provide another

outlet for Pennsylvania anthracite, ran nearly 72 miles from

White Haven through Mauch Chunk to Easton on the Delaware

River. Replacing an inadequate system of transporting coal on

the Lehigh River, the Lehigh Canal, although still depending in

small part on slackwater navigation on the river, was a large,

well-constructed waterway capable of floating boats of 100

tons. In its peak year, 1860, 2,000 barges ran its course,

carrying more than a million-and-one-third tons of traffic.30

At Easton, the Lehigh Canal fed into two other canals, one

supplying anthracite to Philadelphia, the other to New York.

The Delaware Division Canal, opened over its full length in 1832,

paralleled the Delaware River for 60 miles south to Bristol, from

where boats could navigate the river to Philadelphia. Built by

the state of Pennsylvania, it was the only anthracite canal not

under private management. In a mistaken effort to save money,

it was constructed on a smaller scale than the Lehigh, with the

result that cargoes of the larger Lehigh boats had to be transshipped at Easton to small craft. Nevertheless, the Delaware

Division Canal did a large business and yielded good return on

construction costs.

28
. . The Anthracite Canals

R EA D ING

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
The Morris Canal, also connecting with the Lehigh at Easton,

was intended not only to supply New York with coal, but to stimulate agriculture and manufacturing and revive the iron industry

of northern New Jersey, which had flourished in colonial times.

Winding through the hills of northern New Jersey to Newark Bay,

the canal had to overcome an elevation of 914 feet. With the

limited lift of locks in those days, the 200 to 300 locks

required made the project prohibitively expensive. The canal’s

promoters, considered using inclined planes, but wanting reliable

professional advice, called on Secretary of War Calhoun for

assistance. General Bernard and Colonel Totten of the Army's

Board of Engineers for Fortifications surveyed the route in

1823. They agreed that the idea was financially and technically

practicable. The inclined planes, constructed wherever a long,

steep hill had to be surmounted, were steam-powered cable railways on which the barges ascended or descended about 10 feet for

every 100 feet of track. Twenty-three inclines took care of the

greater part of the elevation, and only 23 locks were needed to

cover the rest.

Construction on the canal began in 1825, and in 1831 the

90-mile connection between the Delaware River and Newark was completed. In 1836 the canal was extended another 12 miles across

the Bayonne neck to Jersey City. Although a considerable

engineering achievement, the Morris Canal, like the Delaware

Division, was the victim of shortsighted planning. NO doubt due

in large degree to lack of funds, its locks could not

accommodate boats of more than 25 tons, thus excluding the

larger Lehigh barges. Hurting the profitability of the canal

even more were the scandalous financial manipulations of its

directors, who had been granted banking privileges. When

bankruptcy hit in 1841, a new company took over the canal,

enlarged it, and managed to keep it out of the red until after

the Civil War. Despite its shortcomings, the canal carried a

considerable tonnage of anthracite and contributed materially,

as had been intended, to the economic development of northern

New Jersey. 32

A fifth anthracite canal, the Delaware and Raritan, cut 44

miles across central New Jersey from Bordentown on the Delaware

River to New Brunswick on the Raritan, which connected it to

Perth Amboy. The location was one of the four “necks*’ of land

across which Gallatin had recommended the construction of canals

in 1808. Completed in 1838, the canal was a large and wellconstructed waterway that not only carried considerable

Pennsylvania coal, but also much commerce of a more general

nature. Despite handicaps of railroad ownership and irresponsible management, the canal was one of the most important in the

country before the Civil War, and for a few years actually

. carried greater tonnage than did the Erie.33

30
Canals of Broader Commercial Purpose

Three other Middle Atlantic canals built by private

enterprise, while also important to the coal trade, were

primarily carriers of general merchandise. One, the Chesapeake

and Delaware Canal, provided an inland shortcut for shipping

between the two great bays. At their heads the land distance

between the bays narrows to less than 20 miles. Cutting a canal

across this isthmus had been discussed since the Delaware Colony

was in the hands of the Dutch. A route was surveyed as early as

1764, and construction repeatedly urged. Like the Delaware and

Raritan, the proposed canal was a link in Gallatin's projected

intracoastal waterway, and like the Morris Canal, it was surveyed

in 1823 by Engineers Bernard and Totten, whose recommendations

appear to have been decisive in determining the route that was

adopted. When opened in 1829, the canal reduced the distance of

water transportation between Philadelphia and Baltimore by more

than 300 miles. Financial embarrassments plagued the canal in

its early years, but by the 1840s it was carrying steadily

increasing amounts of traffic that in 1872 reached a peak of a

million-and-one-third tons. But the company never fully

recovered from the financial disasters of its first decade, and

until the federal government purchased its property and

franchises in 1919, it was continually in debt. Ultimately the

government transformed the waterway from a small barge canal

into a ship canal as part of the Atlantic Intracoastal

Waterway.34

The Schuylkill Navigation and the Union Canal was a combined

waterway designed to bring to Philadelphia the trade of interior

Pennsylvania and southwestern New York reached by the Susquehanna

River and its tributaries. The Schuylkill Navigation, which

opened in 1825, consisted of 45 miles of slackwater and 63 miles

of canals that extended the navigation of the Schuylkill River

from Philadelphia to Port Carbon. The Union Canal, completed

two years later, united the Schuylkill at Reading with the

Susquehanna at Middletown, just south of Harrisburg. The

77-mile Union Canal, however , proved to be a bottleneck in the

extensive system. Because of topographical difficulties and a

shortage of water, the canal’s dimensions limited traffic to

boats of 25 tons, thereby excluding the larger barges of the

Schuylkill and those of the Pennsylvania state canals soon built

to the west. Enlarged in the early 1850s to give it the capacity

of the state canals, the Union for a few years doubled its

traffic, but the excessive costs of reconstruction together with

increasing railroad competition led to declining profits by the

end of the decade.35

31
The Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal represented Baltimore's

bid to garner the rich trade of the Susquehanna watershed. This

could be done only if the navigability of the lower Susquehanna,

with its 40-odd-miles of rapids and falls, were improved. In

1823 Army Engineer Captain Hartman Bathe, at the request of

Maryland, surveyed a route along the river to circumvent these

obstacles. It was not until 1840, however, that the Susquehanna

and Tidewater Canal, reaching from Havre de Grace on Chesapeake

Bay 45 miles up the river to clear navigation at Wrightsville,

opened to traffic. It was a costly canal, about $80,000 a mile,

but its large locks were soon heavy with traffic, justifying the

expense. Ironically, in view of the intentions of the canal’s

original-promoters, Susquehanna trade flowed not only to

Baltimore but also, by taking advantage of the Chesapeake and

Delaware Canal, to rival Philadelphia.36

The Pennsylvania State Canals

The third group of canals in the Middle Atlantic region, and

the most ambitious of all the artificial waterway projects, were

the Pennsylvania state canals. As the Erie Canal neared completion, merchants of Philadelphia, fearing a heavy loss of

western trade to New York, began to push for a waterway of their

own to Pittsburgh on the Ohio. Opposition was not wanting. It

came from wagoners and innkeepers on the turnpikes, from

farsighted people who said that the still unproven railroad

would be the better answer, from Pennsylvanians who would share

in the canal's costs but not in its benefits, and from critics

who insisted that the canal would cross such rugged and difficult

terrain it could never compete successfully with the Erie. But

canal fever carried the day. In 1826 Pennsylvania began the Main

Line Canal.

But the state had to settle for a compromise between waterway

and rail. The Union Canal, which already connected Philadelphia

with the Susquehanna River, was too small to carry all the

expected traffic. Moreover, Major John Wilson of the Army

Engineers, who made a preliminary examination of the route at

the request of the canal’s promoters, advised that the area

between Philadelphia and the Susquehanna was much more

appropriate for a railroad than for a canal. Therefore the

first section of the Main Line from Philadelphia to Columbia on

the Susquehanna was a railroad, which for its first few years,

was horse drawn. From Columbia a series of canals along the

Susquehanna and Juniata rivers brought the Main Line to the

backbone of the Allegheny Mountains near Hollidaysburg.

The famous 36-mile Allegheny Portage Railroad surmounted the

crest. On a series of ten inclined planes, the canal boats,

which could be dismantled into sections, rode on cable cars up

one side of the divide and down the other. Canals following the

Conemaugh and Allegheny river valleys brought the Main Line the

rest of the way to Pittsburgh.

3

42
Opened over its entire length in 1834, the Main Line was 30

miles longer than the Erie Canal and cost in excess of $4

million more to build. The Erie took the Appalachians in flank,

rising at its highest point only 650 feet above sea level. The

Main Line had to take the mountains head on, crossing at an

altitude of 2,322 feet. The Erie could travel its course with

84 locks; the Main Line needed 174. The Main Line did attract

considerable business, but it never became a serious challenge

to the Erie. The Portage Railroad bottlenecked traffic and the

excessive lockage slowed passage further. Then at Columbia

cargoes had to be transshipped to railroad cars or to boats

small enough to slip through the Union Canal. In 1840 the last

disadvantage was partially overcome with the completion of the

Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal, which permitted large barges to

continue on to Chesapeake Bay and to Philadelphia or to rival

Baltimore. But traffic on the Main Line continued to be more

costly and more time consuming than on the Erie.

Because of political pressures from sections of the state

that wanted their own waterways, Pennsylvania built not only the

Main Line but also a whole system of branch canals, whose total

mileage by 1834 was almost double that of the through route to

Pittsburgh. Sections of the state not yet satisfied, however,

continued to force construction, until by 1842 Pennsylvania had

772 miles of canal built and another 162 miles building. Then

the bubble of confidence burst. Most of the canals, suffering

from high initial costs, slow movement of traffic, and strong

railroad competition, were losing money; and the state was

virtually bankrupt. In the 1850s Pennsylvania sold most of her

canals to railroads and other private corporations.37

SOUTHERN CANALS

The success of the Erie also gave new life to the South's

schemes to share in the rich trade of the West. The dream of

the old Potomac Company to connect the Potomac River with the

Ohio was revived by the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company,

organized in 1828. Taking a lesson as well as enthusiasm from

the Erie, the company abandoned the system of short canals and

river improvements constructed by the old company and substituted

a permanent artificial waterway extending up the Potomac Valley.

Receiving generous stock subscriptions from Virginia, Maryland,

and the federal government, the company began work on the

Potomac River section from Georgetown to Cumberland, 184 miles

away at the base of the mountains. This barrier, even higher

here than in Pennsylvania, was not to be crossed by tracks like

the Main Line, or by road as the Potomac Company had planned,

but would be surmounted by 246 locks and a 4-mile tunnel piercing,

the divide at 1,900 feet. This engineering challenge was never

met. The waterway did not open to Cumberland until 1850, and

33
its $11 million cost exceeded that of the Erie and Champlain

canals combined. Disputes over rights of way, a cholera

epidemic, political obstructionism> and continual labor,

financial, and engineering problems had delayed construction and

increased costs beyond the $8 million estimate of the Corps of

Engineers in 1826 that canal supporters had deemed preposterous.

The canal's dimensions, however, were generous. Therefore

despite competition from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, whose

tracks paralleled most of its route, the waterway accommodated

large barges and attracted considerable business, mostly

transporting coal from around Cumberland. The canal continued

in use into the twentieth century, but it never became a major

transportation agency or a paying enterprise.

The plan to connect the James River with the Kanawha was also

revived. In 1835 the assets of the old James River Company were

taken over by a private corporation under the name of the James

River and Kanawha Company, with the state of Virginia holding

three-fifths of the stock. Making the last attempt to unite the

Atlantic with the West by water, the company displayed enormous

optimism, for not only were the engineering problems substantial,

but by 1835 the faith placed in waterways was already being

transferred to railroads. Like the Chesapeake and Ohio Company,

the James River and Kanawha Company made little use of the old

- - river-improvement works and relied on slackwater navigation for

only a small part of the route. And it too planned to pierce

the mountains with a tunnel. Surveys made by Major William G.

McNeill of the Army Engineers between 1826 and 1828 had found

that it would be practicable to do so with a tunnel 2.6 miles

long at an elevation of about 1,900 feet. Subsequent surveys

did not change these plans. By 1840 the canal was completed 146

miles from Richmond to Lynchburg. From that date to 1856, as

funds became available, it was extended about another 50 miles

toward Covington. Then work was suspended for want of means to

carry it further. As with the Chesapeake and Ohio, difficulties

of construction were great and the cost, over $10 million,

exceeded expectations. Although the company never turned debts

into profits, the canal traveled through relatively rich country

and did a substantial business. In 1860, despite railroad

competition, it was by far the largest freight carrier in

Virginia.39

Following the Civil War, the James River and Kanawha Company

turned to Washington for succor , propagandizing the idea of a

great central waterway from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.

The moment was opportune, for there was growing resentment in

the West over alleged exploitation by railroads. The National

Board of Trade; national commercial conventions; and the states

of Ohio, Iowa, and Kansas, claiming that railroads were not

meeting the demands of the West for the cheap and abundant
\

L

transportation of bulky produce to the seaboard, petitioned

Congress to construct the great “central water line.” In 1870

Congress authorized the Corps of Engineers to make a new survey

to the Ohio. Major William P. Craighill, who directed the

survey, reported, as had Major McNeill over 40 years before,

that a water route through the mountains was entirely

practicable. In 1868 the canal company had surveyed a route

through them at a lower elevation than originally planned, which

would pierce the crest with a tunnel 9 miles long. Craighill

found that the job could be done with a tunnel 7.8 miles long.

He estimated the cost of constructing the uncompleted parts of

the line and of enlarging the rest to admit boats carrying 280

tons at around $50 million, an expense that he argued was

warranted by the needs of the West for a cheap and certain

commercial outlet to the Atlantic coast. “It has been supposed

by some that the day of canals is past,” he also commented.

“Facts do not sustain this view . . . . When the circumstances

are such that slowness of movement is permissible and the

quantities to be moved large, the cheapness of the canal becomes

obvious to everyone who chooses to consider the statistics of

the case.” Chambers of Commerce and other commercial organizations now fell in behind the idea, and in 1872 President Grant

urged Congress to insure that the West and South had adequate

transportation for their increasing products. In 1874 the Corps

submitted to Congress further estimates and details of surveys,

which did not differ materially from Craighill's. But if the

proposal ever had a chance with Congress, the Panic of 1873,

which turned the great postwar economic boom into despairing

depression, ended any such possibility. By the end of the

decade the James River and Kanawha Canal became another

abandoned enterprise.

THE END OF THE CANAL-BUILDING ERA

By 1840 the great period of canal construction was over.

Work continued on the Chesapeake and Ohio and on the James River

and Kanawha canals; and the Union, Morris, and Delaware and

Hudson canals were enlarged and improved. But no new construction on canals of major size was started, and by the 1850s

abandonment of canal mileage exceeded new building. High

construction costs, heavy fixed charges, and less than expected

revenues contributed to the collapse of the canal-building boom,

but they do not appear to have been vital causes. Railroads,

whose construction costs seem to have averaged higher than those

for canals, also had their share of financial difficulties, yet

investment in them continued, and for a time most canals were

profitable ventures. Pennsylvania in the East and Indiana in

the West became disastrously involved in the enthusiasm for

canal building, but their experiences were not typical. The

financial crises of 1837 and 1839 perhaps retarded construction.

35
But canal building came to an end primarily because by 1840 most

of the practicable routes for long-distance artificial waterways

had been developed and by that year the enormous potential of

the railroad could no longer be doubted.41

In September 1825, one month before the Erie Canal opened to

through traffic, George Stephenson ran his pioneer locomotive

over the Stockton and Darlington Railroad line in England. The

steam engine promised a future for railroads that early horsedrawn systems, which were little more than turnpikes with tracks,

could never have achieved. Interest in railroads immediately

spread to the United States. Numerous corporations, starting

with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company in 1827, began

constructing roads on the eastern seaboard. The first trial of

an American-made steam locomotive took place in August 1830.

The early railroads were crude affairs, but they were rapidly

improved, and they completed the transportation revolution in

the United States that had begun with the construction of

turnpikes. Less obliged than canals to conform to the lay of

the land, not freezing up for part of the year, unaffected by

droughts and seldom by floods, easier to connect with the point

of origin and the ultimate destination of goods, and carrying

freight at the prodigious speed of 20 miles an hour, railroads

possessed advantages that few canals of the time, even those

capable of handling heavy traffic, could hope to overcome. Many

canals, especially those that carried coal, continued to be

relatively prosperous well into the second half of the nineteenth

century. Some did not reach their peak traffic until after the

Civil War, but eventually railroad competition forced their

abandonment.

Though the Canal Era was brief, it greatly furthered the

transportation revolution in the United States that permitted a

huge expansion of agriculture and industry in the decades before

the Civil War. The waterways opened new areas to profitable use

and stimulated economic development everywhere they serviced.

Even those that failed to pay a fair return on investment were

almost always useful to the public, even if not profitable to

their owners.

36
Chapter III

RIVER AND HARBOR IMPROVEMENT

-

For a half-century after Independence, river and harbor

improvement remained a local responsibility. Federal activity,

of any significance, began in the 1820s, motivated by the same

economic and military considerations that led to the General

Survey Act of 1824 relating to roads and canals. But just as the

intention of that measure was frustrated within a decade and a

half, so was the program of navigation improvement. Occasional

federal projects continued to be carried out, but it was not

until after the Civil War, when a new economic, technological,

and political climate prevailed in the nation, that the federal

government initiated a vigorous and continuing program of river

and harbor improvements.

EARLY LOCAL EFFORTS ON RIVERS

As shallow sloops and often larger vessels generally had

little difficulty navigating the tidal reaches of rivers, state

agencies and private companies directed their attention mostly

toward improving small boat navigation on upstream stretches.

They made some rivers considerably more usable, but more often

their success was limited.

On the Merrimack River the series of canals constructed by

subsidiaries of the Middlesex Canal Company provided a workable

system of navigation. All the locks were large enough to pass

the 75-foot boats employed on the canal. Towed along that ditch

by horse or oxen, and propelled on the river by oars, poles, and

under favorable conditions by sail, the boats could travel

uninterrupted to Concord.

In 1812 steamboats, used for the first time as tugs on an

American waterway, began towing barges on the canal and river.

But they proved of little advantage. At speeds greater than

three-and-a-half miles an hour on the canal they badly washed

its banks, and whatever time they saved was usually more than

offset by delays at the locks. On the river, traffic was not

sufficiently regular, nor were the reaches between the canals

sufficiently long, to use tugs profitably. Towing by steam was

abandoned in 1820 and never resumed.l

Navigation on the Connecticut River above the head of sloop

navigation at Hartford, while much improved by canals, was less

satisfactory. Flatboats carrying 15 to 18 tons of cargo could

use the river during high water in spring and fall, but during

the summer months navigation was restricted to lighter boats

with draft of only 12 to 15 inches. Other conditions were even

37
more disadvantageous. Although flatboats operated with some

regularity between Hartford and the Massachusetts towns upriver,

and for a time small steamboats towed barges on stretches of the

river, inhabitants of the upper valley often found it cheaper to

send wagons overland to Boston, to Portland, or to Lake

Champlain, from where products could be sent down the Champlain

Canal to the Hudson River. As separate companies operated the

canals, tolls were not uniform and locks varied in size. Boats

that could pass the locks in the lower river could not squeeze

through those in Vermont. Nor was there satisfactory slackwater navigation, as the dam of one company did not back water

to the foot of the next. At ten places on the upper river the

help of extra men or oxen, and sometimes the toilsome expedient

of lightening the cargo, was required to get boats through

rapids.

Below Hartford the major obstacles to navigation were river

bars scattered downstream from the city for about ten miles. The

Connecticut at this point flows through an alluvial region and

its banks are easily eroded, causing constant changes of its bed

and the formation of shoals at every flood stage. In 1800 the

Connecticut legislature entrusted improvement to the Union

Company, which, like the canal companies, could recover its

expenditures by collecting tolls. Dredging sandbars, reveting

banks with stone and planting them with willows, and extending

wing dams into the river to scour shoals by concentrated

currents, the company secured a channel of seven-and-a-half feet

over the bars. The toll system, which opponents said should not

be applied on “navigable tide waters*’ of the state, aroused

intermittent hostility throughout the six decades of the

company’s chartered life. But the improvements enabled larger

vessels to reach Hartford and relieved all trade of many

interruptions, especially in periods of low water.2

In Pennsylvania the major efforts to improve river navigation

were the Schuylkill Canal and slackwater system, discussed in

the previous chapter, and works on the Lehigh River. Beginning

in 1791 the state legislature enacted provisions for improving

the Lehigh, but little was accomplished until 1818, when Pennsylvania allowed the Lehigh Coal Mine Company to take measures to

move coal down the river to market. In some places the company

scoured out shoals with wing dams, and in others it made rapids

navigable by the unique device of “artificial freshets.” This

consisted of constructing V-shaped dams across the river at the

heads of rapids, thus forming pools above them. Sluice gates

opened in the dams created artificial floods that floated coalcarrying arks over the rapids. The arks were merely large boxes

16 to 18 feet wide and 20 to 25 feet long, steered with oars like

a raft. For economy of operation two arks were joined together,

fastened by hinges to allow them to bend up and down in passing

38
over rapids. As men became accustomed to handling the arks and

the channel of the river was improved, more sections were added

until their whole length reached 180 feet. From the mouth of the

Lehigh the arks floated down the Delaware River to Philadelphia.

There they were broken up for lumber, as the system of artificial

freshets did not permit upstream navigation. It was this disadvantage, combined with rapidly increasing business, that soon

led to the construction of the Lehigh Canal. On the Delaware

River, the state carried out minor improvements. In 1817 it

spent $10,000 to improve navigation from Trenton to Foul Rift,

12 miles above Easton, most of the money being used to blast

rocks and build wing dams at Rocky Falls and Wells Falls. Two

years later the state constructed wing dams at Scudders Falls.3

The southern states, with their plentiful, lengthy, but

shallow rivers, saw the greatest efforts at improvement. The

James River Company that set out in 1785 to create a transAppalachian transportation system was essentially a river

improvement concern, and during its half-century of existence it

not only built two canals but cleared obstructions from the river

and constructed wing dams and sluices. Sluicing consisted of

cutting channels through shoals, confining them by stone walls

on each side, and directing stream flow through them with wing

dams at their approaches. The company also improved navigation

on the Rivianna, Willis, and North river branches of the James.

But its operations were so limited and ineffective that inhabitants along the James persistently complained. In dry seasons

the river was not everywhere navigable by boats drawing a mere

foot of water, as required by the company's charter.4

The Potomac Canal Company, which also began operations in

1785, was, like the James River Company, primarily intent on

river improvement, and it undertook canal construction only at

falls. The canals, however, absorbed so much of its limited

resources that it made only minor excavations in the main river

and its larger branches. In the upper course of the Potomac it

never attained more than a foot of permanent water. Thus it

failed to achieve its modest charter objective, which was to

provide a safe channel in all seasons for vessels carrying 50

barrels of flours

The state of Virginia, which controlled the James River

Company after 1820, also financed other river improvements. In

1816 the legislature created a Fund for Internal Improvement, to

be administered by a Board of Public Works. The system remained

in effect until the Civil War, by which time the state held an

interest in 12 canal and navigation projects, several still

unfinished, as well as in roads, bridges, and railroads.6

39
North Carolina enacted river improvement measures as early

as 1784. It chartered a number of companies to carry out the

projects, but decades passed with little being accomplished. In

1819 the state established a Board for Internal Improvements to

solve its transportation problems. North Carolina produce was

finding its markets largely in neighboring states. Most of the

trade of the Roanoke Valley made its way to Norfolk, and much of

the trade of the central part of the state flowed southward into

South Carolina. North Carolinians hoped that if these leakages

were checked a commercial city would grow up on their own coast

equal in importance to Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Charleston.

To this end the state subscribed to stock in companies chartered

to improve navigation on six rivers, build a canal between the

Yadkin and Cape Fear rivers, and cut a short intracoastal

waterway.

But results continued to fall far short of objectives. The

construction of sluices on the Roanoke River and its Staunton and

Dan tributaries, for which Virginia's subscriptions were larger

than North Carolina's, secured small boat passage on the Staunton

through the Blue Ridge Mountains to Salem, Virginia, and on the

Dan to the foot of the Saura Town Mountains in North Carolina.

Otherwise little progress was made, and most of the companies

abandoned their efforts. The Board for Internal Improvements

attributed the failure partly to blunders made “before the aid of

science and skill had been enlisted to direct the operations” and

partly to diffusion of effort among so many projects. Indeed,

too much had been attempted with too little. Private investment

had been meager, and total state expenditures to 1833 were less

than $300,000.7

South Carolina expended much more money but fared little

better. Beginning in 1799 a number of companies tried to make

various rivers more navigable with slim finances and even slimmer

results. Traffic in the state was still too light to create

effective demands for expensive improvements, and cotton growers

managed to get their crops to market profitably with rivers and

roads as they were. Not until competition arose from western

cotton producers after 1815 were South Carolina planters spurred

to lower the cost of marketing their crops through improved

transportation facilities. The effort began in 1817 when South

Carolina appointed a “Civil and Military Engineer," purchased a

company that had attempted improvements on the Catawba and

Wateree rivers, and subscribed heavily to the stock of the Winyaw

and Wando Canal Company. The next year it appropriated $1

million for an ambitious program, to be spent at the rate of

$250,000 a year.

In 1819 the state placed the work under the direction of a

Board of Public Works but because of squabbles over the board’s

management transferred authority to a Superintendent of Public

40
Works in 1822. By 1834 South Carolina had spent nearly $2

million, more than half of which went into costly canals

bypassing falls in the center of the state; had improved to some

extent nearly 2,000 miles of rivers, the most important work

being done on the Wateree and the Great Peedee; and had

constructed nearly 150 miles of roads. Yet the results were on

the whole disappointing. Individual improvements had been

selected on a highly political basis, thus frustrating the

development of a coherent transportation system. Improvements

above the fall line, including most of the canals, locks, and

sluices, were not navigable by steamboats, and almost all were

ultimately abandoned. Below the fall line, periodic flooding

choked the channels with debris and sandbars, yet maintenance

was neglected as disappointment over the failure of the system

to meet expectations created a reluctance to spend more money on

waterways. Finally, as with many inland navigation projects

along the East Coast, by the time the system was completed the

practicability of railroads was being demonstrated. As in North

Carolina, the poor results were attributed in part to too much

diffusion of effort. There was hardly a public work in the

state, except the State Road and the Columbia Canal, declared a

disillusioned governor, that “would find a purchaser . . . at a

public auction."8

In Georgia reaction to the spread of the cotton culture

westward after the War of 1812 paralleled that in South Carolina.

Upland sections of the state demanded better means of transportation, and in 1817 Georgia made its first appropriations for river

improvement. It allocated funds for each of the important

streams in the state, to be expended by local commissioners, and

established a fund of $250,000, later increased to $500,000, to

earn interest for financing projects. Improvements came so

slowly and were so disappointing when they did come that in 1825

the state established a Board of Public Works to inaugurate a

more centralized and effective program. The next year, however,

it abolished the board and went back to a policy of appropriations expended by local commissioners. By 1829$ when efforts

petered out, river navigation had been little improved.

The Savannah River, flowing to the state’s principal port,

was of special interest to many Georgians. Because it formed

the state’s boundary with South Carolina, improvement was considered a matter for joint action; but as Georgia was the most

benefited, it put the most money into the river. In 1817 a

steamboat company began running vessels on the Savannah to

Augusta. Within a few years, however, despite work on the

river’s channel, traffic declined because of the inability of the

boats to reach Augusta during long seasons of low water. At one

time the legislature planned more extensive improvements to

facilitate their passage but subsequently turned its attention

41
to a railroad line to Macon. Inhabitants of the Piedmont

continued to demand improvements on the upper course of the

Savannah, but rapid descents and frequent heavy freshets

prohibited better navigability at reasonable cost. The farmers

of the upper river had to wait for a railroad.g

EARLY HARBOR WORK

Harbor improvement in the early years of the Republic was

minimal. Trade still remained highly dispersed among many small

ports, and seagoing vessels, while adopting better hull designs

and rigs, did not increase much in size from colonial times.

Ships still rarely exceeded 400 tons displacement and 100 feet in

length. As late as 1828 the largest ship in Salem's merchant

fleet, which in the early nineteenth century experienced its

golden age of world-wide commerce, was 404 tons.10

But not all ports had the depth of water or degree of

protection shipping interests preferred. In 1784 the port

wardens of Baltimore tried to deepen the harbor using a Dutchtype mud mill, a dredging machine that raised spoil with longhandled scoops operated by man-powered treadmills. Dredging is

said to have been attempted on the Thames River channel to

Norwich, Connecticut, in 1785, on the Hudson River shoals between

Albany and Troy in 1799, and on the Delaware River mud at New

Castle Harbor in 1803 and after. In 1804 Oliver Evans of Philadelphia built a steam-powered dredging machine equipped with

wheels for travel on land and a paddle wheel for propulsion on

water, but the extent of its use is uncertain. In 1785 Pennsylvania, in an early effort to furnish protection to shipping,

constructed timber piers at Marcus Hook on the Delaware River to

provide a harbor of refuge from drifting ice.ll

Beginning in 1790 several states carried out harbor

improvements under the authority of congressional enabling acts.

Congress granted permission to levy tonnage duties on shipping to

Georgia to pay for raising wrecks sunk during the Revolutionary

War to block Savannah Harbor, to Maryland to support improvements

by the port wardens of Baltimore, and to Rhode Island to subsidize work at Providence by a “River Machine Company" incorporated

for that purpose. In 1798 Congress approved the incorporation of

a company by Massachusetts to erect a pier at the mouth of the

Kennebunk River in Maine to protect the channel. In 1806 it

allowed Pennsylvania to levy tonnage duties at Philadelphia for

“building piers in, and otherwise improving the navigation of the

"

12 river Delaware, with which monies, apparently, the state

constructed ice harbors of refuge at Chester and Fort Mifflin.

Harbor improvements by the federal government's own agencies

developed slowly. The First Congress of the United States had

provided that all expenses for the maintenance and repair of

4 2
_

lighthouses, beacons, buoys, and public piers should be defrayed

out of the Treasury of the United States and that all contracts

for work be made by the Secretary of the Treasury with the

approval of the President.13 Under this authority relating to

navigation safety, the federal government undertook its first

harbor projects. In 1802 a congressional directive to the

Treasury resulted in the construction of cribwork piers at New

Castle, Delaware, to provide vessels a harbor of refuge from the

dangerous Delaware River ice. In 1820-1821 the Treasury built a

pair of cribwork piers at the entrance of the Kennebunk River to

confine the channel and obtain more water over the bar. In 1822

Congress authorized the Treasury to construct a breakwater to

improve a harbor of refuge at the Isles of Shoals, about seven

miles off Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and to erect two piers at

Cape Henlopen, at the mouth of Delaware Bay, to create a refuge

from the twin threats of storms and ice. Calling on other

government agencies in 1823 for projects other than piers,

Congress authorized a collector of customs to supervise the

removal of a channel obstruction between the harbors of

Gloucester and Annisquam on Cape Ann in Massachusetts and ordered

a survey by an Army Engineer to determine how best to improve the

entrance of the harbor of Presque Isle, Pennsylvania, on Lake

Erie.14

FOUR DECADES OF SPORADIC FEDERAL ACTIVITY

Even before the Presque Isle assignment to plan harbor work,

the Army Engineers had planned river improvements. Under

military appropriations bills of 1819 and 1820 they had made

surveys on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and several tributaries to devise methods for making them more navigable. In June

1823 the Engineer Department ordered the Board of Engineers to

design the piers at Cape Henlopen that Congress had authorized

the Treasury to construct the year before.

Responsibility for carrying out navigation improvements soon

followed. On 24 May 1824 Congress provided for the removal, by

*’engineers in the public service,” of snags and sandbars from the

Ohio and Mississippi rivers, work which President Monroe assigned

to the Corps of Engineers. Two days later Congress voted appropriations for improving the harbor of Presque Isle and for

repairing Plymouth Beach, Massachusetts, which sheltered the

town’s harbor. Further appropriations in the next two years

provided for breakwater construction at two Lake Erie ports, for

breakwater surveys at the Massachusetts harbors of Marblehead

and Holmes* (Woods) Hole and a canal route survey across Florida,

and for clearing obstructions from the Savannah River. 15

On 20 May 1826 Congress enacted its first omnibus rivers and

harbors bill, a measure that provided for more than 20 works and

surveys on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts and on the Great Lakes.

43
Annually thereafter through 1838 Congress passed similar bills

authorizing new projects and surveys or appropriating additional

funds for projects under construction. With the exception of

the act of 1836, few new projects or surveys were authorized

after 1830, and appropriations were mostly for completing or

continuing works. Occasional--y Congress also made individual

appropriations for projects.

Much of the work on the East Coast was to protect shipping

from storms or ice at both commercial harbors and harbors of

refuge. At Plymouth, Provincetown, and Duxbury, Massachusetts,

the Army Engineers by various means firmed beaches that formed

natural harbor breakwaters to arrest water and wind erosion.

They constructed granite seawalls on islands and headlands at

Boston Harbor and at Black Rock and Westport harbors in Connecticut to preserve these natural harbor screens. At Little Egg

Harbor, New Jersey, they strung jetties out from the shore of

Tuckers Island, which protected the harbor, to prevent abrasion

of the island by surf. At harbors without sufficient natural

cover, the Engineers constructed rubblestone breakwaters, thus

providing protected anchorages at Belfast and Portland, Maine;

Rockport, Bass River, and Hyannis, Massachusetts; Churchs Cove,

Rhode Island; and Stonington, Connecticut. At Cape Henlopen they

took over the construction of the artificial harbor of refuge

originally assigned to the Treasury; and on the Delaware River

they constructed ice-breaker piers at New Castle and repaired

those at Chester, Port Penn, Marcus Hook, and Fort Mifflin. They

also built an ice breaker at Staten Island, New York, to protect

the public wharf and buildings of the harbor’s quarantine

station.

Deepening channels to coastal or river ports constituted the

bulk of other projects. Bars obstructing harbor entrances were

tackled with horse or steam-powered dredging machines at

Nantucket, Massachusetts; Bridgeport, Connecticut; Wilmington,

Delaware; Baltimore, Maryland; and Brunswick, Georgia. For the

benefit of shipping to Philadelphia, the Delaware River ice

harbors of New Castle, Chester, Marcus Hook, and Port Penn were

dredged; and for the benefit of shipping to Hartford and other

river towns, dredging was begun on Saybrook Bar at the mouth of

the Connecticut River. In the shallow Pamlico Sound area of

North Carolina, dredging was performed to clear a shoal in the

Pamlico River below the town of Washington, to remove shoals

near the Ocracoke Inlet to the sound, and to open a navigable

passage through adjoining Core Sound to Beaufort Harbor. In the

Savannah River wrecks sunk during the Revolutionary War were

raised and the shoals formed by them dredged. Rocks and other

obstructions were cleared from the Kennebec River of Maine to

facilitate navigation to Bangor, from the Saugatuck River of

Connecticut to improve the harbor of Westport, and from the

44
Raritan River of New Jersey to benefit New Brunswick. In work

aimed at protecting channels, a breakwater and dike were constructed at Southport, Connecticut, to confine the channel and

prevent sand from washing into it; and at Edgartown, Massachusetts, a pier supporting a lighthouse was extended, also to

prevent sand from being carried by littoral current into the

harbor.

Several attempts were made to deepen channels by constricting

river currents to increase their natural scour. The jetties at

the mouth of the Kennebunk River, erected earlier by the Treasury

and soon wrecked by storms, were rebuilt and extended; and new

jetties were constructed at the mouth of the Merrimack River, at

the entrance of the Saco River of Maine, and in the Cape Fear

River below Wilmington, North Carolina. To improve the channel

of the Thames River to Norwich, Connecticut, a number of wing

dams were extended into the stream, the scouring effect of which

was supplemented by dredging. Wing dams, together with shoreprotection dikes and revetments as well as dredging, were also

employed in the Hudson River to control the shoals above and

below Albany.

The focus of the early East Coast projects was on harbors

accessible to seagoing ships. Work on inland waterways was

negligible. Rocks and shoals were removed from the Cocheco and

Berwick branches of the Piscataqua River to permit small boats

to reach communities a few miles upstream, the inside navigation

channel between St. Johns River in Florida and St. Marys Harbor

in Georgia was improved, and shoals were dredged in Joyces Creek

at the southern end of the Dismal Swamp Canal. 17

Early navigation projects on western rivers and on the Great

Lakes followed the advance of the steamboat on these waters.

But the steamboat was of little significance to improvements on

the Atlantic seaboard. By the 1820s steamboat routes had been

established on a number of rivers, bays, and sounds, but the

instances of correlation between these routes and the localities

of the river and harbor improvements are few and it would be

difficult to credit these to the steamboat. 19 Even more than

the sailing vessel, the coastal steamer, with its flat-bottomed

hull, only slightly protruding keel, and gingerly dipping paddle

wheels, was suited to shallow waters. The eastern steamer was

primarily a passenger vessel--its large engines and huge stores

of firewood (anthracite did not come in to general use until the

1840s) left little room for freight. And oceangoing steam

vessels scarcely existed. Because of various technical and

economic obstacles much harder to overcome than those met on

sheltered waterways, the application of steam to ocean transportation was slow to develop. Not until the 1850s did either the

coastal or ocean steam vessel begin to compete with sailing

ships in the carrying trade.20

45
Navigation improvements on the East Coast coincided with a

marked increase in coastal shipping. Although for some years

after the War of 1812 foreign trade made little progress beyond

prewar levels, the American fleet engaged in the coastwise trade

grew steadily from 475,666 gross tons in 1815 to 842,906 gross

tons in 1828, an increase that reflected’ the rise of manufacturing in the United States and the more extended division of labor

resulting from it. The acquisition of Florida in 1821 and an

ever-increasing volume of goods from the South and West moving

down the Mississippi, a considerable part of which went to

northeastern ports, further augmented the coastal trade.21

Most of the projects had beneficial results. Some, however,

were left unfinished, and almost all subsequently suffered from

lack of maintenance, for no further appropriations were forthcoming until 1852. Just as it had been politically impossible

for the federal government to initiate a unified national system

of roads and canals, it was unable to institute a coherent plan

for rivers and harbors improvement. Local and sectional

pressures supported by logrolling tactics had produced rivers

and harbors bills that appropriated small amounts for numerous

projects in uncoordinated piecemeal fashion. Criticism and

opposition arose both within Congress and in the executive

branch. Except for the briefly incumbent Whig Presidents

Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore, all chief executives to the

time of the Civil War took the constitutional position that

Congress could appropriate for works of a national character but

not for projects of a local nature, a distinction often

difficult to determine. They generally refused to present

estimates for work to Congress and several times vetoed rivers

and harbors bills. This was a period of turbulent party

politics, and party alignment on the issue was clearly evident.

The Democrats, who generally believed that the government should

let economic activities pretty much alone, tended to be hostile

toward internal improvements, while the Whigs, who held a

broader conception of the powers and duties of the federal

government, usually supported them. The Depression opening in

1837 and increasing state and sectional tensions did nothing to

ease the controversy.

Except for a measure in 1844 confined to projects in the

interior, there was not another general rivers and harbors act

until 1852. Congress continued to make a few appropriations

through special acts or riders attached to other bills. Projects

on the East Coast, however, were restricted to minor works justified by military requirements. The Corps of Engineers cut a

small canal in Florida between Mosquito Lagoon and the Indian

River at a portage called the Haulover to permit easier movement

of Army supplies in campaigns against the Seminole Indians, and

it constructed or repaired seawalls at Boston Harbor and

St. Augustine, Florida, to preserve sites for fortifications. 23

46
The Rivers and Harbors Act of 30 August 1852 was the product

of election-year tactics. In the campaign of that year the Whig

and Free Soil parties, both more attuned to the interests of

eastern businessmen and western farmers than the southerncontrolled Democratic party, proclaimed themselves in favor of

internal improvements. Swaying with the political winds,

Congress appropriated in excess of $2 million for more than 100

works and surveys, 46 of which, at a cost of about $640,000,

were on the East Coast. With the Whig Millard Fillmore in the

White House, the bill was assured of presidential approval.24

More than half of the East Coast projects consisted of

repairing or continuing works left untouched for over a dozen

years ● Combating the depredations of storms and time, the Corps

of Engineers repaired the breakwaters at Portland and Hyannis,

the jetties at Kennebunk River, and the ice piers at Chester and

New Castle; they patched up a seawall at Marblehead and a dike

at Woods Hole built years before by other agencies; and they

closed several large breaches in the beach at Plymouth opened by

a gale in 1851. Continuing unfinished projects, the Corps worked

on the Delaware Bay breakwaters and the Boston and St. Augustine

seawalls, resumed beach protection measures at Provincetown, and

again dredged and made other channel improvements at Bridgeport

Harbor and in the Hudson, Pamlico, Savannah, and Cape Fear

rivers.

Undertaking new projects, the Army Engineers constructed

breakwaters at Owls Head and Richmond Island harbors in Maine

and ice-breaker piers at Reedy Island in the Delaware River.

They blasted out rocks at New Haven Harbor, Connecticut, at

Cobscook Bay, Maine, and at Hell Gate in New York’s East River.

They dredged at Charleston and Providence harbors, in Newark

Bay, in the Kennebec, James, Appomattox, and Patapsco rivers,

and at the mouths of the Susquehanna and St. Johns rivers. They

also made an unsuccessful attempt to reopen navigation between

Albemarle Sound and the Atlantic Ocean at Nags Head on the Outer

Banks of North Carolina.25

The act of 1852 failed to restore an ongoing program of

navigation improvement. The Democrats won the election, and

with the party opposed to internal improvements in power for the

rest of the decade, Congress did not pass another general rivers

and harbors bill until after the Civil War. Through special

acts it authorized four works in the interior and three in the

East, and passed five of these bills over the vetoes of President

Pierce. The three eastern projects allowed the Corps to continue

work on the Savannah and Cape Fear rivers and to deepen the

Patapsco River to make Baltimore Harbor accessible to steam

frigates and other vessels of the United States Navy.26 When

these appropriations and those of 1852 ran out, river and harbor

improvement by the federal government again came to a halt, with

many projects still uncompleted.
PRESSURES FOR NAVIGATION IMPROVEMENTS

At the close of the Civil War several forces converged to

settle the long-debated issue of river and harbor improvement.

Many Atlantic harbors were feeling the pinch of three decades of

economic and technological development that had drastically

changed long-existing patterns of maritime activity. Between

1830 and 1860 world shipping had expanded enormously as part of

the complex development labeled the Industrial Revolution.

Manufacturing had increased immensely and had tended to become

geographically concentrated, necessitating the transportation of

raw materials from remote places and the mass shipping of

finished products to distant markets. The construction of railroads, canals, river works, and highways had greatly increased

the hinterlands of seaports and provided cargoes for ships on a

scale formerly unknown. The tonnage of United States ships

engaged in all employments rose from 1.19 million tons in 1830

to 5.35 million in 18600 In this same period the annual tonnage

of American vessels that entered and cleared from American ports

increased nearly sixfold.

The growing volume of trade, the concentration of overseas

commerce at major ports, the rise of packet lines operating on

definite routes and regular schedules, and the increasing

carriage of bulky products led to a demand for larger vessels.

In 1830 a ship of more than 400 tons was considered a monster.

In the early forties ships of 1,000 tons were regarded as very

large. By the fifties ships of this size were the typical

deep-sea freighters and many vessels registered 1,500 or more

tons. These developments affected not only the rising primary

transshipment centers of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and

Baltimore, but also smaller harbors all along the seaboard as

schooners and an increasing number of steamers carried an

expanding amount of commerce between the larger and smaller

ports.27

During the same years that Atlantic harbors were experiencing

unprecedented use, people of the interior were organizing great

commercial conventions calling for the improvement of the

Mississippi and Ohio rivers and their tributaries. Among the

earliest was a meeting in Memphis in 1845. From then on powerful

associational appeals for waterway projects came steadily from

the South and West. Reinforcing the resolutions of these conventions was an outpouring of tracts on river improvement that by

1860 had become a considerable body of literature. Even the war

did not retard the movement. In 1863 a call signed by 14

senators and 80 representatives in Congress brought 2,000

delegates to a waterway convention in Chicago to demand

improvements on the Erie Canal and on canals in Illinois and

Michigan. The next year another convention in Louisville urged

improvement on the Ohio River.28

48
These developments and appeals elicited from the nation’s

capital a response very different from that of the prewar

decades. The Civil War opened a period of amazing growth in

transportation, trade, industry, and agriculture that dwarfed

even the substantial advances of earlier years. Old political

patterns dissolved before new dynamic forces, and new ruling

groups emerged anxious to provide expanding enterprise with a

federal helping hand. And this assistance included the development of the nation's navigable waterways. The Republican party

had begun its national career with a declaration in its platform

of 1856 that appropriations by Congress for the improvement of

rivers and harbors were constitutional and justified by the

obligation of the government to protect the lives and property

of its citizens. The Democratic party, forsaking its earlier

opposition to internal improvements, was no less eager to give

river and harbor improvement steady and generous support.25

RIVER AND HARBOR PROJECTS EXPAND, 1866-1914

River and harbor work resumed in a small way even before the

war ended. In June 1864 Congress authorized the Secretary of

War to expend $350,000 to repair harbors on the seaboard and

Great Lakes. Improvements on a broad scale began in June 1866

with a congressional appropriation of nearly $3.7 million for

more than 50 works and nearly 40 examinations and surveys

throughout the country. Thereafter river and harbor expenditures

grew by large amounts. For the decade of the 1870s they totaled

nearly $54 million; for the decade ending in 1914 they came to

more than $325 million.30

This extensive program embraced more than 500 waterways on

the Atlantic seaboard. The Corps of Engineers dredged harbors

to provide deeper and wider channels, anchorages, and turning

basins; improved channels through inlets, bays, sounds, and

offshore thoroughfares; cleared rivers of obstructions to small

craft navigation; and created sheltered passages along the coast

by cutting inland waterways. Many projects included structural

works: breakwaters to improve natural harbors and to build

wholly artificial harbors of refuge; jetties to stabilize harbor

and river channels, control tidal currents, form ice harbors,

check shifting sands, and protect shores from erosion; and dikes,

walls, revetments, and other structures to preserve harbor and

river shorelines.

As the program of navigation improvement expanded, work at

major harbors tried to keep pace with constantly increasing

commerce and larger ships. Steam was replacing sail and iron

was replacing wood. By using iron, vessels could be built of

far greater size than previously had been possible. TransAtlantic express liners increased in size from less than 4,000

tons in the 1860s to 12,000 tons in the 1890s and to 48,000 or

more tons by 1914.31

49
New York Harbor, with a controlling depth over its outer bar

and several inner shoals of almost 24 feet at mean low water, had

been the envy of other Atlantic ports. But by the 1880s large

ships on trans-Atlantic runs could cross the bar only on flood

tides. The first improvement project, begun in 1886 and completed in 1891, provided a passage 30 feet deep and 1,000 feet

wide through the Main Ship and Gedney channels to deep water outside the bar. Within a few years the channel was again

inadequate, and in 1899 Congress authorized the construction of

a 40-foot-deep, 2,000-foot-wide channel. To avoid interrupting

the busy traffic of the port, the outer bar was dredged at the

East, renamed Ambrose, Channel, a hitherto shallow and littleused passage that now became the main entrance channel to the

harbor. As the dredging equipment then existing in the United

States was incapable of doing such deep work while exposed to

the open sea, the contractor was allowed a year to build two

dredges before beginning the project. Before the unprecedented

job was completed in 1914, however, the Corps built four dredges

of its own for the project and transferred a fifth from the

Delaware River. Commenting on the commerce of the port, the New

York Engineer District noted that the value of foreign exports

and imports (the District did not provide statistics for

coastwise commerce) for the year 1914 was $2.1 billion, an

increase over the valuation for 1886 before improvement began of

$1.3 billion. Costing less than two-thirds of 1 percent of the

increase in the annual value of foreign commerce, the projects

were excellent investments.32

At Boston Harbor the original improvement project, adopted

in 1867, enlarged the main ship channel from 18 feet deep and

100 feet wide at its most restricted point to 23 feet deep and

600 feet wide. A project of 1892 extended the depth to 27 feet

and the width to 1,000 feet, and a project of 1899 increased

these dimensions to 30 and 1,200 feet. Three years later

Congress authorized another enlargement of the channel to 35

feet deep and between 1,200 and 1,500 feet wide.33

Shipping to Philadelphia originally had to contend with ten

or more bars scattered down the Delaware River between the city

and Delaware Bay that restricted channel depths at mean low water

to between 17 and 20 feet. Initial improvements consisted of

sporadic dredging and rock removal under separate appropriations.

The first systematic and permanent improvement began in 1885 when

a special Corps of Engineers board studied navigation of the

river as a whole and recommended the construction of a ship

channel to Philadelphia at least 600 feet wide and 26 feet deep.

This work was carried out at some bars and shoals by the federal

government and at others by the city of Philadelphia. Hitherto,

vessels of deep draft had been compelled to ride two high tides

to ascend the river to Philadelphia; now they could make the

whole trip on a single tide. Continued dependence on tides,

50
-

however, was not satisfactory for long, and in 1899 Congress

authorized the construction of a 30-foot channel. Work was

nearing completion in 1910 when a new project increased the

channel depth to 35 feet and the width to between 800 and 1,200

feet. 34

The controlling depth of the Patapsco River channel to

Baltimore Harbor was originally 17 feet at low tide and only

slightly more than 18 feet at high tide. Vessels exceeding that

draft were obliged to transfer portions of their cargoes to

lighters about 14 miles from the city in order to ride high

enough to reach the wharves. The improvement begun in 1853 aimed

at a channel depth of 22 feet and a width of 150 feet. PostCivil War projects adopted in 1871, 1881, and 1896 deepened the

channel by stages to 30 feet and widened it to 600 feet. In 1905

Congress authorized a 35-foot channel between 600 and 1,000 feet

wide.35

Norfolk Harbor had a deep-water entrance on Hampton Roads,

but several shoals within the Elizabeth River restricted mean

low-water depths of the main and branch channels to 21 feet or

less. The original project adopted in 1876 provided for

dredging the worst shoals only. Modified no less than eight

times between 1885 and 1910, the project ultimately provided a

main channel 35 feet deep and at least 400 feet wide from

Hampton Roads to a point above the Norfolk Navy Yard on the

South Branch of the Elizabeth River.36

Efforts at other harbors to keep abreast of commercial and

technological developments were equally striking. At Wilmington,

North Carolina, the pre-Civil War projects to increase the

governing low-water depths of the entrance bar and the channel

of shallow Cape Fear River beyond 7.5 feet had accomplished

little. Between 1870 and 1890 five successive projects, which

included closing inlets between islands at the mouth of the

river as well as dredging, gradually increased the channel’s

dimensions to the city to 20 feet deep and 270 feet wide. The

rivers and harbors acts of 1910 and 1911 provided for securing

such depths in excess of 20 feet as the appropriations would

allow. The act of 1912 authorized a 26-foot channel 300 feet

wide to the sea and 400 feet wide across the bar. 37 At

Savannah, three projects adopted between 1873 and 1902 deepened

the river channel to 28 feet at mean high water. A project

begun in 1910 established a channel depth of 26 feet at mean low

water. At Charleston, the deepest channel across the entrance

bar was originally about 12 feet. In 1878 Congress authorized

the construction of two jetties and auxiliary dredging to obtain

a channel of not less than 21 feet, A project of 1899, which

was modified in 1910, provided for dredging the entrance channel

to 26 feet and then to 28 feet.38

51
An exceptionally dogged race to accommodate increasing

commerce and larger ships took place at Providence, Rhode Island.

The Providence River, which stretches eight miles from the city

to Narragansett Bay, was obstructed by several shoals that at

one point opposite the city decreased the low-water depth of the

channel to 4.5 feet. At mean low water the channel in the

portion of the river forming the harbor ranged from 4.5 to 15

feet deep, but most of the river at this point was only 1 to 3

feet deep. Resuming after the Civil War work begun in 1852, the

Corps of Engineers had by 1870, under three successive projects,

cleared the channel to a controlling depth of 14 feet. In 1878

they began constructing a channel that was 23 feet deep and 150

wide in the center to accommodate large ocean steamers. At

lesser depths it was more than 1,000 feet wide to give sailing

coasters more room to maneuver. Four years later Congress

modified the project to provide a 25-foot-deep, 300-foot-wide

steamer channel to deep water in Narragansett Bay and a capacious

anchorage basin at Providence. In 1896 Congress authorized a

25-foot-deep, 400-foot-wide channel that would follow a more

direct route to the ocean through the West Passage of

Narragansett Bay. Projects of 1902, 1907, and 1910 provided for

enlarged anchorage areas. The project of 1910 also authorized

increasing the dimensions of the channel to 30 feet deep and 600

feet wide.39

Far outnumbering the projects at major harbors were works at

smaller rivers and harbors to establish channel depths ranging

from 4 to 16 or more feet at mean low water. As railroads did

not reach every locality and their unregulated rates in any

event encouraged waterway competition, and as highway transport

was still limited, small streams continued throughout the nineteenth century to offer a mode of transportation for many inland

communities. Small harbors all along the coast were even more

vital to the economy. As shelters for fishing fleets and

processing points for catches, they were elements of a large and

still-growing industry. As commercial ports they were more

active than ever, for as the commercial life of the nation

quickened it was still mainly coastal vessels that moved bulk

trade along the Atlantic seaboard.

Trunk-line railroads, having in the main followed economic

development westward across the continent, provided long-distance

east-west connections with the major Atlantic ports. But through

lines going north and south developed at a slower pace. Rivers

and estuaries had to be crossed by immense bridges; the diverse

gauges of southern railroads had to be changed to standard size;

the provincial aims of short lines had to be harmonized with the

objectives of longer hauls; long-haul commerce had to be stimulated by low rates and efficient service; and the consolidation

of short lines had to take place to bring about these changes

52
and to form effective through routes. These changes came later

than on east-west routes and were not fully apparent until the

close of the century. Even then the railroads, afflicted by

freight congestion and a car shortage that reached critical

proportions within a few years, were far from able to meet transportation demands. Some roads would accept only the high-value

freight that was more profitable to carry. Thus coastal trade

continued to move many of the bulky commodities that had always

been its mainstay.40

Fishery products, lumber, lime, building stone, ice, flour,

grains, cotton, rice, tobacco, naval stores, manufactures, and

many other goods found their way up or down the seaboard by

water. Topping the list of bulk carriage was the coal trade out

of Norfolk, Newport News, Baltimore, Perth Amboy, and New York.

The use of coal for heating buildings in the North and for powering industry all along the seaboard increased tremendously in the

last three decades of the nineteenth century. Small two-roasted

schooners and brigs that entered all of the little ports of the

coast at first monopolized this trade. Competition soon followed

from a new breed of three- to six-roasted schooners of much

greater tonnage that carried coal and other goods to the larger

and deeper ports. But smaller vessels continued to service the

lesser ports all along the coast, and every town and industrial

enterprise located on waters navigable by the shallow-draft

schooners had its coal wharf.

While sailing vessels continued to hold their own and

something more in the coastal trade, steamships were by 1900

coming into increasing use , particularly in the coal and lumber

business. After about 1880 tow barges were also frequently seen

along the seaboard. The feasibility of regular towing over long

distances had finally caught on, and tugs, no longer merely

harbor and river auxiliaries, had become seagoing power plants.

Tow barges had the flexibility of freight cars. They could be

detached at ports along the route, unloaded, and then picked up

on a later voyage. By 1900 barges and tugs, although bringing

in less tonnage than ships, formed one-half of the arrivals in

Boston Harbor.41

By 1914 river and harbor improvement on the East Coast began

to taper off as fewer projects were authorized. With the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 a drive for governmental economy

contributed further to the decline. Until 1919, when Congress

authorized 27 new projects on the Atlantic seaboard, mostly of

minor nature, rivers and harbors bills confined appropriations

with only few exceptions to maintenance and to works already

under way. 42 The downtrend was graphically illustrated in New

53
England, whose heavily indented coastline abounds in small

harbors. In 1900 66 coastal navigation projects were under

construction --as many as were under construction throughout all

the United States and its territories in 1979. By 1917 projects

had been completed on 95 rivers and harbors. On 68 of these

waterways no further improvements have been made; on the other

27 nothing more was done until after World War 11. Improvements

on 38 waterways were continued or renewed between the World

Wars, but projects were begun at only seven new localities. 43

As projects became fewer they became more restricted to

localities of major commercial importance. Shipping at many

small ports declined as trains and trucks took over business

from coastal vessels. From 1920 through 1929 Congress authorized

only 48 projects or modifications of existing projects for the

Atlantic seaboard. Expenditures, including monies for maintenance as well as improvement, averaged $10.4 million a year.

The total national outlay on rivers and harbors, excluding

specialized expenditures such as those under the Mississippi

River and California Debris commissions, averaged about $42.7

million a year, or about 6 percent more than expenditures for

1914.44 Since prewar costs had inflated 105 percent by 1920,

outlays for general navigation improvements were actually

reduced by half.

The depression years of the 1930s restored for a decade an

extensive program of navigation improvements. Expenditures for

fiscal year 1930 were about 30 percent greater than for fiscal

year 1929. The increase, the annual report of the Chief of

Engineers explained, was “due to a speeding up of operations to

meet the demands of expanding commerce, and in a considerable

degree to carry out the purposeful plan of the administration to

alleviate conditions of unemployment.” Not only had the greater

ports benefited, the report noted, but also numerous lesser

harbors and waterways had been improved and maintained.

Between 1930 and 1938 larger regular appropriations together with

public works and emergency relief programs increased general

river and harbor expenditures nationwide to an annual average of

more than $115 million. Expenditures on the Atlantic seaboard,

while not increasing in proportion to the national average,

nevertheless rose to more than $19 million a year, and four

rivers and harbors acts between 1930 and 1938 authorized 265

works of improvement.46

World War II, burdening the Corps of Engineers with

increased military responsibilities and creating a critical

shortage of construction equipment, materials, and manpower,

restricted river and harbor work to projects directly related to

defense. On the Atlantic coast projects focused on improving

facilities for naval and supply vessels. These works, several

of which were already in progress, included clearing a 27-foot

54
.

channel in the Kennebec River to the Iron Works at Bath where

warships were constructed for the Navy; dredging a 40-foot

channel in the Delaware River to the Philadelphia Navy Yard;

dredging to 35 feet the main channel of Charleston Harbor leading

to the Navy Yard and the Army Terminals on Cooper River; deepening the Ambrose Channel to New York Harbor to 45 feet and

dredging additional anchorage space within the harbor; improving

the extensively used New York and New Jersey Channels, which pass

through Raritan and Newark bays, for the benefit of large oil

tankers; and removing from the main ship channel of Portland

Harbor a rock ledge hindering the operation of deep-draft

vessels. Submarine attacks off the Atlantic coast prompted

additional emergency measures. The Corps stabilized bank

sections on the recently completed Chesapeake and Delaware Ship

Canal and with Navy Department funds constructed the three-mile

Cape May Canal from Cape May Harbor to Delaware Bay. 47 Both

improvements provided greater protection for shipments of

freight and oil.

Congressional authorization between 1945 and 1950 of 198

projects on the Atlantic seaboard promised a strong revival of

navigation improvements. 48 Only a fraction of the projects

had been started, however, when hostilities erupted in Korea.

Military requirements again took priority, a huge Cold War

defense building program was quickly cranked into operation, and

river and harbor work shrank once more to a handful of essential

projects. Through fiscal year 1955 navigation works on the East

Coast numbered fewer than a dozen.49

Although the Cold War construction program continued without

letup for nearly a decade, river and harbor improvement resumed

on a sizable scale in fiscal year 1956 when the number of projects under construction on the East Coast jumped from 6 to 38.

The next year 37 projects were initiated. Thereafter the volume

of work gradually diminished. From 1958 to 1967 between 7 and

14 projects were initiated each year; from 1968 to 1979 between

1 and 6 were initiated; and in fiscal year 1980 none was started.

The number of projects under construction each year ranged from

39 in 1958 to 13 in 1980.50

During the post-World War II period more than 250 works of

improvement were carried out at nearly as many localities. Small

harbors and lesser ports necessarily accounted for most of the

projects. Many are primarily fishing ports or seafood processing

centers. Others are commercial ports handling a variety of bulky

freight, including petroleum products, coal, fertilizers, chemicals, agriculture products, aggregates, pulpwood, metals, lumber,

cement, limestone, machinery, and numerous other commodities

including large quantities of fish and shellfish. Reflecting a

new public interest, many small harbors are used heavily and

55
others almost exclusively by pleasure craft. Work on scores of

these small waterways was carried out under Section 107 of the

Rivers and Harbors Act of 1960, which permits the Corps to construct certain small projects not specifically authorized by

Congress when they will result in substantial benefit to

navigation.51

At major ports, the Corps of Engineers developed channels,

anchorages, and turning basins to accommodate deep-draft oil

tankers and other large vessels. They deepened the main channels

at Portland, New York, Norfolk, and Newport News to 45 feet and

those of 22 other ports to between 35 and 42 feet. In the past

25 years, commerce at these ports increased markedly. At New

Haven, Norfolk, and Charleston the tonnage of freight moved in

1979 was approximately double that moved in 1954, and at Portsmouth, Fall River, New London, Wilmington (N.C.), Savannah, and

Jacksonville it was approximately three times greater. At Port

Everglades it was about five times greater, and at Morehead City

it was seven times greater. The ports with the greatest tonnage

in 1979 were New York (163.6 million), Philadelphia (54.8

million), Baltimore (51.4 million), Norfolk (48.6 million), and

Boston (26.3 million).

In 1979 26 ports had freight traffic exceeding two million

tons. Petroleum products or crude oil dominated the list of

commodities handled at most of them. The exceptions were

Baltimore, Norfolk, and Newport News, where the leading commodity

was coal; Morehead City, where it was liquid sulphur; and

Hempstead (N.Y.), where it was aggregates. Foreign traffic was

present at all the ports except Hempstead, a small six-foot-deep

harbor on Long Island Sound that is one of the nation’s leading

ports handling sand, gravel, and crushed rock. Foreign tonnage

exceeded domestic tonnage at Portland, Portsmouth, Philadelphia,

Wilmington (Del.), Baltimore, Norfolk, Newport News, Savannah,

and Miami, but was concentrated in greatest quantity at New York

(56.2 million), Baltimore (37.5 million), Norfolk (37.2

million), and Philadelphia (34.5 million).52

56
Chapter IV

THE INTRACOASTAL WATERWAY: ATLANTIC SECTION

The tidal streams, bays, and sounds that lie along and just

within the shoreline of much of the Atlantic coast were

indispensable arteries of communication and commerce for early

settlers in America. Not many years passed before they began to

speak of linking the waterways together with canals at one place

or another to extend their usefulness. . Such enterprises were

too formidable for seventeenth-century resources and knowledge,

but by the final decades of the eighteenth century men were

devoting themselves seriously to the idea, and at last in 1793

and 1796 attempts were made to link Albemarle Sound with

“Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware River with New York Bay.l

In 1804 construction also began on the canal between

Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay of which men had dreamed since

at least 1654. A year-and-a-half later work came to a halt when

the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal Company ran out of funds.

Appealing unsuccessfully to the states of Maryland, Delaware,

and Pennsylvania for financial assistance, the canal company

then turned to Congress. Claiming that the canal was of national

importance, the company's directors argued that it would free

the coastal trade from the dangers of the sea, shorten water

communications between Philadelphia and Baltimore by 319 miles,

promote interstate commerce, lower freight and insurance rates,

and facilitate the military defense of the country. Although

Congress was not inspired to act immediately, the company’s

memorial sparked the Senate discussion of federal aid to internal

improvements that led to the noted report of 1808 by Secretary of

the Treasury Albert Gallatin on the transportation needs of the

country.

The United States possessed, Gallatin noted, an inland

navigation extending from Massachusetts to the southern

extremity of Georgia (then the southernmost Atlantic seaboard

state) that was ‘*principally, if not solely,” interrupted by

four necks of land: Cape Cod, New Jersey between the Raritan

and Delaware rivers, the peninsula between the Delaware River

and Chesapeake Bay, and the marshy tract between Chesapeake Bay

and Albemarle Sound. With canals cut through them, the Secretary

explained, a sea vessel could travel by rivers, bays, and sounds

from Boston to Beaufort and Swansboro in North Carolina. From

there a route through Stumpy and Toomers sounds and two cuts

overland of less than three miles would extend the inland navigation with diminished draft to the Cape Fear River. Broken then

by a short ocean run, the inland navigation continued again

inside the chain of islands skirting the coasts of South

Carolina and Georgia.3

57,
Gallatin estimated that the cost of the four canals would be

$3 million. His entire scheme for roads and canals would run to

$20 million. By setting aside $2 million a year from the annual

Treasury surplus, then in excess of $5 million, the whole undertaking could be accomplished in ten years. Gallatin's plan,

delayed by foreign problems and then frustrated by domestic

obstructions, was never fully implemented. His concept of an

intracoastal waterway never died, but the waterway came into

being through local projects rather than comprehensive planning.

And instead of being completed in ten years, its construction

took more than a century.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE CENTRAL CANAL LINKS

The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal

Until 1822 the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal Company did

little else than make more futile appeals to Congress for

assistance. Reorganized in that year by capable men, it obtained

new stock subscriptions not only from private investors but from

the hitherto reluctant states of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and

Delaware. Before resuming construction the company had to

settle an issue that had arisen over the best route for the

canal, and it was on this matter that the federal government

first lent a helping hand. An “upper” route, which had been

selected in 1804, ran from the Elk River tributary of Chesapeake

Bay toward Christian, then was to continue either directly to

the Delaware River at New Castle or follow the Christina River to

the Delaware at Wilmington. A recently proposed “lower’* route,

more direct but more costly to construct, ran from the Back Creek

branch of the Elk River into Broad Creek, through the ridge of

the Delmarva Peninsula to St. Georges Creek, then on the Delaware

at Newbold’s Landing, later renamed Delaware City. Upon the

request of the company, Secretary of War Calhoun sent Brigadier

General Simon Bernard and Lieutenant Colonel Joseph G. Totten of

the Board of Engineers for fortifications to assist in making the

decision. After examining the routes and reviewing all plans,

estimates, and engineering data, the two Army Engineers conferred

with two civil engineers in Philadelphia in January 1824. The

unanimous decision of the board was for the lower route.

Construction of the canal began the following April.

Continuing all the while to petition Congress for financial

assistance, the company finally succeeded in March 1825, when

President Monroe signed a bill authorizing a subscription of

$300,000 for 1,500 shares of stock. Before construction was

finished, unexpected costs in deep-cut and marshland areas forced

the company to borrow $1 million and again appeal to Congress.

An appropriation for $150,000 for 750 more shares of stock was

quickly approved and became law in March 1829. Thus after

58
The Central Canal Links
standing aloof for nearly 20 years, the federal government

contributed $450,000 toward the canal’s construction and, as the

holder of nearly 38 percent of its stock, became the largest

single proprietor.

Officially opened on 17 October 1829, the Chesapeake and

Delaware Canal was 13.6 miles long, 10 feet deep, 66 feet wide at

the top, and 36 feet wide at the bottom. Each of its four locks

measured 100 by 22 feet. Although beset for a decade by

crippling legal difficulties and costly engineering problems

from which it never fully recovered, and almost immediately

rivaled by a parallel railroad completed in 1831, the canal was

by 1840 attracting increasing amounts of traffic and fulfilling

its promoters’ vision of becoming a major carrier of the

nation’s waterborne commerce. 4

The Dismal Swamp Canal

The Dismal Swamp Canal connecting Chesapeake Bay with

Albemarle Sound also owed its completion in large part to

federal assistance. The construction of the canal, which

extends from Deep Creek, a tributary of the South Branch of the

Elizabeth River flowing to Norfolk, to the Pasquotank River

draining into Albemarle Sound, began in 1793. Because of the

Dismal Swamp Canal Company's inexperience, inefficiency, and

constant lack of funds, work was still in progress when war broke

out with Britain in 1812 and the canal was of little use in

circumventing the British coastal blockade. Although the company

stepped up its efforts to complete the waterway, when Major James

Kearney examined the route in 1816 in response to an inquiry by

a congressional committee, he reported that at the foot of the

intermediate locks of the canal, ‘*if it may so be denominated,”

there had never been more than 18 or 20 inches of water. He

thought that enlarging the canal was an absolute necessity for

the country, but unfortunately the canal company was restricted

by the difficulty of obtaining funds. The committee reported out

a bill to buy stock in the company, but the measure fell by the

wayside. Left on its own, the company could make only limited

improvements. 5

Federal interest in the Dismal Swamp Canal revived with the

passage of the General Survey Act of 1824. In December 1825 in

response to a query from the House of Representatives, General

Bernard categorized the canal as “one link of the contemplated

inland navigation . . . destined to connect . . . all our main

streams emptying into the Atlantic.” With larger dimensions, he

advised, the canal would not only be of great military value but

would “continue to a prompt, safe, and regular interchange of

the manufactured produce of the North, with the raw materials of

the South.” A second report from the Engineer Department in

60
March 1826 stressed the military advantages of making the canal

practicable for sloop navigation. Two months later, on 18 May

1826, Congress voted to buy 600 shares of Dismal Swamp Canal

Company stock for $150,000, provided that the Board of Engineers

determined that the improved canal would serve “as part of the

chain of canals contemplated along the Atlantic Coast,” and that

the sum subscribed would be sufficient to complete the work.6

A survey carried out in July under the direction of

Lieutenant Colonel Charles Gratiot, the Engineer in charge of

defenses at Hampton Roads, produced plans to meet these

conditions, and the canal company, fortified with the federal

subscription and with loans totaling $137,000 from the state of

Virginia, went to work. Reconstruction progressed so rapidly

that by December 1828 an essentially new canal opened to traffic.

Costs had evidently exceeded estimates, for in March 1829

Congress subscribed an additional $50,000 for 200 more shares in

the waterway, 7 bringing its holdings in the company’s stock to

more than 40 percent.

The new canal was 22.5 miles long, averaged 40 feet wide,

and could accommodate vessels drawing 5.5 feet of water. The

elimination of two of seven locks made possible a speedier

passage. A viable waterway at last, the canal rapidly attracted

traffic. By 1833 the annual value of produce shipped through was

nearly $2.5 million and by 1854 it was more than $3.5 million.

Contrary to the prediction of General Bernard, however, trade was

mostly local in character, coming from the sounds and rivers of

North Carolina largely in schooners built especially for this

traffic. Vessels occasionally sailed on to Richmond, Baltimore,

or Washington, but most craft stopped at Norfolk.8

The Delaware and Raritan Canal

The Delaware and Raritan Canal, reaching 44 miles across

central New Jersey from Bordentown on the Delaware River to New

Brunswick on the Raritan, was the next link in Gallatin's chain

to be constructed. Although the Army Engineers rated it, among

canals being built or proposed in the 1820s, as first in importance for the defense of the country and third in importance for

internal commerce, 9 the Delaware and Raritan received no

federal engineering or financial assistance.

The idea for a Delaware and Raritan connection dated back to

the seventeenth century, when William Penn and his associates

are reputed to have commissioned an investigation of the possibility. In 1796 and again in 1804 short-lived attempts were

made to connect the rivers, mainly by deepening existing streams

rather than by digging a new channel. In 1816, with the lesson

of the British blockade fresh in mind, the state of New Jersey
appointed a commission to explore the idea anew. Rejecting the

earlier plan for a slackwater navigation as impracticable, the

commission recommended the construction of a canal that in

conformity with Gallatin's report would be large enough for

seagoing vessels drawing eight feet of water.

During the next decade-and-a-half more than a dozen attempts

to get construction of the canal under way by the state, by

private enterprise, or by a mixed corporation were frustrated by

inability to raise the necessary capital, local jealousies, or

conflicting economic interests. Finally, in February 1830, the

New Jersey legislature broke a deadlock between canal supporters

and partisans of a Camden and Amboy railroad, who wanted to run a

line roughly parallel to the canal, by chartering separate

companies, one to construct the canal and the other the railroad.

A year later the two companies united for their mutual benefit,

and in return for guaranteed annual payments to the state, the

legislature granted a monopoly of New York to Philadelphia rail

transportation across New Jersey to the Joint Companies, as they

came to be called.10

Opened in the spring of 1834, though not actually connected

with the Delaware River at Bordentown until 1838, the Delaware

and Raritan Carol was a large and well-constructed waterway. It

measured 80 feet wide at the surface and had a depth of 7 to 8

feet. Its 14 locks were each 220 feet long, and the smallest

was 24 feet wide. A navigable feeder canal 22 miles long, 60

feet wide, and 6 feet deep joining the main canal at Trenton

brought an ample supply of water from higher up the Delaware.

The canal quickly became one of the largest freight carriers in

the country, with Pennsylvania coal dominating its tonnage.

The Inland Waterway Versus Sea Routes

With three links of Gallatin's projected intracoastal

waterway completed by the late 1830s, a small vessel could

travel from New London, Connecticut, at the eastern end of Long

Island Sound, all the way to the large sounds of North Carolina

without ever being exposed to the open sea. Long-distance shipments by this inside passage, however, were not often made. It

was generally quicker and cheaper to make long transports by sea.

Naval stores, red oak for ships, staves, shingles, and other

forms of lumber from North Carolina, and flour and tobacco and

other products from the Chesapeake region continued for the most

part to reach New York and New England by coastwise vessels,

while manufacturers from the northern states and from Europe

furnished valuable return cargoes. Some long-distance shipments

did come through the canals, particularly the two northern cuts.

Barges filled with coal at Richmond, Virginia, arrived at New

York via the inland waterway, while limited amounts of

62
merchandise moved back to Chesapeake ports the same way. And

from far up the Susquehanna, barges descended to the Chesapeake

and took the inside passage to New York, a journey of about 700

miles. But it was over the shorter distances, between the

Carolina sounds and Norfolk, between Baltimore and Philadelphia,

and between Philadelphia and New York, that the inland waterway

carried the most traffic. On these transits it so successfully

challenged the sea routes that only the bulkiest freight was

left for coastal vessels.12

The Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal

At the southern end of this string of canals another

potential waterway route existed between Norfolk and Albemarle

Sound. Roughly paralleling the Dismal Swamp Canal on the east,

it ran through low and level ground between Currituck Sound, an

arm of Albemarle Sound, and the Elizabeth River. Requiring only

short excavations, this route had such evident advantages that

proposals for a canal had been presented to the Virginia Assembly

as early as 1772. In 1807 Virginia and North Carolina granted

charters to an aspiring canal company, but apparently because

the Dismal Swamp Canal was already under construction, no stock

was subscribed for the venture. Following the War of 1812 Major

Kearney examined the route on the same assignment as his inspection of the Dismal Swamp Canal. With the interest of the

government in mind, he concluded that the expense of improving

the existing canal would be trifling compared to the cost of

building a new one. Interest in the route persisted, however,

and over the next decades several surveys were made by state and

local agencies. Finally in 1856 the Albemarle and Chesapeake

Canal Company began construction.

Designed for vessels of greater tonnage than the Dismal

Swamp Canal could handle, the new canal was 8 feet deep, about

60 feet wide at the surface, and 40 feet wide at the bottom.

Starting in the upper reach of the North River, a tributary of

Albemarle Sound a few miles east of the Pasquotank River, it

passed by a five-mile land cut through the Currituck Peninsula

at Coinjock into the upper part of the Currituck Sound, thence

by Currituck Sound and North Landing River to North Landing,

Virginia, from where an excavation of nine miles brought it to

the South Branch of the Elizabeth River at Great Bridge, five

miles above the entrance to the Dismal Swamp Canal. Unlike

earlier canals cut through more rugged terrain with primitive

equipment, the Albemarle and Chesapeake was scooped through

marshy soil by steam dredges working from deep water at both

ends of the cuts. No lift locks were required, but because the

Elizabeth River is a tidal stream, the company constructed a

guard lock 220 feet long and 40 feet wide at Great Bridge to

prevent currents from eroding the canal’s banks.

63
In January 1859 the first vessel passed through the canal, a

75-ton schooner-rigged barge towed by a company side-wheel

steamer. A steady stream of traffic followed. During the Civil

War, when Union armies commandeered the canal, nearly 9,000

vessels made the transit. After the war, traffic continued to

increase as the new waterway took over practically all of the

trade passing between Albemarle Sound and Norfolk.13

THE UNITED STATES BUYS CANALS

Except for the now eclipsed Dismal Swamp Canal, the canals

comprising the partially realized intracoastal waterway enjoyed

increasing trade until about 1870. Forced from the outset,

however, to meet competition from railroads, their financial

returns were never sufficient to allow the expensive modifications necessary to keep pace with transportation requirements

and, except for the enlarging of locks, their dimensions were

not materially increased. After 1870, owing to the rapid

improvement of railroad beds and locomotives and the lack of

improvement of the canals, trade on the canals steadily declined.

The traffic of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, which reached

a maximum of 1.3 million tons in 1872, fell to 639,543 tons in

1890. In the same time span, traffic on the Delaware and Raritan

Canal fell from 2.8 million to 623,751 tons. Without hope of

revival through independent action, the canal companies turned

to the federal government for relief.14

The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal

After 1871 the financial position of the Chesapeake and

Delaware Canal Company steadily worsened. Growing competition

from railroads and steamships using the outside route gradually

forced tolls down more than 50 percent. Despite efforts to

attract trade by giving larger rebates to towing companies, the

important coal trade, which usually amounted to 40 to 50 percent

of all traffic, declined by more than one-half between 1872 and

1879.

Adding to the troubles of the company was a movement, which

took form at a National Commercial Convention in Baltimore in

1871, for the construction of a sea-level ship canal between the

Chesapeake and Delaware bays. The supporters of this movement

were not interested in an intracoastal waterway but in providing

Baltimore with more direct access to the Atlantic in order to

compete with New York as a great entrepot of overseas trade

connecting with the West. In their view the Chesapeake and

Delaware Canal, even if converted to a sea-level passage, was

too far north to furnish the desired short outlet to the ocean.

Looking primarily to the United States for the construction of

the canal, its advocates succeeded in bringing about surveys by

64
the Corps of Engineers, between 1878 and 1883, of six probable

routes across the Delmarva Peninsula. Upon submitting its

findings to Congress, the Corps suggested the appointment of a

special commission representing military, naval, and commercial

interests to decide which route would best promote the defense

and commerce of the country.15

When eventually appointed in 1894, the commission, chaired

by Chief of Engineers Brigadier General Thomas L. Casey, rejected

all of the surveyed routes and instead recommended development

of the existing Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. Discounting the

benefit of a ship canal to Baltimore's trans-Atlantic trade, the

commission explained that for foreign traffic the gain in time

from using any of the routes would be so small compared with the

duration of the entire voyage it was unlikely vessels would risk

the delays common in restricted channels. Thus a ship canal

constructed on any of the routes would be used largely for

interior navigation, and for this, the commission decided, the

line of the present canal was the most advantageous. Though the

Casey Commission report was unpopular in Baltimore, it was

welcomed by the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal Company, which had

already decided to do everything in its power to have its

properties taken over by the government. 16

Before Congress acted on the matter again, renewed interest

in waterways began to be expressed in the nation. Despite the

precipitous decline in canal traffic, belief in the relative

cheapness of water transportation, especially for low-value bulk

freight, remained strong. The competition of waterways was also

seen as an effective means of regulating railroad rates. The

most compelling cause for the renewed interest, however, was that

the entire transportation system threatened to break down. Railroads, successful beyond their capabilities, had become clogged

with more freight than their cars could carry and more traffic

than their terminals could handle. Dozens of local and regional

waterway associations sprang up for the purpose of pressing upon

Congress the importance of waterway development. 17

In 1906 Congress authorized a new special commission to

determine the cost and advantage of converting the Chesapeake

and Delaware Canal to a ship canal. By this time the advocates

of a ship canal had significantly changed their tune. No longer

urging a direct route to the ocean for Baltimore's foreign trade,

they had for several years been touting the strategic and commercial benefits of the existing canal route as part of a great

inland waterway. Reporting in January 1907, the commission,

chaired by Felix Agnus of Baltimore, one of the first and most

articulate of the ship canal advocates, declared that the canal

was “the most important link in the proposed waterway from the

Gulf to the City of Philadelphia . . . and its purchase and

65
improvement by the Government would be a benefit of extraordinary

value.” Bills to this end introduced in 1907 and 1909, however,

failed to pass. Although the demand for the ship canal was

growing, it still lacked sufficient strength.18

Adding to the political clout of the canal’s supporters at

this time, however, was the organization in 1907 at Philadelphia

of the Atlantic Deeper Waterways Association. Its president was

J. Hampton Moore, a congressman from Philadelphia, and chief

among its other leaders was John H. Small, a congressman from

North Carolina. The association persistently agitated for the

systematic and gradual construction of a continuous inland water

route from Boston to Key West. Because of the importance of the

Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to its overall plan; “substantially

the vital link,” Moore maintained, the group became the canal’s

leading advocate.

In 1908 Congressmen Moore and Small introduced resolutions

calling for surveys for an inland waterway from Boston to

Beaufort, North Carolina, and from Beaufort to Key West.

Approved in 1909, the surveys were the first to be made along the

entire Atlantic coast. In 1910 Congress empowered the Secretary

of War to negotiate the purchase of either the Albemarle and

Chesapeake Canal or the Dismal Swamp Canal as part of the inland

waterway if recommended in the survey report. The report on the

Boston to Beaufort survey, submitted to Congress early in 1912,

recommended two first steps in the development of the waterway:

the construction of a 12-foot-deep waterway between Norfolk and

Beaufort by way of the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal and the

purchase and gradual conversion, so as to interfere as little as

possible with existing traffic, of the Chesapeake and Delaware

Canal into a ship canal 25 feet deep. In the Rivers and Harbors

Act of 1912 Congress accepted the first recommendation but not

the second. According to Moore, “the desire to keep down the

total appropriations and the pressure from the Mississippi

Valley were too strong to be overcome."20

For several years repeated attempts to purchase the

Chesapeake and Delaware Carol were frustrated by opposition from

the West and Midwest, government economizing on waterway projects

followed the outbreak of war in Europe, and failure to set a

price acceptable to both the canal company and Congress.

Finally, in 1917 Congress authorized condemnation proceedings.

In March 1919 it made the necessary appropriation, and the next

month the Wilmington District Court made a condemnation award of

$2.5 million. This figure, which the company had agreed to

accept prior to the award, had been set by the Agnus Commission

as the value of the canal. It represented solely the bonded

indebtedness of the company. As no dividends had been declared

on the canal’s stock since 1876, the commission had deemed it

worthless. Formal transfer of the canal to the government

occurred on 13 August 1919.21

66
By 1927 the first step recommended by the Corps--the

conversion of the locked canal into a sea-level canal 12 feet

deep and 90 feet wide at the bottom--was completed. To provide

more ready access to deep water and to eliminate a sharp curve

in the canal line, the Corps located a new eastern terminus at

Reedy Point, two miles south of the old entrance at Delaware

city. Reconstruction had proceeded with a minimum of hindrance

to traffic, which increased while work was in progress from

481,000 tons in 1920 to more than 700,000 tons in 1928. Continuing to grow, tonnage exceeded one million tons in 1932 and

remained well above the figure throughout the decade. New larger

vessels were soon regularly navigating the canal, shallow-draft

seagoing vessels occasionally used it, and in 1931 a new

commodity —oil--began to pass through in tankers designed to the

largest dimensions possible for use on the route.22

In 1935 Congress authorized the enlargement of the canal to

27 feet deep and 250 feet wide at bottom through the land cut and

400 feet wide down the Elk River and into Chesapeake Bay to deep

water. Initiated with funds from the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, the project was completed by 1938. Commerce

through the canal increased dramatically from just over 1 million

tons in 1935 to 3.8 million tons in 1940. World War II drove

more freight to the protected passage, and in 1942, when German

submarine activity along the Atlantic coast was at its peak,

10.8 million tons went through.23

Traffic on the canal dipped back to about 3.7 million tons

by 1945, and then steadily increased until by the mid-1950s it

amounted to nearly 10 million tons annually. In 1954 Congress

again modified the canal project to provide for a channel 35

feet deep and 450 feet wide throughout, the reduction of curves

in the channel, and the replacement of all movable-span bridges

with high-level fixed structures (later changed to allow a

vertical-lift railroad bridge). For several years meager funds

allotted to the project permitted only minor works. But after

new calculation of the project's cost-benefit ratio in 1932,

which showed 30 percent greater benefits than costs, Congress

provided for large-scale construction. Moving ahead at a steady

pace, the project was by 1970 about 87 percent completed. Since

then only minor work has been carried out. In 1979 vessels

carrying 14.4 million tons of freight made 11,207 trips through

the canal.24

The Dismal Swamp and Albemarle and Chesapeake Canals

The Dismal Swamp Canal, dealt a blow by competition from the

Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal, was dealt another by the Civil

War. Taken over to transport supplies first by Confederate

troops and then by Union forces, neither of whom paid tolls or
provided maintenance, the canal deteriorated badly. In 1866 the

canal company, reminding Congress that the United States still

owned 800 of 1,944 shares in the waterway, asked for $200,000

for repairs. Congress responded by authorizing the Secretary of

the Treasury to sell the stock, apparently intending that the

company use the proceeds in lieu of an appropriation. At the

same time Congress stipulated that the canal should be kept open

as a navigable highway without any further expense to the government. This move died when the Attorney General advised that

perpetual navigability of the canal was a matter the government

could not control beyond its voice as a stockholder in the

company and could not be insured by any guarantee a purchaser

might be asked to give. 25 In 1867 the company floated a

$200,000 bond issue, but the sum proved insufficient to rebuild

a viable waterway. The company again petitioned Congress for aid

in 1871 and 1874 without success. In 1878, in default on bond

payments, it was forced by the bondholders to sell its

properties, at which time the United States ceased to be a

stockholder .26

Faring no better under new management, the company continued

to lead a hand-to-mouth existence while the condition of the

canal steadily worsened until only vessels whose draft did not

exceed 2 feet had a reasonable chance of getting through without

grounding. In 1892 came a turning point. The Lake Drummond

Canal and Water Company of Baltimore purchased the canal and

between 1896 and 1899 reconstructed it into substantially its

present form. The new owners enlarged the canal to 10 feet deep,

60 feet wide at the surface, and 40 feet wide at the bottom;

lowered the summit level so that only a single lock was required

at each entrance; and dredged the canal approaches 10 feet deep

and 40 feet wide. The Corps of Engineers, under a project

authorized in 1899, widened the approaches to 100 feet.

The success of the reconstructed waterway in recapturing

trade from its rival was remarkable. In 1880 the Dismal Swamp

Canal had carried only 6,731 tons of freight, while the

Albemarle and Chesapeake had carried 400,000 tons. In 1899,

although reconstruction was not completed until August, it

carried 78,211 tons compared to the Albemarle and Chesapeake's

316,793 tons. By 1906 the Dismal Swamp’s tonnage had increased

to 340 135 tons, while its rival’s had dropped to 95,629

tons.28 This advantage, however, was short lived.

The Corps of Engineers report on the survey of the

intracoastal waterway from Boston to Beaufort, North Carolina,

submitted to Congress in 1912, recommended the route of the

Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal for the construction of the

12-foot-deep, sea-level waterway from Norfolk to Beaufort. The

shorter land cut and lower elevation of this route brought

68
construction cost to less than half that of the Dismal Swamp

route. Congress approved the project, and on 30 April 1913 the

United States purchased the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal for

$500,000.29

The construction of the waterway, known officially as the

“Inland Waterway from Norfolk, Vs., to Beaufort Inlet, N.C.,”

was completed in 1932. Congress modified the project in 1917

and 1918 to permit changes in the route and in 1930 to provide

for the construction of a new tidal guard lock, measuring 600

feet long and 75 feet wide, at the Elizabeth River entrance to

the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal. Covering a distance of

nearly 198 miles from Norfolk to Beaufort, the waterway varies

in bottom width from 90 feet in land cuts to 300 feet in open

waters. Upon leaving Albemarle Sound, it avoids broad Pamlico

Sound and follows a succession of rivers, creeks, bays, and land

cuts from the Alligator River, which flows into Albemarle Sound,

to the Newport River, which leads to Beaufort Inlet. Prior to

the adoption of the project the Corps had improved some of these

water courses and, beginning in 1837, had made seven previous

surveys for a through route. Now at last it had constructed a

through waterway suitable for barge traffic as part of the larger

scheme for an intracoastal waterway. Between 1970 and 1979

commerce on the waterway passing through the Albemarle and

Chesapeake Canal averaged 1.36 million tons annually. 30

- -

Following federal purchase of the Chesapeake and Albemarle

Canal, the Dismal Swamp Canal again lost trade to its now tollfree rival. For some years lumber shipped from landings on the

canal’s banks almost alone kept it in operation. Meanwhile its

controlling depth gradually diminished to five feet. In time

growing usage by pleasure boats helped keep the canal open.

Yachtsmen taking this route found it a comfortable day’s run

from Norfolk to Elizabeth City on the Pasquotank River, where

they could get supplies and lay over for the night. On the

Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal route such accommodations are not

readily available.

From the beginning of the Norfolk to Beaufort waterway

project, the Lake Drummond Canal and Water Company tried to

persuade the government to take over its canal as well as the

Chesapeake and Albemarle. In 1925 Congress finally agreed to

buy it as an adjunct to the inland waterway for $500,000. After

several years’ delay the transfer of title took place on 30 March

1929. Until recently the Corps of Engineers maintained the canal

at project dimensions of 9 feet deep over a bottom width of 50

feet and, under the project of 1899, maintained its approaches

at 10 feet deep and 80 to 100 feet wide. In 1940-1941 the Corps

replaced the canal’s old timber locks with steel and concrete

chambers 300 feet long and 50 feet wide. Although yachts en

69
route to and from Florida continue to use the canal extensively,

commercial traffic from 1974 to 1978 averaged only 173,504 tons

annually. Finding this insufficient to justify maintaining the

project depth, the Corps currently provides a 6-foot channel.31

The Cape Cod Canal

In 1860 the state of Massachusetts revived the idea, which

had lain dormant since the 1820s, of cutting a canal through

Cape Cod between Barnstable Bay and Buzzards Bay. It commissioned the drafting of new plans and in 1870 granted a

construction charter to a newly organized Cape Cod Ship Canal

Company. The state also asked the federal government to

construct a breakwater to shelter the Barnstable Bay entrance,

claiming that the work would be comparable to any other federal

harbor project. Directed to look into the matter, Boston

District Engineer Lieutenant Colonel John Foster suggested a

much larger waterway than had been planned. A canal 23 feet

deep, 300 feet wide at the surface, and 198 feet wide at the

bottom, he advised, would permit the heaviest vessels of the

Navy to pass through and allow vessels of all classes to pass

each other. Because of considerable differences in the heights

and times of tide at the two bays, previous plans had included

locks at each end of the canal. Foster discarded this idea. He

calculated that in a canal of the dimensions he proposed, the

swiftest currents generated by tides, which would last only a

few minutes anyway, would be no greater than in several other

waterways navigated without difficulty.32

Foster’s report established the concept of an open canal, but

had no further effect as the canal company never started construction. For more than three decades new petitioners scrambled

for charters to construct the canal. Several charters were

granted, but little was accomplished. Almost everyone saw rosy

prospects for the canal, but practically no one was willing to

risk his own money. The string of false starts ended in 1907

when August Belmont, a New York investment banker and the builder

of the city’s first subway system, bought the rights and properties of a company chartered eight years before. Belmont formed

a syndicate to underwrite the canal and in June 1909 started

construction. 33

Shortly afterward the Corps of Engineers made their

intracoastal waterway surveys from Boston to Key West. They

surveyed two inland routes from Boston to Narragansett Bay and

also considered the advisability of purchasing the partly

completed Cape Cod Canal, which would mean outside navigation

for the waterway from Boston to Fishers Sound except for the

several miles of the canal and Buzzards Bay. As existing

commercial needs were insufficient to justify construction of a

canal over either of the inland routes, the Corps recommended

70

postponing their further consideration until other sections of

the proposed intracoastal waterway had been constructed and the

benefit to commerce afforded by the Cape Cod Canal had been

demonstrated. Accordingly, plans for purchasing the canal should

also be delayed. Between Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound

the Corps surveyed a series of tidal streams, ponds, and lagoons

that offered an inside route for a canal, but the Engineers

doubted that it would be used sufficiently to warrant the large

expense. The rest of the waterway to New York Bay, they noted,

was by nature sheltered through Long Island Sound and of ample

capacity for all the traffic that would ever use it except at its

western end, where obstructions were already being removed. 34

In July 1914 the Cape Cod Canal opened to traffic. It was a

narrower waterway than Colonel Foster had proposed, Although its

charter depth was 25 feet, its bottom width of only 100 feet and

surface width of 200 feet precluded two-way traffic. The land

cut of the canal was 7.68 miles long, a dredged approach in

Buzzards Bay about 5 miles long, and the Barnstable Bay approach

about one-half mile long, making the total length of the passage

about 13 miles. For years it had been believed that the canal,

by eliminating the hazardous passage around the cape, would aid

shipping immensely. Yet it failed to attract the expected

traffic. The current was a major deterrent. Underpowered

vessels had to await slackwater or a favoring tide. Tugs towing

barges could not proceed against the current, and on going with

it had to take them through one at a time. Accidents occurred~

giving the canal a bad reputation. Mariners complained about

delays in transit through the single-track route, the narrowness

of the channel, shoals caused by bank erosion, the hazards of

passing through narrow draw bridges, and the prevalence of

ground fog.35

As early as 1915, Belmont, who formerly had been indifferent

to government aid or purchase, thought that the national

government “ought to really acquire the canal.” The first step

in this direction was taken May 1917, five weeks after the United

States declared war on Germany, when Senator John Weeks of

Massachusetts introduced a bill for its purchase. Slightly

amended, the bill became part of the Rivers and Harbors Act of

August 1917. The government and the canal company, however,

came to loggerheads on the question of price, an issue that was

further complicated by claims for compensation due each side

arising from the government’s takeover and repair of the canal

in the last months of the war. In 1919 the government instituted

condemnation proceedings that eventually led to an out-of-court

settlement signed on 29 July 1921 under which the government

agreed to pay the canal company $5.5 million in cash and assume

its $6 million bond obligation. Until Congress approved the

contract and appropriated the money, the company would operate

the canal and the government would be responsible for the

interest on the bonds.

72
In the next half-dozen years seven bills to carry out the

contract were introduced in Congress, only to fail because of

haggling over the terms, indifference, or opposition. In

January 1927 a bill finally passed, but only with a Senate amendment providing that the government should pay interest on the

bonds from the date of the title transfer rather than from the

date of the contract, which meant a loss of nearly $2 million to

the canal company. After more delay because of questions arising

over the validity of company land titles, the United States took

over ownership of the canal on 30 March 1928.36

The Corps of Engineers made extensive repairs on the canal

and the government abolished tolls. Commerce seeking the waterway increased from 894,763 tons in 1927 to nearly 2.5 million

tons in 1930. But it was obvious that without major improvements

the canal could never attract the great bulk of shipping compassing the cape. Studies authorized in 1930 recommended deepening

and widening the channel, installing a tidal lock midway in the

land cut to eliminate the problems caused by currents, and

replacing the hazardous bridges with more suitable

structures.37

Reconstruction began in 1933 as an emergency relief measure.

The Public Works Administration allocated funds to construct

three bridges and widen the land cut to 205 feet. Before work

had progressed very far, plans for the project went back to the

drawing board. An initial widening of the land cut in one place

to 170 feet had resulted in greater current velocities, yet

tugboat operators found that most of the difficulties for one-way

traffic had been removed. The trouble with the canal had not

been the current, but the narrow width of the channel. A locked

canal was no longer viewed as necessary, and the winter of 1933-

1934 showed that it might be a nuisance. Buzzards Bay became so

choked with ice that shipping was disrupted for weeks at a time.

But the canal did not freeze. It was apparent that in the still

waters of a locked canal there could be serious trouble with ice

formations every few years.

Boston District Engineer Colonel John J. Kingman proposed

modifying the project to provide for an open waterway 32 feet

deep and 540 feet wide through the land cut. The 540-foot width

would not only insure safe two-way navigation but also permit the

excavation of a channel 40 feet deep and 500 feet wide at some

future time without impairing revetments and other works on the

banks of the canal. Other recommendations included widening the

channel approach in Buzzards Bay to 500 and 700 feet, constructing mooring basins at each end of the land cut, and installing a

new lighting system to combat the problem of ground fog. The

reviewing authorities of the Corps concurred with Kingman's

proposals, and Congress authorized the project in August

1935.38

73
By 1940 the project was essentially completed. The Corps cut

the surface width of the canal to about 700 feet but reduced the

bottom width to 480 feet. More gradually sloping banks, the

Engineers reasoned, would reduce erosion and provide greater

safety if a ship ran aground. In addition to the mooring basins

for freighters, the Corps constructed harbors of refuge for small

craft at each end of the waterway. With extended approach

channels reaching to the new 32-foot depth, the total length of

the canal became 17.5 miles. Even while work was in progress

the improved canal attracted new shipping. In 1940 three times

as many ships and more than eight times as much cargo tonnage

went through as had gone through the old canal in 1927, the last

year of private ownership.

During World War II cargo tonnage doubled as convoys bound

for Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom assembled in

Buzzards Bay and all but the deepest ships sailed through the

protected passage. Other merchant ships, whose peacetime routes

passed wide of the cape, sought the safety of the canal, and

naval vessels of the lighter classes used it extensively. At the

height of submarine activity in the Atlantic, as many as 80

merchantmen and warships used the canal in a single day. Nearly

19 million cargo tons

After the war the

Since 1970 freighters

average of about 12.5

passed through in the year 1944.

canal continued to attract heavy traffic.

and tankers have carried through an

million cargo tons annually. Thousands of

recreational craft also pass through the canal each year. To

accommodate this traffic the Corps, between 1957 and 1963,

provided additional anchorage facilities at each end of the

waterway .39

THE INTRACOASTAL WATERWAY FROM BEAUFORT,

NORTH CAROLINA, TO KEY WEST, FLORIDA

In 1913 the Corps of Engineers submitted its report on the

Beaufort, North Carolina, to Key West, Florida, section of the

proposed intracoastal waterway. The Engineers were divided in

opinion. The special board of officers making the survey

recommended a ten-foot-deep waterway for the entire distance of

925 miles, to be completed in six years at an estimated cost of

$31 million. Brigadier General William H. Bixby, the Chief of

Engineers, concurred on the need for an intracoastal waterway

but saw no urgency for one ten feet deep or, in view of the

sparse population on Florida's east coast, for construction

through to Key West. He recommended, for the present, a sevenfoot channel as far as the St. Johns River, which the special

board formed at his request estimated would cost about $14.4

million. The Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors declined

to endorse either recommendation. Through traffic would be

74
negligible, the board argued, as vessels suited to the waterway

could not compete in capacity or speed with seagoing vessels.

It agreed with the special board that most commerce would be

local but saw no prospect of an increase sufficient to warrant

the large expenditures involved. It noted that between

Charleston and Jacksonville--in its view the most promising

section of the intracoastal waterway--channels for small boat

traffic already existed, for two of which improvement had already

been recommended. Improvement of the remaining sections of the

waterway, the board concluded,

time.40

was not advisable at the present

Congress took no action on the report. Ultimately the

waterway between Beaufort, North Carolina, and Key West was

developed, not as single project, but in several sections

improved by stages in response to expectations of commercial

benefit. The entire Intracoastal Waterway remained a string of

variously named projects until 1947, when all but the last two

of the southern reaches were collectively designated the

*’Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway between Norfolk, Vs., and St.

Johns River, Fla.” The ship canals comprising the waterway in

the north and the sections between the St. Johns River and Key

West continue to remain separate projects.

Inland Waterway, Beaufort to Cape Fear River, North Carolina

The Intracoastal Waterway from Beaufort, North Carolina, to

the Cape Fear River passes from Beaufort through Bogue Sound to

Swansboro, thence through the sounds and marshes to the south to

the lower end of Myrtle Sound where, near Carolina Beach, a land

cut of 1.6 miles brings it into the Cape Fear River about 16

miles below Wilmington. Covering a distance of 93.5 miles, the

channel is 12 feet deep at mean low water with bottom widths

varying from 90 feet in land cuts to 300 feet in open waters.

Contrary to the assumption made by Secretary Gallatin when

writing his report on roads and canals, inland navigation along

this stretch of the coast even for vessels of light draft was

not practicable. Between Beaufort and Swansboro the governing

low-water depth through Bogue Sound was 18 inches; between

Swansboro and the New River the depth of channels winding

through marine marshes sometimes diminished to 6 inches; and

between the New River and the southern end of Myrtle Sound the

shallow channels and marshes were not navigable by rowboats at

low water. Small boats sailing between Beaufort and the Cape

Fear River had to make the trip by ocean and pass around the

dangerous Cape Fear Shoals with no safe inlets to put into if

caught in bad weather and without enough good daylight to make a

safe through run. 41

75

Navigation improvement along this reach of the inland

waterway began in 1836 with a small appropriation for dredging

in the New River, which today carries a side channel of the

Intracoastal Waterway 21 miles to the town of Jacksonville.

Several more minor appropriations through 1910 further improved

the river. Navigation improvement between Beaufort and Swansboro

began in 1886 and between Swansboro and the New River in 1890.

In 1917 Congress consolidated the three works under the project,

“Inland Waterway, Beaufort to Jacksonville, N.C.,” which provided

for a channel 100 feet wide and 3 feet deep at mean low water

between Beaufort and Swansboro, thence 40 feet wide and 3 to 4

feet deep at mean high water to New River, thence 40 feet wide

and 3 feet deep at mean low water to Jacksonville.42

Congress authorized the 12-foot channel through to the Cape

Fear River in 1927, and the Corps completed the work five years

later. Since then the Corps has increased the usefulness of the

waterway for both commercial and pleasure craft by constructing

ten channels, several with boat turning basins, to connect with

ocean inlets or nearby communities. 43

Intracoastal Waterway from Cape Fear River,

North Carolina, to Winyah Bay, South Carolina

Passing down the Cape Fear River to Southport, near the

river’s mouth, the Intracoastal Waterway then follows the

Elizabeth River to its headwaters, cuts 2.6 miles through high

ground to the head of Davis Creek, descends the creek, and

continues through coastal sounds and marshes to the Little River.

Ascending the Little River to its headwaters, it cuts nearly 22

miles through land to the head of Socastee Creek, thence follows

the creek and Waccamaw River to Winyah Bay to complete a

distance of 94.5 miles.

Before construction began in 1930 inland navigation between

the Cape Fear River and Winyah Bay had been totally impossible.

The depth of water in the Elizabeth and Little rivers and in

Socastee Creek diminished to nothing at their heads, and in

other places shallow channels and marshes could not be traveled

by rowboats at low water. Where the land cuts were made,

elevations reached 30 and 32 feet. The only navigation work

along the route had been dredging in the Waccamaw River,

authorized in 1880, to clear shoals as far as the town of Conway.

The project initiated in 1930 provided for a waterway 8 feet

deep and 75 feet wide, which was completed in 1936. The next

year Congress approved a channel 12 feet deep with a bottom

width of not less than 90 feet. Applying to the Intracoastal

Waterway from the Cape Fear River to Savannah, this legislation

was in accordance with a Corps review report that recommended

77
enlarging that portion of the waterway to the same dimensions as

already existed north to Norfolk. In 1938 provision was made for

the construction of a yacht basin at Southport. Both project

modifications were completed in 1940.44

Waterway from Winyah Bay to Charleston, South Carolina

Leaving Winyah Bay 8 miles below the port of Georgetown, the

Intracoastal Waterway passes through the Estherville-Minim Creek

Canal to the North Santee River, cuts through Four Mile Creek to

the South Santee River, and then threads through low coastal

islands to Charleston Harbor, 63.5 miles away. For much of this

course it follows a natural waterway, originally 86 miles long,

that had allowed the passage of small vessels but was in many

places obstructed by crooked channels and shallow reaches where

low-water depths sometimes did not exceed a foot. More dangerous

were stretches across Bulls Bay and near Cape Remain that were

exposed to the sea.

Improvements on the waterway began in 1900 with the

construction of the Estherville-Minim Creek Canal--6 feet deep,

70 feet wide, and 5 miles long--for the passage of Santee River

steamers to Winyah Bay. A second project initiated in 1902

enlarged the channel from Charleston to the village of McClellanville, about two-thirds of the way to Winyah Bay, to 4 feet deep

and 60 feet wide and rerouted it to eliminate the open stretch

across Bulls Bay. 45 Nothing more was done until 1919, when

the Corps extended these channel dimensions through to the

Estherville-Minim Creek Carol along a course that avoided the

exposed run near Cape Remain. In 1925 Congress authorized the

cut across the Santee Delta at Four Mile Creek, which shortened

the waterway by 10 miles. In 1932 the Corps recommended

constructing a channel 10 feet deep and 90 feet wide, generally

following the existing route. This project was included in the

Public Works Program launched in 1933 to stimulate the economy,

was adopted by Congress in 1935, and was completed the next year.

In 1937 the legislation establishing uniform dimensions for the

Intracoastal Waterway from the Cape Fear River to Savannah

increased the project depth to 12 feet. Three years later this

work was completed.46

Waterway from Charleston to Beaufort, South Carolina

At Charleston Harbor the Intracoastal Waterway passes from

the Ashley River through the Wappoo Cut and continues along a

sinuous string of tidal streams and land cuts 66.5 miles to the

Beaufort River at Beaufort, South Carolina. Better endowed than

the inland water course to the north, the original natural

waterway between Charleston and Beaufort had a minimum depth of

6 feet interrupted at only four places and, except for a 6-mile

passage across St. Helena Sound, was well protected from the sea.

78

Early work on the waterway tackled its most bothersome

stretches. The first undertaking was at Wappoo Cut, a crooked

and shallow creek joining the Ashley and Steno rivers. BY

dredging and by a cutoff bypassing some of the worst bends, a

project authorized in 1881 created a channel through the cut 6

feet deep and 60 feet wide. At the other end of the waterway, a

project adopted in 1890 improved Brickyard Creek. A continuation

of the Beaufort River, Brickyard Creek had a fairly good 7-foot

channel except near its juncture with the Coosaw River, where the

channel practically disappeared among shoals. Work completed

in 1905 provided the creek with a through 7-foot channel of ‘“convenient width.” A third improvement, made in 1905-1906, was the

construction of Fenwicks Island Cut in the central portion of the

waterway. Replacing a narrow, tortuous, and shallow passage

through Mosquito Creek, the cut, 7 feet deep and 90 feet wide,

connected the South Edisto River with the Ashepoo River.

In 1925 Congress consolidated these improvements into a

single project for a waterway from Charleston to Beaufort 7 feet

deep and not less than 75 feet wide. Completed in 1929, the

Corps ' work consisted mainly of widening and deepening the

channel in Steno River, where in places the low-water depth had

been 4 feet; constructing another cutoff at Wappoo Cut to

eliminate a sharp curve; and cutting a new channel between the

Dawho and South Edisto rivers to avoid more sharp bends and

shorten the waterway by 9 miles. In 1931 a Corps report recommended eliminating the exposed passage across St. Helena Sound by

excavating two short cuts through the marshes between the Ashepoo

and Coosaw Rivers. This work, authorized under the Emergency

Relief Appropriation Act of 1935 and included in a rivers and

harbors act later in the year, was completed in 1936.

In 1937 the Corps resumed construction on the entire waterway

between Charleston and Beaufort to bring the channel to the

12-foot-deep, 90-foot-wide dimensions authorized that year for

the Intracoastal Waterway from the Cape Fear River to Savannah.

The Engineers completed this alteration in 1940.47

Waterway between Beaufort, South Carolina,

and St. Johns River. Florida

Between Beaufort, South Carolina, and the St. Johns River the

Intracoastal Waterway consists mostly of natural water courses

through sounds and tidal marshes. Several artificial cuts help

shorten the route and avoid exposed localities. Two hundred and

seven miles long, this section offers intermediate connections

with Port Royal, South Carolina; Savannah, Darien, and Brunswick>

Georgia; and Fernandina, Florida. Even before improvement of the

waterway, light-draft boats had carried considerable commerce between Beaufort and Savannah. Between Savannah and Fernandina,

where the controlling depth of water was three feet, traffic had

80
been lighter. Between Fernandina and the St. Johns River, which

the waterway enters a few miles from its mouth, nature had

neglected to provide a through channel, but private interests

opened a shallow passage early in the nineteenth century by

making cuts to connect streams paralleling the coast.

Until 1917 the Corps improved these three reaches of the

waterway under separate authorizations. Work began on the

section between Fernandina and the St. Johns River. Between

1828 and 1839 the Army Engineers dredged shoals at several

places, chiefly in the cuts. Nothing more was done until 1874

when Congress called for dredging between the St. Johns River

and Nassau Inlet in order to provide a better outlet for the

commerce of the St. Johns than across the treacherous bar blocking the river’s mouth. Six years later, however, upon the

adoption of plans for improving the entrance of the St. Johns,

the project was abandoned. The channel soon shoaled to 2.5 feet

and remained in this condition until 1913. That year Congress

authorized a new project, completed in 1915, to open a waterway

between Fernandina and the St. Johns River 7 feet deep and 100

feet wide.48

Between Savannah and Fernandina the first navigation

improvements deepened passages at Romerly Marsh in 1882 and at

Jekyl Creek in 1888. In 1892 work began on a through 7-foot-deep

channel. A separate project of 1905 improved Skidaway Narrows,

a twisting and shallow passage near Savannah that was much used

in preference to the regular route because it was safer in bad

weather and shorter. In 1912 Congress incorporated the Narrows

and four other water courses used as alternate routes or

auxiliary channels into the Savannah to Fernandina Waterway.

4 9

Work between Beaufort and Savannah began in 1896 with a

project to deepen the natural waterway between the two

communities to 7 feet throughout its course. Because current

plans for improving Savannah Harbor included closing old

entrances of the waterway, a new entrance was to be cut into the

Savannah River near its mouth. Three years later, however, the

waterway was re-routed to move the entrance upriver to a less

exposed locality. In 1912 a similar change of route was made

where the waterway entered Beaufort River to bring it into the

shelter of Parris Island. Twenty-five years later this passage

was abandoned in favor of the deeper water of Port Royal

Sound.50

The Rivers and Harbors Act of 1917 consolidated the projects

on the three reaches into the “Waterway between Beaufort, S.C.,

and St. Johns River, Fla.” All work under the new authorization,

which included several cuts that considerably shortened the

81

length of the waterway, was completed in 1932. In 1937 the

waterway as far as Savannah came under the provision of that

year for establishing a 12-foot-deep, 90-foot-wide channel from

the Cape Fear River. The next year, upon the request of

carriers, Congress authorized the extension of the 12-foot

channel to the St. Johns River, work which the Corps completed

in 1941. Between 1919 and 1945 Congress also provided for the

construction of an anchorage basin at Thunderbolt, Georgia, and

for the incorporation into the project of five more ancillary

channels connecting with intermediate points or offering more

protected passages. 51

Intracoastal Waterway, Jacksonville to Miami, Florida

The Intracoastal Waterway from Jacksonville to Miami extends

down the St. Johns River from Jacksonville to the entrance of

Pablo Creek, a few miles from the river’s mouth, and then follows

an almost continuous series of protected waterways just inside

the coast to Miami on Biscayne Bay for a total of 370 miles.

Early federal projects on this lengthy course were restricted

to Indian River, a 128-mile-long lagoon lying between the mainland and barrier islands midway along the waterway. The first,

prompted by logistic problems during the Second Seminole War of

1835-1842, was the construction in 1853-1854 of a small canal 8

feet wide, 2 feet deep, and less then half a mile long at a

portage called the Haulover between Mosquito Lagoon and Indian

River to permit the Army to transport supplies by flatboats down

the waterways without having to lug them across an intervening

sand barrier. With little permanent population in the region,

the small passage soon fell into disrepair. By 1892, however,

settlements along the Indian River had developed to the extent

that a project was initiated for clearing a 5-foot-deep, 75-footwide channel for steamers through the river's most obstructed

section between Goat Creek and Jupiter Inlet. Small dredging

projects authorized in 1894 and 1896 opened Indian River Inlet

and Jupiter Inlet for passage of small vessels to the sea.

The development of a continuous waterway along Florida's

east coast was left to private enterprise. In 1883 the Florida

Coast Line Canal & Transportation Company began construction from

the St. Johns River to Biscayne Bay that continued until 1912,

when the last section of the Florida East Coast Canal was

completed. By charter requirements the company was to provide a

channel 5 feet deep and 50 feet wide, but whether because of

inadequate toll receipts or greater interest in profiting from

the sale of lands granted by the state to subsidize construction,

it failed to maintain these dimensions.

83
I

,

1

Io

I

to

,

,to
In 1915 Congress directed the Corps of Engineers to examine

the advisability of purchasing the canal and converting it into

a more usable waterway. The canal company was willing to sell

its rights for $2 million, but the survey board advised against

the purchase. Taking the same position as had the Chief of

Engineers in relation to the intracoastal waterway surveys made

a few years before, the board did not believe that commerce along

Florida's still sparsely populated east coast would develop

sufficiently within a reasonable period to justify the large

expense. In 1920 Congress ordered a second survey. Not

reporting until 1926, the Corps found a markedly changed

situation. Noting that between 1920 and 1925 the population of

Florida's east coast counties had increased more than 70 percent

and that the Florida East Coast Railway could not provide

adequately for the movement of perishable crops, the Corps now

advised that the development of the waterway was warranted. It

recommended the construction of an 8-foot-deep, 75-foot-wide

channel (modified in 1930 to 100 feet wide) from Jacksonville to

Miami, provided that local interests acquired the Florida East

Coast Canal and the necessary rights of way and transferred them

free of cost to the United States.53

Congress approved the project in 1927, and in 1929 a Florida

Inland Navigation District created by the state purchased the

canal properties and conveyed them to the United States.

Financed in large part by Public Works funds, the construction

of the waterway was completed in 1935. Ten years later, in

response to objections by local interests that common carriers

found it unprofitable to operate on regular schedules in an

8-foot channel, Congress authorized a channel 12 feet deep and

125 feet wide. In 1960, however, an economic study report led

to a reduction of the project depth to 10 feet for the portion

of the waterway between Fort Pierce and Miami. These channel

modifications were completed in 1965. Extending through a now

populous and recreationally popular coastal strip, the waterway

from Jacksonville to Miami is dotted with private and municipal

wharves and piers for freight and recreational craft, makes

intermediate connection with the deep-water ports of Fort Pierce,

Palm Beach, and Port Everglades, and connects with ten yacht

basins open to the public.54

Intracoastal Waterway, Miami to Key West, Florida

In 1935 Congress authorized the continuation of the

Intracoastal Waterway, with a channel 7 feet deep and 75 feet

wide, from Biscayne Bay through Card, Barnes, and Backwater

sounds into Florida Bay as far as Cross Bank at the southern end

of Key Large, 63 miles from Miami and 94 miles short of Key

West. A Corps survey report of 1932 justified the extension

only to that point, where it would connect with Key Largo and

87
neighboring Plantation Key, the largest of the Florida Keys and

the most important in fish and agricultural production. The

survey found that the depth of water in Biscayne Bay and the

sounds to the south was generally 10 to 12 feet and in the

eastern end of Florida Bay 7 feet, but scattered shoals interrupted through navigation. Dredging through the shoals to

construct a 7-foot channel to Cross Bank would cost relatively

little. But the cost would be too great and the benefits too

uncertain to justify extending the channel to Key West. For 53

miles from Cross Bank to Bahia Honda the controlling depth of

water was 5 feet and for 41 miles from Bahia Honda to Key West

only 2.5 feet, conditions that would require almost continuous

dredging. The dredging to Cross Bank was accomplished in 1938-

1939, with the width of the channel increased to 90 feet at no

additional cost.

In 1945 Congress authorized the extension of the 7-foot

channel to Key West. A Corps review report, completed in 1942,

had advised that the channel would not only be of commercial

benefit but would facilitate the activities of the federal

military and civil agencies located at Key West. Funds for the

work, however, never materialized. In 1963 an economic study

report concluded that the extension was not economically

justified, and this last stretch of the Intracoastal Waterway

was placed in the inactive category. 55

THE “MISSING LINK”

With the completion of the channel from Miami to Cross Bank

in Florida Bay in 1939, the Intracoastal Waterway along the

Atlantic coast reached its present length. But there is a

“Missing Link,” as it has been labeled by the Atlantic Deeper

Waterways Association. The through navigation envisioned by

Gallatin is interrupted between New York Bay and the Delaware

River, where once the Delaware and Raritan Canal had carried

more traffic than the famous Erie.

After 1872 the volume of coal entering the Delaware and

Raritan Canal, which had comprised more than 80 percent of its

tonnage, steadily declined. The Philadelphia and Reading

Railroad, which now controlled many of the Schuylkill mines,

preferred to ship anthracite to New York by rail or by barges

towed along the outside route. The Pennsylvania Railroad, which

in 1871 leased the canal to acquire affiliated railway rights

across New Jersey, favored shipments by rail rather than canal

and was apparently indifferent to the decline of traffic on its

waterway. Despite criticism of the railroads by waterways

advocates, the canal could in fact no longer accommodate barges

of the size necessary for the economical transportation of

freight by water. Freight revenues in the twentieth century

8 8
fell below those from pleasure craft. In 1933 the canal ceased

operations, and the next year the railroad gave its rights to

the waterway to the state.56

The failure of the Delaware and Raritan Canal to meet the

requirements of modern water transportation caused the city of

Philadelphia, in 1894, to commission an investigation of

feasible ship canal routes across New Jersey. Reporting the

next year, the commission favored a route from Bordentown to

Sayreville near the mouth of the Raritan River, located to the

south of the existing canal and following a more direct course

across the state. Because of land elevations on the route

ranging from 75 to 100 feet, it did not propose a sea-level

canal, but one equipped with three locks at each end.

Philadelphia took no further action, and the scheme for a

ship canal remained in abeyance until the Corps intracoastal

waterway surveys initiated in 1909. Like the Philadelphia

commission, the special board conducting the surveys ruled out

the purchase of the Delaware and Raritan Canal. Topographical

and geological conditions, the existence of numerous bridge

crossings, and its route through the business center of Trenton

were all too unfavorable for its conversion to a ship canal.

The board recommended the construction of a 25-foot-deep

sea-level canal close to the route proposed by the Philadelphia

commission. It estimated the cost at $45 million and advised

that construction should be deferred until the two sections of

the waterway to the south were completed. Chief of Engineers

Bixby, unconvinced of benefits to the general public sufficient

to warrant that great an expense, recommended a 12-foot-deep

locked canal at a cost of $20 million. It should be constructed

to permit future enlargement, but as the benefits accruing from

the use of heavy-draft boats would be mainly local, this cost

should be met through provisions of local cooperation. The Board

of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors advised against constructing

either canal, but suggested that if one were built, the United

States should foot only half the bill.57

Four more Corps reports on the New Jersey ship canal between

1920 and 1936 failed to produce a favorable recommendation.

Prospective commercial benefits never caught up with escalating

costs. By 1920 the estimated cost of a 12-foot-deep locked canal

had risen to $40 million and that of a 25-foot-deep sea-level

canal to $86 million. By 1930 the cost of a sea-level canal

only 12 feet deep was $100 million. In 1934 a congressional

request for data on a waterway with a minimum depth of 25 feet

resulted in plans that discarded the concept of an open sea-level

waterway and recommended a canal with a summit level of 10 feet

reached by locks and dams in the Delaware and Raritan rivers.

Studies had developed the essential requirement that the canal

89
must be designed to prevent an intolerable intrusion of salt

water into the Delaware River, upon which Philadelphia and other

communities were dependent for water supplies. The estimated

cost of the waterway was $210 million. 58

It took the submarine menace of World War II to draw from

the Corps, in 1942, a favorable, though divided, review report.

The Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors concluded that the

value of a barge canal in time of war, together with prospective

benefits in normal times, warranted the construction of a

14-foot-deep canal at an estimated cost of $145 million.

Lieutenant General Eugene Reybold, the Chief of Engineers,

believing that the war had demonstrated the value of a ship

canal that could be built for only 29 percent more, recommended

the construction of the 27-foot-deep locked canal for which plans

had been drawn. 59 No further reports on the New Jersey ship

canal have been completed, and the “Missing Link” in the Intracoastal Waterway is not likely soon to be forged. Changing

concepts of war have lessened the military incentive for the

canal, and the large problems of cost in relation to benefits

and of salt water intrusion still remain.

The New Jersey Intracoastal Waterway

Lacking a route across New Jersey, light-draft boats may

take a sheltered passage down most of the New Jersey coast and

into the lower end of Delaware Bay by the New Jersey Intracoastal

Waterway. Beginning at Manasquan Inlet, 26 miles south of Sandy

Hook, the waterway passes through the 2-mile Point Pleasant Canal

to the head of Barnegat Bay, follows a series of bays, lagoons,

and thoroughfares inside the New Jersey barrier islands to Cape

May Harbor, thence crosses the southern tip of the state by the

3-mile Cape May Canal to enter Delaware Bay about 3 miles above

Cape May point. The state of New Jersey constructed the waterway

from Manasquan Inlet to Cape May Harbor, a distance of 106 miles,

between 1908 and 1918. Although the authorized dimensions were

100 feet wide and 6 feet deep, the state dredged portions of the

channel to depths of 10 and 12 feet. The Corps of Engineers

dredged the Cape May Canal, a cut 12 feet deep and 100 feet wide,

with Navy Department funds in 1942 as an emergency wartime

measure to facilitate transportation along the coast.

In 1945 Congress adopted the New Jersey Intracoastal Waterway

as a federal project and authorized a through channel 12 feet

deep and generally 100 feet wide. The rationale for the project

was that it would bring substantial recreational and commercial

benefits and that the waterway was an essential part of the

intracoastal route from Boston to Miami. Funds for dredging the

12-foot channel from Manasquan River to Cape May Harbor, however,

were not forthcoming, and that portion of the project was soon

90
The Intracoastal Waterway: New Jersey

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
deferred for restudy. The Corps maintains portions of the

channel north of Cape May Harbor at the 10- and 12-foot depths

originally dredged by the state, but elsewhere the controlling

depth of the waterway is about 3 feet. Commercial traffic on

the waterway, consisting in 1979 of 87,012 tons of fish and

shellfish, is of minor importance.60

CONCLUSION

Two centuries of navigation development on the Atlantic

seaboard has seen river improvement and canal construction to

provide inland transportation, harbor improvement to serve foreign

and coastwise commerce, and the construction of an intracoastal

waterway to offer a sheltered passage the length of the coast.

Influenced by changing commercial needs and political climates,

this development has followed an uneven course.

During the colonial era the difficulty and often prohibitive

cost of land transportation forced Americans to depend on

waterways for travel and trade. Local authorities sometimes

attempted navigation improvements, but the known instances are

few. Atlantic harbors were deep enough in their natural states

for the small ships of the time and mostly well sheltered.

Numerous rivers were navigable by sloops for long distances

inland, and above the head of sloop navigation shallow-draft

boats could reach most communities.

American independence brought a need for better inland water

communications. The interruption of coastwise shipping during

the Revolution revealed the inadequacy of transportation

facilities north and south along the seaboard. A surge of

population westward to the Appalachians and beyond created a

demand for better east-west connections. Soon the economic life

of the nation quickened everywhere. Turnpike construction begun

shortly after the Revolution greatly improved overland travel,

but as goods still moved far more cheaply by water than by land,

Americans continued to depend wherever possible on water routes.

Private companies and state agencies set out as early as 1784 to

improve river navigation, largely by constructing locks and

canals at falls. Extensive construction of longer overland

canals did not get under way until the 1820s, after the builders

of the Erie Canal demonstrated that such huge undertakings were

technologically and economically feasible. The river improvements frequently failed to bring significant results, but the

dozen and a half major canals built along the seaboard helped

greatly to fulfill transportation requirements of the age.

Within a few decades, however, competition from railroads, which

revolutionized land transportation, brought canal building to an

end.

92
.

Albert Gallatin and other statesmen of broad national vision

hoped to combine the many early nineteenth-century schemes for

canals and roads into a coherent national system under the

sponsorship of the federal government. But their plans met with

only partial success. State and sectional jealousies, constitutional scruples, and partisan politics stood in the way of

effective federal action. Federal appropriations helped build

specific roads and canals, and the Army Corps of Engineers

assisted in planning many internal improvements. But the

transportation system in America was mostly shaped by the

narrower interests of state governments and private enterprise.

The federal government did assume responsibility for river

and harbor improvement. Work of a significant nature, performed

by the Army Engineers, began in 1824 in response to greatly

increased shipping activity. But the federal endeavors were

fitful and of uncertain future for several decades. The

political forces that obstructed federal development of roads

and canals also impeded systematic navigation improvement.

After the Civil War, however, a constantly growing volume of

waterborne commerce carried in increasingly larger ships and a

new political climate in the nation assured a strong federal

role in river and harbor development. As an unprecedented

program of navigation work continued to expand until about 1914,

the Corps of Engineers improved almost every river and harbor on

the East Coast that was expected to provide commercial benefits

justifying the cost. Work then sharply declined for a decadeand-a-half and centered mainly on waterways of major commercial

importance. In the 1930s public works spending and larger

regular appropriations, which nearly doubled navigation work on

the East Coast, restored a broader program. Interrupted by

World War 11 and the Korean War, river and harbor improvement on

the eastern seaboard resumed on a significant scale in 1956 and

then gradually diminished. In 1980 the Corps of Engineers did

not initiate a single new navigation project from Maine to

Florida. By this time, however, they had deepened major

Atlantic ports to 35 to 45 feet to accommodate deep-draft oil

tankers and other large vessels. They had also improved

numerous smaller ports important to the coastwise trade and

harbors important to fishing fleets and recreational craft.

The Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, conceived by Albert

Gallatin in 1808, was not essentially completed until the

1930s. It is a hybrid creation comprised of two widely

separated ship canals north of Norfolk, Virginia, and a string

of barge canals south of that port. Although Gallatin and other

advocates had in mind the advantages of a through route, the

waterway came into being through a series of local projects

developed in expectation of local benefits. Long-distance

shipments along the seaboard are cheaper and quicker by large

93
coastwise vessels than by vessels suited to the restricted

channels south of Norfolk. Commerce through the ship canals

consists mostly of coastwise and foreign traffic en route to

northern and Middle Atlantic ports. Commerce south of Norfolk

is entirely domestic and mostly short haul, tributary to the

nearest commercial centers and seaports. Although not a

thoroughfare over which the goods of the North and South are

exchanged, as envisioned by early planners, the waterway

nevertheless carries large amounts of freight and is heavily

used by recreational vessels.

94
HISTORICAL CHRONOLOGY OF ATLANTIC COAST WATERWAYS

1524 - Giovanni da Verrazano, a Florentine mariner seeking the

Northwest Passage for the king of France, was the first

navigator of whom we have definite record to coast the

Atlantic seaboard from the Carolinas to Newfoundland. He

put into New York Bay and Narragansett Bay.

1525 - Estevan Gomez, a Portuguese in Spanish service out to find

the passage, discovered a number of rivers and bays from

Cape Breton to Cape Cod, including the Penobscot River,

which he followed to the head of navigation at the site of

Bangor. He may have sailed as far south as Florida, but

the record is not clear.

- While Gomez was sailing south for the Spanish king, Lucas

Vasquez de Ayllon sailed north from the Spanish colony of

Santo Domingo with a flotilla of five ships to find the

passage and establish a colony. His colony, apparently

located on the Cape Fear River, was decimated by fever

and a difficult winter, and only a remnant of his

expedition made it back to Santo Domingo.

1527 - John Rut, sailing for England to find the passage,

searched the coasts of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia,

and New England. He continued to the West Indies, but

whether he explored more of the coast is not known.

1579 - Simon Ferdinand and John Walker, sent by Sir Humphrey

Gilbert to find a site for a colony, explored Penobscot

Bay and possibly Narragansett Bay in 1579-1580.

1584 - Simon Ferdinand, Philip Amadas, Arthur Barlowe, and Sir

Richard Grenville, employed in 1584-1585 to establish a

settlement for Sir Walter Raleigh (the ill-fated Roanoke 

Colony), found inlets through the Carolina banks, explored

Pamlico and Albemarle sounds, and ascended several rivers

flowing into them. Ferdinand also appears to have put

into Chesapeake Bay, claiming to have been there before

with Spanish mariners.

1585 - Settlers from the Roanoke Colony, rounding Cape Henry in

a small boat, explored the southern shore of Chesapeake

Bay, Hampton Roads, and the lower estuary of the York

River.

1588 - Vicente Gonzales, sent to reconnoiter the Roanoke Colony,

which Spain intended to destroy and replace with a Spanish

settlement, unknowingly sailed past the inlets to the

colony and on into Chesapeake Bay, which he explored to

its head.

95
1602 - Bartholomew Gosnold, employed by English merchants,

explored the New England coast from southern Maine to

Buzzards Bay. He named Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and

the Elizabeth Islands, and established a temporary post

on Cuttyhunk Island to barter with the Indians.

1603 - Martin Pring, on a similar trading expedition for English

merchants, followed Gosnold's course but put into

Massachusetts and Cape Cod bays, which Gosnold had sailed

by. For some five weeks he operated a trading post at a

good anchorage formerly identified as Plymouth Harbor but

now thought to be Provincetown Bay.

1604 - Samuel de Champlain, searching for a site for a French

colony and for the Northwest Passage, made three voyages

between 1604 and 1606 on which he explored and charted

the coast from Cape Breton Island to southern

Massachusetts. More systematic than his predecessors, he

navigated the Penobscot River and the lower reaches of

the Kennebec, entered the harbors of Eastport, Machias,

Gloucester, Boston, Plymouth, Barnstable, Nauset, and

Chatham, and sailed through Vineyard Sound as far as

Woods Hole.

1605 - George Waymouth, who three years earlier had looked for

the Northwest Passage in icebound waters to the north,

came to the coast of Maine to find a colonial refuge for

English Catholics and fishing grounds for his merchant

backers. He discovered Monhegan Island and an anchorage

that he named St. George's Harbor.

1607 - Captain John Smith, under orders from the Virginia Company

to find a passage to the Pacific Ocean, went up the James

River and the tributary Chickahominy River looking for a

lake at its source that Englishmen believed lay just

beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains and fed rivers leading to

the Pacific.

1608 - Continuing to look for the passage to the Pacific as well

as for sites for new settlements, Smith explored numerous

bays and creeks in Chesapeake Bay and ascended the

Potomac, Patapsco, Sassafras, Patuxent, and Rappahannock

rivers.

1609 - Henry Hudson, seeking the passage to the Orient for the

Dutch East India Company, and using maps sent by John

Smith, entered New York Harbor and followed the Hudson

River to the head of navigation above Albany. He opened

the way for the Dutch fur trade and the settlement of New

Netherland.

96
1614 - Captain Adriaen Block, sailing a small vessel built on

Manhattan Island, entered Long Island Sound through the

Hell Gate and navigated the southern New England coast as

far as Massachusetts Bay. Discovering the Connecticut

River, he sailed to the head of navigation at Hartford.

- Captain Cornelis Jacobsen Mey, another Dutch navigator,

charted Delaware Bay and bestowed his names on the

Delaware capes.

- Captain John Smith meticulously explored the shores and

waterways of New England (which owes its name to him)

from Penobscot Bay to Cape Cod. His Description of New

England, published in 1616, contained the most accurate

maps and descriptions made up to that time.

1662 - The Dutch at New Amsterdam built a small breakwater to

protect ships from ice floating from the Hudson River.

Few other references to harbor improvement during the

colonial period are readily found.

1686 - An early local effort at river improvement was the

deepening of the Connecticut River channel between

Hartford and Wethersfield through the combined efforts of

the adjoining towns.

1716 - Providing aids to navigation was more necessary and common

during the colonial period than was harbor improvement.

In 1716 the first American lighthouse began operation at

the entrance to Boston Harbor.

1762 - A lottery was organized in New York to raise funds for

erecting a lighthouse on Sandy Hook.

1763 - The colonial assembly of New York authorized the

appointment of a master and three or more wardens for the

port of New York to commission pilots, repair buoys, and

maintain lighthouses.

1770 - Citizens of Pennsylvania and New Jersey appointed

commissioners to improve navigation on the Delaware River

between Trenton and Easton. The next year the Pennsylvania and New Jersey assemblies granted the commissioners

legal status. Funding, however, continued to be by

subscription.

1773 - New Jersey residents raised 3,000 pounds by lottery to

clear and deepen the channel of Elizabeth-Town Creek so

that boats might be brought to a landing in the center of

the town.

97
1774 - The first recorded harbor dredging on the Atlantic coast

was the deepening of ship berths at Philadelphia by a

horse-powered grab dredge.

1775 - The American Revolution revealed the isolation of the

colonies from one another and the difficulties of moving

goods along the seaboard when the ship traffic was

interrupted. The Revolution also saw more western

migration. Both developments created incentives for

better transportation facilities.

1784 - One of the earliest attempts at harbor improvement was

dredging in Baltimore Harbor with a Dutch-type mud mill

that raised spoil with long-handled scoops operated by

man-powered treadmills. Some form of dredging is also

said to have been attempted in the Thames River of

Connecticut in 1785, in the Hudson River between Albany

and Troy in 1799, and in the Delaware River at New Castle

in 1803.

1785 - The state of Pennsylvania constructed timber piers in the

Delaware River at Marcus Hook to provide ships a refuge

from drifting ice. This was the first of a number of

“ice harbors’* built in the Delaware River.

- The Potomac Canal Company was organized, with George

Washington as president, to open the Potomac River to

navigation as far as Cumberland, Maryland, from where it

would connect by road to the Ohio River. Essentially a

river improvement concern, the company undertook canal

construction only to bypass falls. The canals, however,

absorbed so much of its resources that the company made

only minor improvements in the river.

- The James River Company was chartered to improve

navigation on the James River and to link it by turnpike

to the Kanawha River, a tributary of the Ohio. This

enterprise also owed its conception to Washington.

1789 - The First Congress of the United States directed that all

expenses for the maintenance and repair of lighthouses,

beacons, buoys, and public piers should be paid for from

the Treasury of the United States and that all contracts

for work be made by the Secretary of the Treasury with

the approval of the President. The Treasury assumed

control from local authorities of the 12 lighthouses

operating on the Atlantic coast.

1790 - Beginning in 1790 several states made harbor improvements

under federal enabling acts. Georgia was permitted to

levy tonnage duties to pay for work at Savannah Harbor;

98
0 .

Maryland to improve Baltimore harbor; Rhode Island to

dredge Providence Harbor; and Pennsylvania to construct

ice harbors in the Delaware River.

1792 - A stock company began construction of a canal around the

falls on the Susquehanna River near Columbia, Pennsylvania, and improved navigation through rapids for about

17 miles below Columbia, allowing flatboats to bring

produce from interior Pennsylvania and New York to

Chesapeake Bay. The project was completed in 1798.

- Work began on a canal to surmount falls on the

Connecticut River at South Hadley, Massachusetts, the

first in a series of canals bypassing falls that opened

flatboat navigation far into New Hampshire and Vermont.

The system was completed when the Enfield, or Windsor

Locks, Canal opened in 1829.

1793 - Construction began on the Dismal Swamp Canal to connect

Albemarle Sound, North Carolina, with the Chesapeake Bay

at Norfolk. Inexperience, inefficiency, and a paucity of

funds retarded progress until federal engineering

assistance and stock subscriptions totaling $200,000

helped transform a muddy ditch into a viable waterway

opened in 1828.

1796 - A canal to circumvent falls in the Merrimack River was

constructed at the future site of Lowell, Massachusetts--

Americafs first textile city. By 1814 companies

affiliated with the Middlesex Canal Company had

constructed six systems of locks and canals at falls and

rapids farther up the river. The project opened barge

traffic to Concord, New Hampshire.

1798 - Congress approved the incorporation of a company by

Massachusetts that would construct a pier at the mouth of

the Kemebunk River in Maine to protect the channel.

1800 - The Union Company improved sloop navigation on the

Connecticut River below Hartford by maintaining the

channel through shoals. Like the companies that

constructed canals around river falls, the Union Company

was authorized to collect tolls.

- The Santee and Cooper Canal, begun in 1792, opened water

transportation from the interior of South Carolina via the

Santee River system and the Cooper River to Charleston.

Twenty-two miles long, it was the first major canal constructed in the United States. It never became profitable. Railroad competition ultimately forced its

abandonment in 1858.

99
1802 - Under the 1789 provision relating to navigation safety,

Congress appropriated $30,000 for the Treasury to erect

and maintain piers in the Delaware River. Accordingly,

piers were constructed at New Castle, Delaware, to provide

a harbor of refuge from floating ice.

1803 - The Middlesex Canal of Massachusetts, started in 1793,

was completed. It permitted the trade of the Merrimack

Valley to flow to Boston. Running 27 miles and passing

through eight aqueducts and 20 locks, the canal

represented the greatest feat of canal construction in

America before the Erie. The Middlesex Canal was never

profitable and succumbed to railroad completion in 1853.

1808 - Albert Gallatin, the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury,

submitted a comprehensive plan to bind the new nation

together with a government-sponsored system of roads and

canals. He proposed the construction of an inland waterway along the Atlantic coast from Boston, Massachusetts,

to St. Marys, Georgia. The principal work would be the

construction of four canals, which he estimated would

cost $3 million. He thought that his whole program could

be completed in ten years.

1812 - The state of North Carolina chartered the Roanoke

Navigation Company. The company constructed a canal

around the falls of the Roanoke River at Weldon.

1815 - President Madison urged upon Congress the construction of

roads and canals and suggested a constitutional amendment

to invest the federal government with that authority.

- South Carolina and Georgia, each faced with competition

after 1815 from western producers of cotton, launched

ambitious programs for improving their waterways to lessen

the cost of marketing crops. Both programs were poorly

administered, and the shallow, swift, shoal-infested

streams of the Piedmont never succumbed to the designs of

the planners.

1816 - On November 16 Congress established the Board of Engineers

for Fortifications, consisting of three Corps of Engineers

officers and one naval officer, to choose sites and plan

fortifications. The board and the Topographical Engineers

gradually became involved in surveys relating to internal

improvements.

- The state of Virginia created a Fund for Internal

Improvement, to be administered by a Board of Public

Works, through which navigation projects and the construction of roads, bridges, and railroads were carried

out until the Civil War.

100
1817 - New York state began to construct the Erie Canal.

- A bill sponsored by Representative John C. Calhoun for

federal funding of internal improvements squeaked through

Congress, but President Madison, still believing in the

need for a constitutional amendment, vetoed it.

1818 - Pennsylvania authorized the operators of the Lehigh coal

mines to improve navigation on the Lehigh River in order

to move their anthracite down the Lehigh and Delaware

rivers to Philadelphia.

1819 - On January 7 Secretary of War John C. Calhoun submitted a

plan, much like Gallatin's, for a national system of roads

and canals. He emphasized the benefits for national

defense and recommended the extensive use of Army

Engineers in making surveys and plans. In hopes of

attracting trade and developing a major seaport, North

Carolina established a Board for Internal Improvements.

1820 - The Treasury Department constructed piers at the mouth of

the Kennebunk River in Maine to improve the channel.

1822 - On May 7 Congress authorized the Treasury to construct a

breakwater at the Isle of Shoals lying off Portsmouth,

New Hampshire, and to erect piers at Cape Henlopen at the

entrance to Delaware Bay to form a harbor of refuge.

1823 - President Monroe adopted the constitutional position that

Congress could appropriate funds for internal improvements

of national benefit if control of the improvement

companies remained with the states. He also recommended

that Army Engineers survey the routes for several canals

to be built by private companies.

- The Corps of Engineers was called upon to plan the

improvement of the harbor of Presque Isle, Pennsylvania,

on Lake Erie and to design the piers at Cape Henlopen

that Congress had directed the Treasury to construct.

1824 - On April 30 Congress passed the General Survey Act

authorizing the President to employ Army and civil

engineers to make surveys, plans, and estimates for roads

and canals of national importance. President Monroe

established the Board of Engineers for Internal

Improvements to administer the act.

On May 24 Congress appropriated $75,000 for navigation

improvements on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.

President Monroe assigned this work to the Corps of

101
Engineers, thus initiating the Corps' role in carrying

out as well as planning waterway development. Two days

later Congress voted further appropriations for improving

the harbor of Presque Isle and for repairing Plymouth

Beach, Massachusetts, which sheltered the town’s harbor.

1825 - The Schuylkill Navigation, opened to traffic in 1825, and

the Union Canal, opened in 1827, was a waterway system

designed to bring to Philadelphia the trade of interior

Pennsylvania and southwestern New York via the

Susquehanna River and its tributaries.

- The Erie Canal was completed. The longest canal in the

United States and the largest construction job yet

undertaken in America, it funneled much of the commerce

of the West to New York City. Even before its completion,

sections opened to traffic as early as 1819 had phenomenal

success and inspired a canal-building mania in the United

States.

1826 - On May 20 Congress approved the first omnibus rivers and

harbors act providing for more than 20 works and surveys.

Congress passed similar bills annually thereafter through

1838. Fifty works of improvement were carried out along

the Atlantic seaboard.

1827 - The Cumberland and Oxford Canal in Maine was completed.

Connecting Sebago Lake with Casco Bay, the canal remained

an important outlet for the products of southeastern Maine

into the 1870s.

1828 - The Blackstone Canal, linking Worcester, Massachusetts,

to Providence, Rhode Island, opened. A boon to the

development of the area during its brief existence, it

succumbed in 1847 to railroad competition.

- The Delaware and Hudson Canal, the northernmost of the

“anthracite canals,” opened to carry coal to New York and

New England markets. The canal extended from Honesdale,

Pennsylvania, to the Hudson River at Rondout.

- The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company was organized to

construct a canal up the Potomac River Valley from

Georgetown to Cumberland, Maryland. The canal did not

reach Cumberland until 1850 and never achieved the goal

of crossing the Appalachian divide with 264 locks and a

four-mile tunnel. The canal did carry considerable

tonnage and continued to be used into the twentieth

century. Always suffering from railroad competition, it

never became a profitable enterprise.

102
- The Dismal Swamp Canal between Chesapeake Bay and

Albemarle Sound was the first of the four canals of

Gallatin’s proposed inland waterway to be completed.

Already 15 years under construction by a private company

when Gallatin issued his report, it became a viable

enterprise only after receiving federal financial and

engineering assistance in 1826.

1829 - The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, connecting the

Chesapeake Bay with the Delaware River, was the second of

Gallatin's proposed chain of canals to open. It was

constructed by a private corporation, which after a

failing start in 1804-1805, resumed work in 1823. The

company received engineering assistance from the Corps of

Engineers in 1823 and federal financial assistance,

through the purchase of company stock, in 1825 and 1829.

The Chesapeake and Delaware reduced the distance of water

transportation from Philadelphia to Baltimore by more

than 300 miles and became a major carrier of the nation’s

waterborne commerce.

- The Lehigh Canal opened to barge Pennsylvania anthracite

from fields at White Haven to the Delaware River at

Easton.

1831 - The Morris Canal, connecting Newark Bay with the Delaware

River at Easton, opened to transport anthracite to New

York City and to stimulate agriculture and industry in

northern New Jersey. The canal employed 23 *’inclined

planes,” or cable railways, to transport barges over an

elevation of 914 feet. Although it could not handle

boats of more than 25 tons, the canal did a considerable

business and contributed materially to the economic

development of the area.

1832 - Pennsylvania completed construction of the Delaware

Division Canal, an anthracite canal connecting with the

Lehigh Canal at Easton. The canal paralleled the Delaware

River south to Bristol. From there barges could navigate

the river to Philadelphia.

1834 - The Pennsylvania Main Line Canal, connecting Philadelphia

with Pittsburgh on the Ohio River, opened to compete with

the Erie Canal for western commerce. From Philadelphia

to Columbia on the Susquehanna River, the transportation

was by rail, as was a 36-mile crossing of the crest of

the mountains by the Allegheny Portage Railroad. The

Main Line did a considerable volume of business, but its

construction and operation, together with a system of

branch canals, virtually bankrupted the state before the

canal and its branches were sold in the 1850s.

103
1835 -

1838 -

1840 -

The James River Company was reorganized as the James

River and Kanawha Company. Making the last attempt to

connect the Atlantic to the West by canal, the company

constructed a waterway nearly 200 miles up the James

River Valley from Richmond to Covington. The company

suspended work in 1856 for lack of funds and abandoned

plans to pierce the Appalachian divide with a tunnel.

Despite railroad competition the canal did a substantial

business, but it never recovered financially from high

construction costs.

The New Haven and Northampton Canal, built to divert the

commerce of the Connecticut River Valley from Hartford to

New Haven, opened.

Poorly constructed and constantly beset by difficulties,

it was abandoned in 1847.

The Delaware and Raritan Canal, another anthracite canal,

opened from Bordentown on the Delaware River to the

Raritan River connecting with New York harbor. It was

the third of Gallatin's proposed canals to be completed.

For a few years it carried greater tonnage than did the

Erie.

Congress in effect repealed the General Survey Act of

1824 by enacting legislation prohibiting the employment

of Army Engineers by private companies.

Local and sectional rivalries, constitutional objections,

partisan politics, and the Depression beginning in 1837

combined to signal an end to the annual rivers and

harbors acts of the past dozen years. Projects carried

out along the Atlantic seaboard included preserving

natural harbor breakwaters by firming beaches and

building seawalls, constructing artificial breakwaters

and ice-breaker piers, dredging rivers and harbors, and

erecting contraction works to deepen channels by the scour

of concentrated water currents. Except for a limited

measure in 1844 providing for works in the interior,

there was not another general rivers and harbors act

until 1852. Some appropriations continued to be made,

but those for the East Coast were limited to a few minor

projects justified by military requirements.

The Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal opened to circumvent

rapids and falls extending some 40 miles up the Susquehanna River from the Chesapeake Bay. The canal

represented Baltimore's bid to capture trade from

Philadelphia. Traffic, which soon became heavy, flowed

not only to Baltimore but also to Philadelphia by way of

the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal.

104
1852 - On August 30 Congress appropriated in excess of $2 million

for more than 100 works and surveys, 46 of which were on

the East Coast. Thereafter, until the close of the Civil

War, Congress voted appropriations for only seven improvements; four in the Middle West and three in the East.

1856 - The first national platform of the Republican Party

included a declaration that appropriations by Congress

for river and harbor improvements were constitutional and

justified by the obligation of the government to protect

the lives and property of its citizens.

- Construction began on the Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal,

which opened to traffic three years later.

1860 - The tonnage of American ships engaged in all employments

had increased from 1.2 million tons in 1830 to 5.4 million

tons. The annual tonnage of American vessels entering

and clearing American ports had increased between five

and six times. The size of ships had also greatly

increased. In 1830 a ship exceeding 400 tons was very

large; by 1860 many vessels displaced 1,500 or more

tons. These developments made the large-scale renewal of

river and harbor work imperative.

1863 - A waterways convention called by 94 members of Congress

brought 2,000 delegates to Chicago to demand improvements

on the Erie Canal and other waterways. Such conventions,

beginning as early as 1845, added to the pressures for a

broad federal program of river and harbor improvement.

1864 - On June 28 Congress authorized the Secretary of War to

expend $350,000 to repair harbors on the seaboard and the

Great Lakes.

1866 - On June 23 Congress appropriated nearly $3.7 million for

navigation improvements throughout the country. The

development of waterways continued to expand until about

1914, during which time more than 500 rivers and harbors

were improved on the East Coast. Work at major harbors

in this period often raced with growing volumes of

commerce and increasing size of ships.

1867 - On March 2 Congress authorized the first project to

improve the main ship channel at Boston Harbor. This and

several more projects through 1902 gradually enlarged the

channel from 18 feet deep and 100 feet wide to 35 feet

deep and between 1,200 and 1,500 feet wide.

105
- Work begun at Providence River and Harbor in 1852 was

renewed. Under nine project modifications through 1910,

the channel from Providence into Narragansett Bay, which

originally had a controlling depth of 4.5 feet, was

expanded to a 30-foot depth and 600-foot width.

1870 - Between 1870 and 1912 more than a half-dozen projects

gradually increased the governing low-water depth of the

Cape Fear River leading to the port of Wilmington, North

Carolina, from 7.5 feet to 26 feet.

1871 - The Rivers and Harbors Act of March 3 resumed improvement

of the Patapsco River channel to Baltimore harbor begun

in 1853. Successive projects until 1905 increased the

channel depth from 17 to 35 feet.

- A National Commercial Convention meeting in Baltimore

launched a movement for the construction of a ship canal,

which it hoped would be built by the United States

government, between the Chesapeake and Delaware bays. As

a result of entreaties by the canal’s advocates,

the Corps of Engineers between 1878 and 1883 made surveys

of six alternative ship canal routes across the Delmarva

Peninsula.

1873 - Projects adopted from 1873 to 1910 increased the channel

depth of the Savannah River to the port of Savannah from

7 feet at mean low water to 26 feet.

1876 - Congress adopted the first project for the improvement of

Norfolk Harbor. Further authorizations through 1910

provided for the gradual development of a 35-foot main

channel from Hampton Roads to beyond the Norfolk Navy

Yard on the South Branch of the Elizabeth River.

1878 - On June 18 Congress authorized the first in a series of

projects running to 1910 that deepened the entrance

channel to Charleston Harbor from 12 to 28 feet.

1883 - The Florida Coast Line Canal & Transportation Company

began construction of the Florida East Coast Carol by

dredging waterways paralleling the coast and connecting

them with canals. The work was completed in 1912.

1885 - The first systematic and permanent improvement of the

Delaware River to Philadelphia began with a Corps study

in 1885. Between then and 1910, several projects

increased the controlling depth of the channel from 17 to

35 feet.

106
1886 - The Rivers and Harbors Act of August 5 authorized the

Corps to begin improvement of New York Harbor. Although

the entrance channel had a controlling depth of 24 feet,

by the 1880s large ships could come in only on flood

tides. The channel was deepened to 30 feet, and then by

a project adopted in 1899, to 40 feet.

1892 - The Lake Drummond Canal and Water Company purchased the

Dismal Swamp Canal, which had been deteriorating since

the Civil War. Thoroughly reconstructed by its new

owners, the canal regained the major share of commerce

passing between Albemarle Sound and Norfolk. The canal

prospered until 1912, when the United States began construction of an inland waterway between Norfolk and

Beaufort Inlet by way of the Albemarle and Chesapeake

Canal.

1894 - A special commission authorized by Congress and chaired

by Chief of Engineers Thomas L. Casey recommended that

the United States purchase the Chesapeake and Delaware

Canal and convert it to a sea-level ship canal.

- Prompted by the inadequacy of the Delaware and Raritan

Canal to meet modern shipping requirements, the city of

Philadelphia commissioned a study of other routes across

New Jersey for the construction of a ship canal. The

commission recommended a route cutting more directly

across the state south of the existing canal, but no

action was taken.

1907 - The Atlantic Deeper Waterways Association was organized

in Philadelphia to lobby for the construction of an

inland waterway from Boston to Key West.

- A special commission appointed in 1906 to determine the

cost and advantages of converting the Chesapeake and

Delaware Canal into a ship canal reported that the

reconstructed canal would be the most important link in

the proposed intracoastal waterway and a valuable benefit.

1909 - In the Rivers and Harbors Act of March 3, Congress

authorized the first complete surveys for an intracoastal

waterway along the Atlantic coast.

- A syndicate formed by August Belmont, a New York

investment banker, began construction of the Cape Cod

Canal. When completed in 1914, the canal forged the

final link in Secretary Gallatin’s projected chain of

canals, but it did not follow the inland route that he

had proposed.

107
1912 -

1913 -

1917 -

1919 -

1920 -

1925 -

Reporting on the intracoastal waterway survey from Boston

to Beaufort, the Corps of Engineers recommended the

purchase of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal and its

conversion into a ship canal. The Corps also recommended

construction of a 12-foot-deep waterway between Norfolk

and Beaufort along the route of the Albemarle and

Chesapeake Canal.

On February 17 Congress authorized the purchase of the

Albemarle and Chesapeake Canal for $500,000, and the

construction of a waterway 12 feet deep and at least 90

feet wide from Norfolk to Beaufort Inlet. Construction

was completed in 1932.

The Corps of Engineers submitted a survey report on the

Beaufort, North Carolina, to Key West, Florida, section

of the proposed intracoastal waterway. The report

revealed serious differences of opinion among the special

board conducting the survey, the Chief of Engineers, and

the Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors as to what

action should be taken, and no projects resulted from it.

Congress adopted the project, “Waterway between Beaufort,

S.C., and St. Johns River, Fla. ," which provided for a

channel seven feet deep. The project consolidated three

projects adopted earlier. All work called for was

completed in 1932.

The project, "Beaufort to Jacksonville, N.C.," providing

for a channel three feet deep, incorporated improvements

begun on the New River in 1836, between Beaufort and

Swansboro in 1886, and between Swansboro and the New

River in 1890.

The United States purchased the Chesapeake and Delaware

Canal for $2.5 million. Bills to accomplish this had

repeatedly been introduced in Congress since 1907.

The annual reports of the Chief of Engineers from 1920 to

1930 noted that under the current program, improvement of

only the more important rivers and harbors was

contemplated. In accordance with this policy, from 1920,

to 1929, Congress authorized only 48 projects or

modifications of existing projects for the Atlantic

seaboard.

Several projects for improving specific localities in the

natural waterway between Charleston and Beaufort, South

Carolina, adopted between 1881 and 1902 were incorporated

into the single

Beaufort, S.C.”

the project was

project, "Waterway from Charleston to

Providing for a channel seven feet deep,

completed in 1929.

108
1927 - Congress authorized the construction of the “Inland

Waterway, Beaufort to Cape Fear River, N.C.” Incorporating the earlier project that had established a 3-foot

channel between Beaufort and Jacksonville, North Carolina,

the projects provided for a channel 12 feet deep and not

less than 90 feet wide extending to the Cape Fear River.

The work was completed in 1932.

- Congress authorized the construction of the “Intracoastal

Waterway, Jacksonville to Miami, Fla.,” provided local

interests acquired the necessary rights-of-way and the

Florida East Coast Canal, and transferred them cost free

to the United States. The state of Florida purchased and

conveyed the canal properties to the United States in

1929. The waterway, with channel dimensions 8 feet deep

and 100 feet wide, was completed in 1935.

- The conversion of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal into

a sea-level canal 12 feet deep and 90 feet wide at bottom

was completed. By 1932 cargo tonnage passing through the

waterway was more than double the tonnage of 1920.

1928 - The United States acquired the Cape Cod Canal for $11.5

million. Haggling over price and opposition within

Congress had delayed the purchase, which was first

authorized in 1917.

1929 - The United States purchased the Dismal Swamp Canal for

$500,000. In 1925 Congress had voted authorization to

acquire the canal as an adjunct to the inland waterway

from Norfolk to Beaufort Inlet. The canal is now used

primarily by recreational boaters.

1930 - Construction of the “Intracoastal Waterway from Cape Fear

River to Winyah Bay, S.C.,” began. The project, which

provided for a channel 8 feet deep and 75 feet wide, was

completed in 1936.

- Beginning in 1930 expenditures for navigation improvements

increased considerably and remained at a high level

throughout the decade. Public works and emergency relief

programs accounted in part for the increase. Giving

attention to both large and small waterways, Congress

authorized 265 projects for the Atlantic seaboard.

1932 - The Corps of Engineers recommended the construction of a

waterway 10 feet deep and 90 feet wide between Winyah Bay

and Charleston, South Carolina. Starting in 1900 several

109
separate projects had improved the natural waterway

between these localities to a minimum depth of 4 feet.

The new project was included in the public works program

started in 1933, authorized by Congress in 1935, and

completed in 1936.

1933 - The reconstruction of the Cape Cod Canal began as an

emergency relief measure by the Public Works Administration. In 1935 Congress authorized new project plans, and

by 1940 reconstruction was essentially completed. From a

narrow waterway that had failed to become a paying enterprise under private ownership, the canal was rebuilt into

a passage 32 feet deep and 480 feet wide at bottom.

Commerce currently averages about 12.5 million tons

annually.

- The Delaware and Raritan Canal, after more than a

half-century of declining traffic, ceased operation. The

next year the Pennsylvania Railroad relinquished its

rights to the waterway to the state of New Jersey.

1935 - Congress authorized the construction of the “Intracoastal

Waterway, Miami to Key West, Fla.” The waterway, however,

was to extend only as far as Cross Bank in Florida Bay,

where it would connect with Key Largo and Plantation

Key. A Corps of Engineers report had concluded that the

construction of a seven-foot channel was justified only

to that point. The necessary dredging was accomplished

in 1938-1939.

- Congress approved the enlargement of the Chesapeake and

Delaware Canal to 27 feet deep and 250 feet wide at

bottom, initiated with funds from the Emergency Relief

Appropriations Act. The work was completed in 1938.

Cargo tonnage carried through the canal nearly quadrupled

between 1935 and 1940.

1937 - Congress authorized increasing the channel dimensions of

the Intracoastal Waterway from the Cape Fear River to

Savannah to 12 feet deep and not less than 90 feet wide.

This action extended the dimensions that already existed

on the waterway from the Cape Fear River to Norfolk.

Work was completed in 1940.

1938 - On the request of carriers using the Intracoastal

Waterway, Congress authorized the enlargement of the

channel between Savannah and the St. Johns River to 12

feet deep and 90 feet wide. The Corps completed the work

in 1941.

110
1941 - World War II restricted river and harbor work to a minimum

as projects not directly connected with defense and war

efforts were suspended. Only eight construction projects

on the East Coast were continued or initiated. All were

to facilitate the movement of naval or supply vessels.

1942 - Because of the submarine threat to Atlantic coast shipping

during World War II, the Corps of Engineers, after years

of reporting adversely on the construction of a canal

across New Jersey to unite the Delaware River with New

York Bay as the Delaware and Raritan Canal had formerly

done, finally endorsed the proposal. The Board of

Engineers for Rivers and Harbors recommended building a

14-foot-deep barge canal, while the Chief of Engineers

favored a 27-foot-deep ship canal. No action was taken,

and a canal across New Jersey continues to be the “Missing

Link” in the Intracoastal Waterway.

1945 - The enlargement of the Intracoastal Waterway from

Jacksonville to Miami, Florida, to 12 feet deep and 125

feet wide was authorized. An economic study report of

1960 led to a reduction of the project depth to 10 feet

for the portion of the waterway between Fort Pierce and

Miami. Construction was completed in 1965.

- On the basis of a Corps of Engineers review report

submitted in 1942, Congress authorized the completion of

the Intracoastal Waterway to Key West with a seven-foot

channel. The work was never funded, and following an

economic study report of 1963, it was placed in the

inactive category.

- The New Jersey Intracoastal Waterway, constructed by the

state between 1908 and 1918, was authorized as a federal

project with the channel to be deepened from 6 to 12 feet.

The improvement was justified in part on the grounds that

the waterway, as an alternative to a canal across New

Jersey, was an essential part of the intracoastal route

from Boston to Miami. The project was soon deferred for

restudy, and construction has not been undertaken.

1947 - Legislation consolidated the six intracoastal waterway

projects from Norfolk to the St. Johns River into the

“Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway between Norfolk, Vs., and

St. Johns River, Fla.”

1954 - Congress authorized the enlargement of the Chesapeake and

Delaware Canal to 35 feet deep and 450 feet wide. By

1970 the project was approximately 87 percent completed.

Since then only minor work has been carried out.

111
1956 - River and harbor work on the East Coast was resumed on a

sizable scale with 38 projects under construction.

1958 - The number of Atlantic seaboard navigation projects

started each year began gradually to decline until in

fiscal year 1980 none were started.

1979 - Between 1945 and 1979 more than 250 improvement projects

were initiated on the Atlantic seaboard. The main

channels of 26 major harbors were dredged to depths of 35

to 45 feet. Lesser commercial ports were improved, as

were many small harbors used primarily by fishing and

recreational fleets.

112
NOTES

Chapter 1

1. Samuel Eliot Morison, The European Discovery of

America: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1499-1616 (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 503-511; Lawrence Co Wroth,

The Voyage of Giovanni da Verrazzano, 1524-1528 (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1970), pp. 71-90; Samuel Eliot Morison,

The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, A.D.

500-1600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 277-317.

2. Morison, Northern Voyages, pp. 166-209, 233-454,

479-545, 569-605; James A. Williamson, The Voyages of the Cabots

and the Discovery of North America (London: Argonaut Press,

1929), pp. 166-170, 184-197; John Bartlett Brebner. The

Explorers of NorthAmerica, -

1492-1806 (New York: Macmillan Co.,

1933), pp. 109-165, 197-217; David Beers Quinn, England and the

Discovery of America, 1481-1620 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

1974), pp. 93-171, 182-191, passim; Nellis M. Crouse, In Quest

of the Western Ocean (New York: William Morrow & Co:, 1928),

pp. 30-196, passim; George Born Manhart, The English Search for

a Northwest Passage in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, Studies in

English Commerce and Exploration in the Age of Elizabeth

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1924), pp. 31-

83, 99-121, 140-144.

3. Quoted in Brebner, Explorers, p. 320

4. Morison, Northern Voyages, pp. 233-237, 326-334; Quinn,

Discovery of America, pp. 171-182.

5. Morison, Northern Voyages, pp. 468, 619-625, 640-644;

Quinn, Discovery of America, pp. 250-251, 254-258.

6. Quoted in Quinn, Discovery of America, p. 240.

7. Ibid., pp. 240-241, 383, 388-390, 413-414, 423-427;

Henry F. Howe, Prologue to New England (New York: Farrar &

Rinehart, 1943), pp. 55-77, 84-97.

8. Quoted in Brebner, Explorers, pp. 154, 156.

9. Ibid., p. 156; Howe, New England, pp. 79-83, 98-141.

10. Quinn, Discovery of America, pp. 254, 256, 265,

275-276, 436.

113
11. Brebner, Explorers, pp. 264-265; Philip L. Barbour, The

Three Worlds of Captain John Smith (Boston: Houghton Mifflin

co., 1964), pp. 154-157, 200-230; Crouse, Western Ocean,

pp. 209-218.

12. Brebner, Explorers, pp. 205-207, 265-267; Llewelyn

Powys, Henry Hudson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1928),

pp. 24-38; 45-59, 77-111.

13. Brebner, Explorers, pp. 267-269; Howe, New England, pp.

219-233; Curtis P. Nettels, The Roots of American Civilization,

2d ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963), p. 195;

Christopher Ward, The Dutch & Swedes on the Delaware, 1609-1664

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930),

pp. 26-30.

14. Quoted in Howe, New England, p. 245.

15. Quoted in ibid., pp. 238, 243. See also Barbour, John

Smith, pp. 306-312; 325-326.

16. Quoted in Nettels, American Civilization, p. 160.

17. The fact that waterways determined the location of the

first American settlements is revealed in a number of general

histories. E.g., see Nettels, American Civilization, pp. 154-

185, 196-225, passim; James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New

England (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1930), chaps. 5,6,8,

9, passim; Samuel Eliot Morison, Henry Steele Commager, and

William E. Leuchtenburg, The Growth of the American Republic, 2

vols, 8th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 1:

23-24, 43-44, 54, 60.

18. Caroline E. MacGill et al. History of Transportation in

the United States before 1860 (Washington, DC: Carnegie

Institution of Washington, 1917), pp. 5, 254; Adams, New

England, p. 7.

19. See Nettels, American Civilization, pp. 225-264.

20. John G.B. Hutchins, The American Maritime Industries

and Public Policy, 1789-1914, Harvard Economic Studies, vol. 71

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941), pp. 159-160,

209-210; Winthrop L. Marvin, The American Merchant Marine: Its

History and Romance from 1620 to 1902 (New York: Charles

Scribners Sons, 1902), pp. 22-24; George Rogers Taylor, The

Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860, The Economic History of

the United States, vol. 4 (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1951),

pp. 108-109; Edward Chase Kirkland. Men. Cities. and ,. Transportation: A Study in New England History, 1890-1900, 2

vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 1:18.

114
21. Hutchins, Maritime Industries, pp. 146, 179-180; Robert

Greenhalgh Albion, The Rise of New York Port, 1815-1860 (New

York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1939), p. 24.

22. Thomas E. Rush, The Port of New York (Garden City, NY:

Doubleday, Page & CO., 1920), pp. 22, 235. Cf. Albion, New York

Port, and Writers Program of the Work Projects Administration,

New York, A Maritime History of New York (Garden City, NY:

Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1941).

23. David F. Bastian, “The Development of Dredging Through

the 1850's," in National Waterways Roundtable Papers:

Proceedings on the History and Evolution of U.S. Waterways and

Ports (Ft. Belvoir, VA: U.S. Army Engineer Water Resources

Support Center, Institute for Water Resources, 1980), pp. 2-3, 4;

Frank E. Snyder and Brian H. GUSS, The District: A History of

the Philadelphia District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,

(Philadelphia: U.S. Army Engineer District, 1974)3 p. 64.

24. Albion, New York Port, pp. 17-19, 24-25, 34-35.

25. Rush, Port of New York, pp. 32-33; Writers' Program of

the Work Projects Administration, Massachusetts, Boston Looks

Seaward: The Story of the Port, 1630-1940 (Boston: Bruce

Humphries, 1941), pp. 42-43.

26. Writers' Program, Massachusetts, Boston Looks Seaward,

pp. 41-42; Patrick Beaver, A History of Lighthouses (Secaucus,

NJ: Citadel Press, 1973), pp. 82-83.

27. Wheaton J. Lane, From Indian Trail to Iron Horse:

Travel and Transportation in New Jersey: 1620-1860 (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1939). pp. 59-60: Hutchins. Maritime -

. ; . ,

Industries. D. 147.

28. Lane, Indian Trail to Iron Horse, pp. 68-69.

29. W. DeLoss Love, “The Navigation of the Connecticut

River,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society , New

Series 15 (1903):394; Carter Goodrich, “The Virginia System of

Mixed Enterprise: A Study of State Planning of Internal

Improvement s," Political Science Quarterly 64 (1949):358;

MacGill et al., Transportation, pp. 254-255; Carter Goodrich,

Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800-1890

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), p. 102; Lane,

Indian Trail to Iron Horse, pp. 64, 67, 70-71.

115
Chapter 2

1. Gallatin's "Report on Roads and Canals,” 4 April 1808,

American State Papers: Miscellaneous, edited by Walter Lowrie

et al., 38 vols. (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1832-1861),

1:724-921. The Report proper is on pp. 724-741; the rest iS

appendix.

2. T. Harry Williams, Richard N. Current, and Frank Freidel,

A History of the United States, 2 vols., 2d ed., rev. (New York:-

Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), 1:303-304: Taylor, Transportation

Revolution, p. 18. - . .

3. James D. Richardson, cd., A Compilation of the Messages

and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897, 10 vols. (Washington,

DC: Government Printing Office, 1896-1899), 1:567-568.

4. George Dangerfield, The Awakening of American

Nationalism, 1815-1828 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), pp. 18-

19; Taylor, Transportation Revolution, pp. 21-22.

5. Calhoun's “Report on Roads and Canals,” 7 January 1819,

American State Papers: Miscellaneous, 2:533-537; Forest G.

Hill, Roads, Rails & Waterways: The Army Engineers and Early

Transportation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957),

pp. 6, 23-34; “Report of the Board of Engineers on the defense

of the seaboard,’” 7 February 1821. American State Papers:

Military Affairs, 2:305; Laws of the United States Relating to

the Improvement of Rivers and Harbors, 3 vols. and index (H.

Dec. 1491, 62d Cong., 3d sess.; and H. Dec. 379, 76th Cong., 1st

sess.) (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1913; -

1940), 1:22, 26.

6. Richardson, Messages and Papers, 2:216.

7. Laws Relating to Rivers and Harbors, 1:26; Dangerfield,

American Nationalism, pp. 200-201; Hill, Roads, Rails &

Waterways, pp. 49, 60-61, 91-95; Taylor, Transportation

Revolution, pp. 20-22; Carter Goodrich, “National Planning of

Internal Improvements,” Political Science Quarterly 63

(1948):36-39.

8. Williams et al., History of the United States,

1:344-345.

9. MacGill et al., Transportation, p. 144; Christopher

Roberts, The Middlesex Canal, 1793-1860, Harvard Economic

Studies, vol. 61 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938),

p. 3.

116
10. Edward Chase Kirkland. Men. Cities. and .

Transportation: A Study in New England History , 1890-1900, 2

vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 1:66-67, 69,

73-74; MacGill et al., Transportation, pp. 144, 146; Love, “The

Navigation of the Connecticut River,” pp. 404-415.

11. Roberts, Middlesex Canal, pp. 117, 124-133; MacGill et

al. , Transportation, pp. 144, 146.

12 ● MacGill et al., Transportation, p. 143.

13 ● Alvin F. Harlow, Old Towpaths: The Story of the

American Canal Era (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1964),

pp. 15-16.

14 ● Walter S. Sanderlin, The Great National Project: A

History of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, The Johns Hopkins

University Studies in Historical and Political Science, vol. 64,

no. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1946), pp. 29-40;

Goodrich, Carols and Railroads, p. 76; MacGill et al.,

Transportation, pp. 265-266; “Great Falls canal and locks:

Civil engineering landmark,” Civil Engineering 42 (November

1972):53-56.

15. Wayland Fuller Dunaway, History of the James River and

Kanawha Company, Columbia University Studies in History,

Economics, and Public Law, vol. 104, no. 2 (New York: Columbia

University, 1922), pp. 9-47, 72-74, 81-88; Goodrich, Canals and

Railroads, pp. 87-94; MacGill et al., Transportation, p. 270.

16. MacGill et al., Transportation, pp. 257-258; Clifford

Reginald Hinshaw, Jr., “North Carolina Canals Before 1860,”

North Carolina Historical Review 25 (1948): 33-40.

17. Roberts, Middlesex Canal, pp. 17, 134, 136-137,

181-186, 191-196; MacGill et al., Transportation, pp. 148-151.

18. MacGill et al., Transportation, pp. 276-279; Harlow,

Old Towpaths, pp. 17-18.

19. Charles Clinton Weaver, Internal Improvements in North

Carolina Previous to 1860, The Johns Hopkins University Studies

in Historical and Political Science, series 21, nos. 3-4

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1903), pp. 68-73; Alexander

Crosby Brown, The Dismal Swamp Canal (Chesapeake, VA: Norfolk

County Historical Society of Chesapeake, 1967), pp. 31-35; Laws

Relating to Rivers and Harbors, 1:32; Hinshaw, "North Carolina

Canals Before 1860,” pp. 19-30.

117
20. Ronald E. Shaw, Erie Water West (Lexington: University

of Kentucky Press, 1966), pp. 198-218, 236-239; Taylor,

Transportation Revolution, pp. 33-34.

21. Goodrich, Canals and Railroads, pp. 51-165, passim;

Goodrich, “National Planning,” pp. 31, 35; Taylor,

Transportation Revolution, pp. 48-52.

22. Taylor, Transportation Revolution, p. 37; MacGill et

al., Transportation, p. 143; Goodrich, Canals and Railroads,

pp. 126-127; U.S. Department of the Interior, Census Office,

Tenth Census of the United States, 1880: Transportation, 4:756,

761.

23. Kirkland, Men, Cities, and Transportation, 1

Taylor, Transportation Revolution, pp. 37-38; Harlow,

Towpaths, pp. 159-161; Tenth Census: Transportation,

:● 81-84 ;

Old

4:757.

24. Kirkland, Men, Cities, and Transportation, 1:70-71,

75-81; Taylor, Transportation Revolution, p. 38; Harlow, Old

Towpaths, pp. 161-164; Tenth Census: Transportation, 4:757-758.

25. Roberts, Middlesex Canal. pp. 19-26: MacGill et al.,

Transportation, pp. 146, 152-156; Justin Winsor, cd., The

Memorial History of Boston, 1630-1880, 4 vols. (Boston: Ticknor

and Co., 1881), 4:113-116.

26. MacGill et al., Transportation, p. 143.

27. Aubrey Parkman, Army Engineers in New England: The

Military and Civil Work of the Corps of Engineers in New

England, 1775-1975 (Waltham, MA: U.S. Army Engineer District,

“1978), pp. 30-31.

28. Ibid., pp. 28-30; William James Reid, The Building of

the Cape Cod Canal, 1627-1914, privately printed, 1961, pp. 1-8.

29. Delaware and Hudson Company, A Century of Progress:

History of the Delaware and Hudson Company, 1823-1923 (Albany:

J.B. Lyon Co., 1925), pp. 15-40, 64-65, 124-131; Harlow, Old

Towpaths, pp. 186-193; Taylor, Transportation Revolution,p. 39;

Tenth Census: Transportation, 4:734.

30. Taylor, Transportation Revolution, pp. 39-40; Harlow,

Old Towpaths, pp. 181-183.

31. Taylor, Transportation Revolution, p. 40; Tenth

Census: Transportation, 4:739, 742-7430

32. Goodrich, Canals and Railroads, pp. 124-125; Harlow,

Old Towpaths, pp. 195-202; Taylor, Transportation Revolution,

p. 40; Tenth Census: Transportation, 4:735; Hill, Roads, Rails

118
& Waterways, pp. 31-32; Henry Varnum Poor, History of the

Railroads and Canals in the United States of America, 1860,

reprint (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970), pp. 411-413;

Lane, Indian Trail to Iron Horse, pp. 224-250.

33. Taylor, Transportation Revolution, pp. 40-41; MacGi

et al., Transportation, pp. 227-234; Goodrich, Canals and

Railroads PP. 123-124; Tenth Census: Transportation, 4:735

Lane, Indian Trail to Iron Horse, pp. 253-277; Hill, Roads,

Rails & Waterways. p. 52.

ll

;

-

34. Ralph D. Gray, The National Waterway: A History of the

Delaware and Chesapeake Canals, 1769-1965 (Urbana: University

of Illinois Press, 1967), pp. 1-155, passim; Taylor,

Transportation Revolution, pp. 41-42; Goodrich, Canals and

Railroads, pp. 121-122; Poor, Railroads and Canals, pp. 569-571;

Hill, Roads, Rails & Waterways, p. 30; MacGill et al.,

Transportation, pp. 217-221.

35. Taylor, Transportation Revolution, p. 41; MacGill et

al. , Transportation, pp. 210-217; Tenth Census: Transportation,

4:740-741, 743; Poor, Railroads and Canals, pp. 540-544,

549-551; Harlow, Old Towpaths, pp. 86-91, 172-174.

36. MacGill et al., Transportation, pp. 222-227; Harlow, Old

Towpaths, pp. 169-172; Taylor, Transportation Revolution, p. 41;

Hill, Roads, Rails & Waterways, pp. 30-31.

37 ● Julius Rubin, "An Imitative Public Improvement: The

Pennsylvania Main Line," in Canals and American Economic

Development, ed. Carter Goodrich (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1961), pp. 67-114; Goodrich, Canals and Railroads, pp. 63-

69; Taylor, Transportation Revolution, pp. 43-45; MacGill et

al., Transportation, pp. 234-248; Tenth Census: Transportation,

4:736-739; Poor, Railroads and Canals, p. 558; Harlow, Old

Towpaths, pp. 92-103; Hill, Roads, Rails & Waterways, p. 54.

38. Sanderlin, Great National Project, pp. 45-295, pass

Taylor, Transportation Revolution, pp. 42-43; MacGill et al.

Transportation, pp. 264-269; Goodrich, Canals and Railroads,

pp. 76-79, 81; Poor, Railroads and Canals, pp. 602-606.

im;

39. Dunaway, James River and Kanawha Company, pp. 92-204,

passim; Taylor, Transportation Revolution, p. 42; MacGill et

al., Transportation, pp. 264-265, 270-271; Goodrich, Canals and

Railroads, p. 95; Hill, Roads, Rails & Waterways, pp. 99-100.

40. Dunaway, James River and Kanawha Company, pp. 211-239;

MacGill et al., Transportation, pp. 271-273; U.S. Congress,

House, Report of the Chief of Engineers, February 8, 1871, H.

119
Ex. Dec. 110, 41st Cong., 3d sess., 1871, hereafter cited as H.

Ex. DOC. 110; U.S., Army, Annual Report of the Chief of

Engineers, 1874, vol. 2, Part 2 (Washington, DC: Government

Printing Office, 1874), pp. 86-129, hereafter cited as ARCE,

1874.

41. See Taylor, Transportation Revolution, pp. 52-55, for a

discussion of these factors.

120
Chapter 3

1. Roberts, Middlesex Canal, pp. 142-147; Kirkland, Men,

Cities, and Transportation, 1:62-64.

2. Kirkland, Men, Cities, and Transportation, 1:67-69, 75;

Parkman, Army Engineers in New England, 1775-1975, p. 72; Love,

“The Navigation of the Connecticut River,” pp. 398-400.

3. Taylor, Transportation Revolution, pp. 39-40; Harlow,

Old Towpaths, p. 179; Tenth Census: Transportation, 4:741-742;

Snyder and Guss, A History of the Philadelphia District, pp. 74,

76.

4. Dunaway, James River and Kanawha Company, pp. 27-28,

31-32, 33-35, 39, 45.

5. Sanderlin, Great National Project, pp. 34-36; Goodrich,

Canals and Railroads, p. 76; Poor, Railroads and Canals, p. 602.

6. Goodrich, “Virginia System,” pp. 360, 362, 374.

7. Weaver, Internal Improvements in North Carolina, pp. 49-

67; Goodrich, Canals and Railroads, pp. 108-109; Hinshaw, “North

Carolina Canals Before 1860,” pp. 4-15, 33-38.

8. MacGill et al., Transportation, pp. 255, 257-258; Alfred

Glaze Smith, Jr., Economic Readjustment of an Old Cotton State:

South Carolina, 1820-1860 (Columbia: University of South

Carolina Press, 1958), pp. 138-149, 154-155; Goodrich, Canals

and Railroads, pp. 102-103; Jamie W. Moore and Dorothy P. Moore,

“The Effect of Harbor Improvement on Inland Commerce and

Economic Development, The Case of Charleston.” in National

Waterways Roundtable- Papers: Proceedings On the History and

Evolution of U.S. Waterways and Ports (Ft. Belvoir, VA: U.S.

Army Engineer Water Resources Support Center, Institute for

Water Resources, 1980), p. 82.

9. MacGill et al., Transportation, pp. 256-260.

10 ● Taylor, Transportation Revolution, pp. 108-110;

Hutchins, Maritime Industries, pp. 173, 209-210, 242; Marvin,

American Merchant Marine, pp. 197, 207.

11. Bastian, “Development of Dredging,” pp. 2-3; and Guss,

A History of the Philadelphia District, pp. 32, 64.

12 ● Laws Relating to Rivers and Harbors, 1:15-18, 190

Permission for Georgia to levy tonnage duties was continued

until 1838 and for Maryland until 1871. Ibid. , 1:20-21, 24, 41,

83, 97, 116, 140-141.

121
130 U.S., Statutes at Large, vol. 1, 1:53-54 (1789).

14. Laws Relating to Rivers and Harbors. 1:18, 25-26;

Snyder and Guss, A History

.

of the Philadelphia District, p.

Parkman, Army Engineers in New England, 1775-1975, p. 38.

27;

15. Laws Relating to Rivers and Harbors,

30-31, 33.

1:21, 22-27,

16. Ibid ., 1:33-87.

17 ● Parkman, Army Engineers in New England, 1775-1975,

pp. 35-39: Hill. Roads. Rails & Waterwavs, pp. 29-30; Snyder and .

Guss, A History-of the-Philadelphia District, pp. 5-14, 65-66;

Weaver, Internal Improvements in North Carolina, p. 56; U.S.

Congress, House, Appropriations and Expenditures for Rivers and

Harbors, H. Ex. Doc. 64, 48th Cong., 1st sess., 1884, pp. 6-47,

passim, 148, hereafter cited as H. Ex. Doc. 64.

18. Hill, Roads, Rails & Waterways, pp. 158, 166, 169, 177.

19. For details on early steamship routes see Kirkland,

Men, Cities, and Transportation, 1:20-26; Tenth Census:

Transportation, 4:667-668, 675.

20. Kirkland, Men, Cities, and Transportation, 2:196,

Taylor, Transportation Revolution, pp. 112-119; Hutchins,

Maritime Industries, pp. 331-333.

212;

21. Hutchins, Maritime Industries, p. 229.

22. Hill, Roads, Rails & Waterways, pp. 170, 178-179, 181,

184-185, 190-192, 195-196; Goodrich, “National Planning,’* pp. 36-

44; Emory R. Johnson, “Rivers and Harbors Bills,” Annals of the

American Academy of Political and Social Science 2

(1892):789-790.

23. Laws Relating to Rivers and Harbors, 1:88-118; George

E. Buker, Sun, Sand and Water: A History of the Jacksonville

District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1821-1975 (Jacksonville,

FL: U.S. Army Engineer District, 1981), pp. 114-116.

24. Isaac Lippincott, "A History of River Improvement,”

Journal of Political Economy 22 (1914):641; Laws Relating to

Rivers and Harbors, 1:119-124.

25. Ho Ex. Doc. 64, pp. 4-47, 126-213, passim; Parkman,

Army Engineers in New England, 1775-1975, pp. 45-46; Snyder and

GUSS, A History of the Philadelphia District, pp. 14, 27-30.

26. Laws Relating to Rivers and Harbors, 1:127, 129,

131-136.

122
27. Hutchins, Maritime Industries, pp. 257-260, 272, 289;

Taylor, Transportation Revolution, pp. 109, 122, 124; Marvin,

American Merchant Marine, pp. 229, 362.

28.

642-646;

Lippincott, “River Improvement,” pp. 633, 638-640,

Gray, National Waterway, p. 158.

Lippincott, “River Improvement,” pp. 632, 649-650;

Army Engineers in New England, 1775-1975, p. 48.

Laws Relating to Rivers and Harbors. 1:44. 151-156:

29.

Parkman,

30. . , - ,

Stun Holt, The Office of the Chief of Engineers of the Army:

, W.

Its Nonmilitary History , Activities, and Organization

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1923), p. 136.

31. Hutchins, Maritime Industries, pp. 443, 488-492.

32. ARCE, 1900, 1:161-166; ARCE, 1914, 1:239-241; Marion J.

Klawonn. Cradle of the Corps: A History of the New York

District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 1775-1975 (New York:

U.S. Army Engineer-District, 1977), pp. 166-177. 

33.

1:80-81.

ARCE, 1883,

ARCE, 1900,

ARCE, 1900,

1:450; ARCE, 1902, 1:98-99; ARCE, 1914,

34 ● 1:189-191; ARCE, 1914, 1:305-307.

35. 1:231-232; ARCE, 1914, 1:375-377. See also

Harold Kanarek, The Mid-Atlantic Engineers: A History of the

Baltimore District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1774-1974

(Baltimore, MD: U.S. Army Engineer District, 1978), pp. 45-59.

36. ARCE, 1914, 1:437-438.

1:274-275; ARCE, 1914, 1:511-513.

1:537-538; 543-545.

37. ARCE, 1900,

38. ARCE, 1914,

39 ● ARCE, 1883,

1:116-118.

1:79-80; ARCE, 1900, 1:102-103; ARCE, 1914,

40. Kirkland, Men, Cities, and Transportation,

Gray, National Waterway, pp. 189-191.

2:150-151;

41. Kirkland. Men. Cities. and Transportation. 2:151-185,

215; Hutchins, Maritime Industries, pp. 545-549, 564; Marvin,

American Merchant Marine, pp. 364-365, 373-374.

42. Gray, National Waterway, pp. 229-231, 234-235; Laws

Relating to Rivers and Harbors, 3:1628-1738, passim. 

123
43. Parkman, Army Engineer in New England, 1775-1975, p. 58;

ARCE, 1979, 1:12-13.

44. Laws Relating to Rivers and Harbors, 3:1860-1864,

1897-1899, 1966-1968. Expenditures taken from ARCE, 1913-1929.

Beginning in 1920 Congress voted lump sums for improvements

rather than specifying the amounts appropriated for each

project, and authorizations for projects were made in separate

rivers and harbors acts. Through 1938 the ARCE stated the

amounts allotted to each project.

45, ARCE, 1930, 1:4.

46. ARCE, 1930-1938; Laws Relating to Rivers and Harbors,

3:2090-2099, 2330-2335, 2512-2516, 2576-2578.

47. ARCE, 1942, 1:2; ARCE, 1943, 1:2; ARCE, 1944, 1:4;

ARCE, 1945, 1:3; Snyder and Guss, A History of the Philadelphia

District, p. 142.

48. Laws Relating to Rivers and Harbors, 4:2909-2915, 2949,

3007-3008, 3095-3096, 3166-3169.

49. The first volume of each Annual Report of the Chief of

Engineers, 1945-1950 (pp. 1-3) lists the principal East Coast

projects on which work was performed between the wars. The

first volume of each annual report for 1951-1955 (pp. 3-6) lists

the principal works under construction during the Korean War.

50 ● ARCE, 1956-1980.

51. U.S., Department of the Army, Corps of Engineers,

Waterborne Commerce of the United States, Calendar-Year 1979,

Part 1, Waterways and Harbors, Atlantic Coast, provides

statistics on commodities and traffic for each waterway. The

Water Resources Development booklets on each state, published by

the Corps Divisions, also provide valuable information on

waterways.

52. ARCE, 1955, 1:70-72; Waterborne Commerce, 1979.

124
Chapter 4

1. Gray, National Waterway, pp. 1-7; Reid, Building of the

Cape Cod Canal, pp. 2-4; Jerome Cranmer, “Improvements Without

Public Funds: The New Jersey Canal,” in Canals and American

Economic Development, ed. Carter Goodrich (New York: Columbia

University press, 1961), p. 117;

pp. 31-32.

2. Gray, National Waterway,

Railroads, pp. 26-27.

Brown, Dismal Swamp Canal,

pp. 20-27; Goodrich, Canals and

3. Gallatin's “Report on Roads and Canals,” American State

Papers: Miscellaneous, 1:725.

4. Gray, National Waterway, pp. 24, 29-55, 62-64, 81-84,

91-100.

5. Brown, Dismal Swamp Canal, pp. 32-44; Hinshaw, “North

Carolina Canals Before 1860,” pp. 21-22; “Subscription to the

Chesapeake and Delaware and Dismal Swamp Canals,” communicated

to the House of Representatives, February 20, 1817, American

State Papers: Miscellaneous, 2:438-442.

6. U.S., Congress, House, Dismal Swamp Canal, H. Doc. 15,

19th Cong., 1st sess., 1826, pp. 7-8, hereafter cited as H. Doc.

15; U.S., Congress, House, Survey of-the waters of Virginia & N.

Carolina, H. Doc. 125, 19th Cong., 1st sess., 1826, p. 5,

hereafter cited as H. Doc. 125; Laws Relating to Rivers and

Harbors, 1:32.

7. U.S., Congress, House, Message from the President . . .

December 5, 1826, and Documents accompanying , H. Ex. DOC. 2,

19th Cong., 2d sess., 1826, pp. 221-225, hereafter cited as H.

Ex. Doc. 2; Hinshaw, “North Carolina Canals Before 1860,” p. 24;

Brown, Dismal Swamp Canal, p. 52; Laws Relating to Rivers and

Harbors, 1:49.

8. Brown, Dismal Swamp Canal, pp. 49-51; Hinshaw, “North

Carolina Canals Before 1860,” pp. 24-29.

9. Hill, Roads, Rails & Waterways, p. 52.

10. Cranmer, "New Jersey Canals,” pp. 117-126; MacGill et

al. , Transportation, pp. 227-230; Lane, Indian Trail to Iron

Horse, pp. 253-261.

11. Tenth Census: Transportation, 4:735; Taylor,

Transportation Revolution, pp. 401-441; MacGill et al.,

Transportation, pp. 233-234; Lane, Indian Trail to Iron Horse,

pp. 262-263.

125
12. Albion, New York Port, pp. 134-135; Taylor,

Transportation Revolution. D. 157.

13. Brown, Dismal Swamp Canal, pp. 75-77; Hinshaw, "North

Carolina Canals Before 1860,” pp. 41-56; “subscription to the

Chesapeake and Delaware and Dismal Swamp Canals,” American State

Papers, pp. 438-439.

14 ● G.D. Luetscher, “Atlantic Coastwise Canals: Their

History and Present Status,” Annals of the American Academy of

Political and Social Science 31 (January-June 1908) :92-93;”Gray,

National Waterway, pp. 182-183.

15. Gray, National Waterway, pp. 150, 154, 158-166; U.S.,

Congress, Senate, Survey with a view to the construction of a

ship-canal to connect the waters of Delaware and Chesapeake

Bays, S. Ex. Doc. 39, 46th Cong., 2d sess., 1880, hereafter

cited as S. Ex. Doc. 39; U.S. Congress, Senate, Surveys for a

ship canal to connect Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, S. Ex. Doc.

6, 48th Cong., 1st sess., 1883, pp. 3-27, hereafter cited as S.

Ex. DOC. 6.

16. U.S., Congress, House, Chesapeake and Delaware Canal,

H. Ex. DOC. 102, 53d Cong., 3d sess., 1894, pp. 4-6, hereafter

cited as H. Ex. Doc. 102; Gray, National Waterway, pp. 184-188.

17. Gray, National Waterway, pp. 188-192; Francis G.

Newlands, “The Use and Development of American Waterways,”

Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

31 (January-June 1908):50; Joseph E. Ransdell, “Legislative

Program Congress Should Adopt for Improvement of American

Waterways,” Annals of American Academy of Political and Social

Science 31 (January-June 1908):36-37.

18. U.S., Congress, Senate. Waterway to Connect Waters of

Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, S. Doc. 215, 59th Cong., 2d sess.,

1907, pp. 1-20, hereafter cited as S. Doc. 215; Gray, National

Waterway, pp. 193-203.

19. Gray, National Waterway, pp. 203-206, 224; Ransdell,

“Legislative Program,” pp. 37, 41-42.

20. U.S., Congress, House, Intracoastal Waterway, Boston,

Mass. , to Beaufort, N.C., Section, H. Doc. 391, 62d Cong., 2d

sess. , 1912, pp. 3-6, hereafter cited as H. Doc. 391; Gray,

National Waterway, pp. 204, 224. A second report in 1913

recommended deepening the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal to 12

feet and widening it bottom to 90 feet, with further enlargement to depend upon the increase in traffic resulting from

this conversion and the abolition of tolls. U.S., Congress,

126
House. Intracoastal Waterway. Boston. Mass., to Beaufort, N.C.:

Final-Report on Sections from New York Bay to Delaware River and

from Delaware River to Chesapeake Bay, H. Doc. 196, 63d Cong.,

1st sess., 1913, pp. 5-6, hereafter cited as H. Doc. 196.

21. Gray, National Waterway, pp. 221, 225, 229-239.

22. Ibid., pp. 241-242, 245-247. For a detailed

description of the work of reconstruction see Earl I. Brown,

“The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal,” Transactions of the

American Society of Civil Engineers 95 (1931):716-763.

23. U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Rivers and Harbors,

Inland Waterway from Delaware River to Chesapeake Bay, Del. and

Md. (Ship Canal), H. Com. Doc. 24, 73d Cong., 2d sess., 1933,

pp. 2, 6-8, hereafter cited as H. Corn. Doc. 24: Gray, National

Waterway, pp. 249-253.

.

24. U.S., Congress, Senate, Inland Waterway from Delaware

River to Chesapeake Bay, Del. and Md., S. Doc. 123, 83d Cong.,

2d sess., 1954, pp. 9-11, hereafter cited as S. Doc. 123; ARCE,

1955, 2:154-155; ARCE, 1956-1980; Gray, pp. 253-256; Waterborne

Commerce, 1979, pp. 73-74, 166.

25. U.S., Congress, House, Dismal Swamp Canal, H. Ex. Doc.

77, 39th Cong., 1st sess., 1866, hereafter cited as H. Ex. Doc.

77; U.S., Congress, House, Dismal Swamp Canal, H. Ex. Doc. 135,

40th Cong., 2d sess., 1868, hereafter cited as H. Ex. Doc. 135.

26. U.S., Congress, House, Letter from the Secretary of the

Treasury in Reference to the interest of the government in the

Dismal Swamp Canal, H. Ex. Doc. 19, 45th Cong., 2d sess., 1878,

pp. 1-2, 9-12, 14-15: Brown, Dismal Swamp Canal. pp. 89-93:

ARCE. 1893. 2:1356. -

27. Brown, Dismal Swamp Canal, pp. 104-108; ARCE, 1899,

1:229; ARCE, 1902, 1:223.

28. Brown, Dismal Swamp Canal, p. 111.

29. H. DOC. 391, pp. 108-113, 120; ARCE, 1932, 1:501.

30. ARCE, 1932, 1:496-501; U.S., Congress, House, Inland

Waterway from Norfolk, Vs., to Beaufort Inlet, N.C., H. Doc.

1136, 64th Cong., 1st sess., 1916, pp. 6-8, hereafter cited as

H. Doc. 1136; Waterborne Commerce, 1979, p. 99.

31. Brown, Dismal Swamp Canal, pp. 113-114, 123-125; U.S.,

Congress, House, Committee on Rivers and Harbors, Inland

Waterway from Norfolk, Vs., to Beaufort Inlet, N.C., H. Com.

127
Doc. 5, 67th Cong., 2d sess., 1922, hereafter cited as H. Com.

DOC. 5; ARCE, 1930, 1:574; ARCE, 1966, 2:324-325; U.S., Army,

Corps of Engineers, North Atlantic Division, Water Resources

Development in Virginia 1981 (New York: U.S. Army Engineer

Division, 1981), p. 8.

32. Parkman, Army Engineers in New England, 1775-1975,

pp. 87-88; ARCE, 1870, 1:481-490.

33. Reid, Cape Cod Canal, pp. 13-33; Parkman, Army

Engineers in New England, 1775-1975, p. 88.

34 ● H. DOC. 391, pp. 5-6, 21-22.

35. Reid, Cape Cod Canal, pp. 60-62; Parkman, Army

Engineers in New England, 1775-1975, p. 90; U.S., Congress,

House, Committee on Rivers and

Doc. 3, 69th Cong., 1st sess.,

as H. Com. Doc. 3.

36. Reid, Cape Cod Canal,

Harbors, Cape Cod Canal, H. Com.

1926, pp. 19-23, hereafter cited

pp. 64-65, 70-83, 90-92, 96-98;

Parkman, Army Engineers in New England, 1775-1975, pp. 90-96;

U.S., Congress, House, Correspondence Concerning the Purchase of

the Cape Cod Canal, H. Doc. 139, 67th Cong., 2d sess., 1921,

pp. 2-6, hereafter cited as H. Doc. 139.

37. Parkman, Army Engineers in New England, 1775-1975,

pp. 96-98; U.S., Congress, House, Cape Cod Canal MaSS., H. Doc.

795, 71st Cong., 3d sess., 1931, pp. 1-4, hereafter cited as H.

Doc. 795.

38. Parkman, Army Engineers in New England, 1775-1975,

pp. 98-102; U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Rivers and

Harbors, Cape Cod Carol Mass., H. Com. Doc. 15, 74th Cong., 1st

sess. , 1934, pp. 2-16, hereafter cited as H. Com. Doc. 15; Laws

Relating to Rivers and Harbors, 3:2331.

39. Parkman, Army Engineers in New England, 1775-1975, pp.

103-106; Reid, Cape Cod Canal, pp. 113-116.

40. U.S., Congress, House, Intracoastal waterway, Beaufort,

N.C., to Key West, Fla., Section, H. Doc. 229, 63d Cong.3 1st

sess. , 1913, pp. 9-18, hereafter cited as H. Doc. 229.

41. Ibid., p. 10; ARCE, 1932, 1:554-556.

42. ARCE, 1915, 2:1803-1804; ARCE, 1917, 1:585-589; ARCE,

1926. 1:532-533.

43. ARCE, 1947, 1:632; ARCE, 1980, 6:2-3.

128
44. ARCE, 1880, 1:848; ARCE, 1932, 1:559, 591-592; ARCE,

1938, 1:528; ARCE, 1946, 1:683; U.S., Congress, House,

Intracoastal Waterway from Cape Fear River, N.C., to St. Johns

River, Fla., H. Doc. 6, 75th Cong., 1st sess., 1936, pp. 1-2,

hereafter cited as H. Doc. 6.

45. ARCE, 1915, 1:565-566, 2:1808; ARCE, 1932, 1:596-597;

U.S., Congress, House, Waterway, Charleston to Winyah Bay, S.C.,

H. Doc. 78, 63d Cong., 1st sess., 1913, pp. 2-6, hereafter cited

as H. Doc. 78; ARCE, 1927, 1:602; ARCE, 1930, 1:682.

46. U.S., Congress, House, Intracoastal Waterway from Cape

Fear River, N.C., to St. Johns River, Fla., H. Doc. 11, 72d

Cong., 1st sess., 1932, p. 3, hereafter cited as H. Doc. 11;

ARCE, 1938, 1:566; ARCE, 1946, 1:710.

47. ARCE, 1932, 1:613-614; ARCE, 1905, 1:267-268; U.S.,

Congress, Senate, Waterway from Charleston, S.C., to Savannah,

Ga. , S. Doc. 178, 68th Cong., 2d sess., 1924, pp. 2-8, hereafter

cited as S. Doc. 178; U.S., Congress, House, Fenwicks Cut at

Ashepoo River to Coosaw River, S.C., H. DOC. 129, 72d Cong., 1st

sess. , 1931, p. 2, hereafter cited as H. Doc. 129; ARCE, 1937,

1:537; ARCE, 1947, 1:685.

48. ARCE, 1915, 2:1823; ARCE, 1932, 1:630-632; ARCE, 1938,

1:606; Us., Congress, House, Channel Between the St. Johns

River and Cumberland Sound, Fla., H. Doc. 898, 62d Cong., 2d

sess. , 1912, pp. 2, 5, hereafter cited as H. Doc. 898.

49. ARCE, 1915, 2:1821-1822; U.S., Congress, House, Skidaway

Narrows, Georgia, H. Doc. 450, 58th Cong., 2d sess., 1904, pp. 2-

3, hereafter cited as H. Doc. 450; U.S., Congress, House,

Savannah-Fernandina Waterway, H. Doc. 1236, 60th Cong., 2d

sess., 1908, pp. 4-7, hereafter cited as H. Doc. 1236.

50 ● ARCE, 1915, 2:1814; U.S., Congress, House, Archers

Creek, S.C., H. Doc. 513, 62d Cong., 2d sess., 1912, pp. 2-3,

hereafter cited as H. Doc. 513.

51. ARCE, 1932, 1:632-633; ARCE, 1947, 1:727-729, 752-753;

Us., Congress, House, Cape Fear River, N.C., to St. Johns

River, Fla., H. Doc. 618, 75th Cong., 3d sess., 1938, pp. 3-5,

hereafter cited as H. Doc. 618; U.S., Congress, House, Generals

Cut, Ga., H. Doc. 581, 63d COng., 2d sess., 1914, p. 2,

hereafter cited as H. Doc. 581; U.S., Congress, House, Terry

Creek and Back River, Ga., H. Doc. 1391, 62d Cong., 3d sess.,

1913, pp. 2-3; hereafter cited as H. Doc. 1391; U.S., Congress,

Senate, Cut Between Baileys Cut of Satilla River and-Dover

Creek, Ga., S. Doc. 43, 71st Cong., 2d sess., 1929, pp. 1-2,

hereafter cited as S. Doc. 43; U.S., Congress, House, Intra129
coastal Waterway Between Charleston, S.C., and St. Johns River,

Fla. (Alternate Route Via Frederica River, Ga.), H. Doc. 114,

77th Cong., 1st sess., 1941, p. 3, hereafter cited as H. Doc.

114.

52. ARCE, 1915, 2:1825-1826; ARCE, 1932, 1:676-677; Buker,

Sun, Sand and Water, pp. 114-120.

53. U.S., Congress, House, Florida East Coast Canal, H. Doc.

1147, 65th Cong., 2d sess., 1918, pp. 2-3, hereafter cited as H.

Doc. 1147; U.S., Congress, House, Intracoastal Waterway from

Jacksonville, Fla., to Miami, Fla., H. Doc. 586, 69th Cong., 2d

sess., 1926, pp. 2-5, 15-16, hereafter cited as H. Doc. 586;

George E. Buker, “The Ugly Duckling: The Beginnings of Florida's

Intracoastal Waterway,” in National Waterways Roundtable Papers:

Proceedings On the History and Evaluation of U.S. Waterways and

Ports (Ft. Belvoir, VA: U.S. Army Engineer Water Resources

Support Center, Institute for Water Resources, 1980), p. 99.

54. U.S., Congress, Senate, Intracoastal Waterway from

Jacksonville to Miami, Fla., S. Doc. 71, 71st Cong., 2d sess.,

1930, p. 2, hereafter cited as S. Doc. 71; U.S., Congress, House,

Intracoastal Waterway from Jacksonville to Miami, Fla., H. Doc.

740, 79th Cong., 2d sess., 1945, p. 3, hereafter cited as H.

DOC. 740; ARCE, 1932, 1:678; ARCE, 1947, 1:775-776; ARCE, 1961,

2:463; ARCE, 1966, 2:441-442.

55. U.S., Congress, Committee on Rivers and Harbors,

Waterway from Miami to Key West, Fla., H. Com. Doc. 44, 72d

Cong., 1st sess., 1932, pp. 2-5, hereafter cited as H. Com. Doc.

44; U.S., Congress, House, Intracoastal Waterway from Miami to

Key West, Fla., H. Doc. 742, 79th Cong., 2d sess., 1945, pp. 5-

8, hereafter cited as H. Doc. 742; ARCE, 1938, 1:641; ARCE,

1946, 1:815-816; ARCE, 1963, 2:446.

56. Lane, Indian Trail to Iron Horse, pp. 264-265, 272,

276-277; H. DOC. 391, p. 52; U.S., Congress, Senate, Atlantic

Intracoastal Canals, S. Doc. 279, 65th Cong., 2d sess., 1918,

p. 71, hereafter cited as S. Doc. 279.

57. S. DOC. 279, pp. 71-79; H. DOC. 391, pp. 22-23, 52-61;

H. DOC. 196, pp. 6-8, 10.

58. U.S., Congress, House, Committee on Rivers and Harbors,

New York Bay-Delaware River Section, Intracoastal Waterway, H.

Com. Doc. 6, 66th Cong., 3d sess., 1920, pp. 2-3, hereafter

cited as H. Com. Doc. 6; U.S., Congress, House, Committee on

Rivers and Harbors, New York Bay-Delaware River Section of the

Intracoastal Waterway, H. Com. Doc. 38, 71st Cong., 2d sess,

1930, pp. 2-4, hereafter cited as H. Com. Dec. 38; U.S.,

130
Congress, House, New York Bay-Delaware River Section of the

Intracoastal Waterway, H. DOC. 219 73d Cong., 2d sess., 1934,

pp. 1-4, hereafter cited as H. Doc. 219; U.S., Congress, House,

Committee on Rivers and Harbors, New York Bay-Delaware River

Section of the Intracoastal Waterway, H. Com. DOC. 93, 74th

Cong., 2d sess., 1936, pp. 1-3, hereafter cited as H. Corn. Dec.

93.

59. U.S., Congress, Senate, New York Bay-Delaware River

Section of the Intracoastal Waterway, S. Doc. 139, 79th Cong.,

2d sess., 1945, pp. 1-3, hereafter cited as S. Doc. 139.

60. U.S., Congress, House, Inland Waterway on the Coast of

New Jersey between Cape May and New York Bay, H. Doc. 727, 65th

Cong., 2d sess., 1918, pp. 2-3, 6, hereafter cited as H. Doc.

727; U.S., Congress, House, New Jersey Intracoastal Waterway, He

Doc. 133, 76th Cong., 1st sess., 1939, pp. 3, 5, hereafter cited

as H. Doc. 133; ARCE, 1980, 3:13.

I —

131
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Public Documents

American State Papers. Edited by Walter Lowrie et al. 38 vols.

Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1832-1861.

Laws of the United States Relating to the Improvement of Rivers

and Harbors. 3 vols. and index. (H. Doc. 1491, 62d Cong.,

3d sess.; H. Doc. 379, 76th Cong., 1st sess.) Washington, DC:

Government Printing Office, 1913, 1940.

Richardson, James D., ed. A Compilation of the Messages and

Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897. 10 Vols. Washington,

DC: Government Printing Office, 1896-1899.

U.S. Army. Corps of Engineers. Annual Reports of the Chief of

Engineers, 1870-1980. Washington, DC: Government Printing

Office, 1870-1981.

 Waterborne Commerce of the United States, Calendar Year

1979, Part 1, Waterways and Harbors, Atlantic Coast.

Vicksburg, MS: Lower Mississippi Valley Division, 1979.

 North Atlantic Division. Water Resources Development in

Virginia 1981. New York: U.S. Army Engineer Division, 1981.

U.S. Congress. House. Appropriations and Expenditures for

Rivers and Harbors. H. Ex. Doc. 64, 48th Cong., 1st sess., 1884.

 Archers Creek, S.C. H. DOC. 513, 62d Cong., 2d sess.,

1912.

Cape Cod Canal, Mass. H. Doc. 795, 71st Cong., 3d sess.,

1931.

 Cape Fear River, N.C., to St. Johns River, Fla. H. Doc.

618, 75th Cong., 3d sess., 1938.

Channel Between the St. Johns River, and Cumberland Sound,

Fla. H. Doc. 898, 62d Cong., 2d sess., 1912.

Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. H. Ex. Doc. 102, 53d

Cong., 3d sess., 1894.

Correspondence Concerning the Purchase of the Cape Cod

Canal. H. Doc. 139, 67th Cong., 2d sess., 1921.

Dismal Swamp Canal. H. Doc. 15, 19th Cong., 1st sess.,

1826.

133
Dismal Swamp Canal. H. Ex. Doc. 77, 39th Cong., 1st

 sess., 1866.

Dismal Swamp Canal. H. Ex. Doc. 135, 40th Cong., 2d

 sess., 1868.

Fenwicks Cut at Ashepoo River to Coosaw River, S.C. H.

Doc. 129, 72d Cong., 1st sess., 1931.

Florida East Coastal Canal. H. DOC. 1147, 65th Cong., 2d

sess., 1918.

Generals Cut, Ga. H. Doc. 581, 63d Cong., 2d sess., 1914.

Inland Waterway from Norfolk, Vs., to Beaufort Inlet, N.C.

DOC. 1136, 64th Cong., 1st sess., 1916.

Inland Waterway on the Coast of New Jersey between Cape

 May and New York Bay. H. Doc. 727, 65th Cong., 2d sess.,

1918.

Intracoastal Waterway, Beaufort, N.C., to Key West, Fla.,

Section. H. Doc. 229, 63d Cong., 1st sess., 1913.

Intracoastal Waterway between Charleston, S.C., and

St. Johns River, Fla. (Alternate Route Via Frederica River,

Ga.). H. Doc. 114, 77th Cong., 1st sess., 1941.

Intracoastal Waterway, Boston, Mass., to Beaufort, N.C.:

Final Report on Sections from New York Bay to Delaware River

and from Delaware River to Chesapeake Bay. H. DOC. 196, 63d

Congo, 1st sess., 1913.

Intracoastal Waterway, Boston, Mass., to Beaufort, N.C.,

 Section. H. Doc. 391, 62d Cong., 2d sess., 1912.

Intracoastal Waterway from Cape Fear River, N.C., to

 St. Johns River, Fla. H. Doc. 11, 72d Cong., 1st sess.,

1932.

Intracoastal Waterway from Cape Fear River, N.C., to

St. Johns River, Fla. H. Doc. 6, 75th Cong., 1st sess.,

1936.

Intracoastal Waterway from Jacksonville, Fla., to Miami,

Fla. H. Do. 586, 69th Cong., 2d sess., 1926.

Intracoastal Waterway from Jacksonville to Miami, Fla. H.

Doc.740, 79th Cong., 2d sess., 1945.

Intracoastal Waterway from Miami to Key West, Fla. H.

Do. 742, 79th Cong., 2d sess., 1945.

134
New York Bay-Delaware River Section of the Intracoastal

Waterway, H. Com. Doc. 93, 74th Cong., 2d sess., 1936.

Waterway from Miami to Key West, Fla. H. Com. Doc. 44,

72d Cong., 1st sess., 1932.

 U.S. Congress. Senate. Atlantic Intracoastal Canals. S. Doc.

279, 65th Cong., 2d sess., 1918.

Cut Between Baileys Cut of Satilla River and Dover Creek,

Ga. S. Doc. 43, 71st Cong., 2d sess., 1929.

Inland Waterway from Delaware River to Chesapeake Bay,

Del. and Md. S. Doc. 123, 83d Cong., 2d sess., 1954.

Intracoastal Waterway from Jacksonville to Miami, Fla.

S. Doc. 71, 71st Cong., 2d sess., 1930.

New York Bay-Delaware River Section of the Intracoastal

Waterway. S. Doc. 139, 79th Cong., 2d sess., 1945.

Survey with a view to the construction of a ship-canal to

connect the waters of Delaware and Chesapeake Bays. S. Ex.

Doc. 39, 46th Cong., 2d sess., 1880.

 Surveys for a ship canal to connect Chesapeake and

Delaware Bays. S. Ex. DOC. 6, 48th Cong., 1st sess., 1883.

Waterway from Charleston, S.C., to Savannah, Ga. S. Doc.

178, 68th Cong., 2d sess., 1924.

Waterway to Connect Waters of Chesapeake and Delaware

Bays. S. Doc. 215, 59th Cong., 2d sess., 1907.

U.S. Department of the Interior. Census Office. Tenth Census of

the United States, 1880: Transportation, vol. 4.

U.S. Statutes at Large. vol. 1 (1789).

Adams, James Truslow.

Little, Brown, and

Books and Articles

The Founding of New England. Boston:

coo, 1930.

Albion, Robert Greenhalgh. The Rise of New York port, 1815-1860.

New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1939.

Barbour, Philip L. The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1964.

136
Bastian, David F. “The Development of Dredging Through the

1850’s.” In National Waterways Roundtable Papers:

Proceedings On the History and Evolution of U.S. Waterways

and Ports. Ft. Belvoir, Vs.: U.S. Army Engineer Water

Resources Support Center, Institute for Water Resources,

1980.

Beaver, Patrick. A History of Lighthouses. Secaucus, NJ:

Citadel Press, 1973.

Brebner, John Bartlett. The Explorers of North America, 1492-

1806 ● New York: Macmillan Co., 1933.

Brown, Alexander Crosby. The Dismal Swamp Canal. Chesapeake,

VA: Norfolk County Historical Society of Chesapeake, 1967.

Brown, Earl I. "The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal."

Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers 95

(1931):716-763.

Buker, George E. Sun, Sand and Water: A History of the

Jacksonville District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,

1821-1975. Jacksonville, FL: U.S. Army Engineer District,

1981.

“The Ugly Duckling: The Beginnings of Florida's

Intracoastal Waterway.” In National Waterways Roundtable

Papers: Proceedings On the History and Evolution of U.S.

Waterways and Ports. Ft. Belvoir, VA: U.S. Army Engineer

Water Resources Support Center, Institute for Water

Resources, 1980.

Clowes, Ernest S. Shipways to the Sea: Our Inland and Coastal

Waterways.. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Co., 1929.

Cranmer, Jerome. “Improvements Without Public Funds: The New

Jersey Canals.” In Canals and American Economic Development,

pp. 115-166. Edited by Carter Goodrich. New York: Columbia

University Press, 1961.

Crouse, Nellis M. In Quest of the Western Ocean. New York:

William Morrow & Co., 1928.

Dangerfield, George. The Awakening of American Nationalism,

1815-1828. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.

Delaware and Hudson Company. A Century of Progress: History

of the Delaware and Hudson Company, 1823-1923. Albany:

J.B. Lyon Co., 1925.

13 ‘7
Dunaway, Wayland Fuller. History of the James River and Kanawha

Company. Columbia University Studies in History, Economics,

and Public Law, vol. 104, no. 2. New York: Columbia

University Press, 1922.

Goodrich, Carter. Government Promotion of American Canals and

Railroads, 1800-1890. New York: Columbia University Press,

1960.

“National Planning of Internal Improvements.” Political

Science Quarterly 63 (1948):16-44.

“The Virginia System of Mixed Enterprise: A Study of

State Planning of Internal Improvements.” Political Science

Quarterly 64 (1949): 355-387.

Granger, M.L. History of the Savannah District, 1829-1968.

Savannah, GA: U.S. Army Engineer District, 1968.

Gray, Ralph D. The National Waterway: A History of the

Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, 1769-1965. Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1967.

“Great Falls canal and locks: Civil engineering landmark.”

Civil Engineering 42 (November 1972):53-56.

Harlow, Alvin F. Old Towpaths: The Story of the American Canal

Era. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1964.

Hill, Forest G. Roads, Rails & Waterways: The Army Engineers

and Early Transportation. Norman: University of Oklahoma

Press, 1957.

Hinshaw, Clifford Reginald, Jr. ‘*North Carolina Canals Before

1960.” North Carolina Historical Review 25 (1948):1-56.

Holt, W. Stun. The Office of the Chief of Engineers of the

Army : Its Nonmilitary History , Activities, and

Organization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1923.

Howe, Henry F. Prologue to New England. New York: Farrar &

Rinehart, 1943.

Hutchins, John G.B. The American Maritime Industry and Public

policy, 1789-1914. Harvard Economic Studies, vol. 71.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941.

Johnson, Emory R. “Inland Waterways, Their Relation to

Transportation.” Supplement to Annals of the American

Academy of Political-and Social Science (September 1893):

1-164.

138
“Rivers and Harbors Bills. ” Annals of the American

Academy of Political and Social Science 2 (1892):782-812.

Jones, Chester Lloyd. ‘*The Anthracite-Tidewater Canals.*’ Annals

of the American Academy of Political Science 31 (JanuaryJune 1908):102-116.

Kanarek, Harold. The Mid-Atlantic Engineers: A History of the

Baltimore District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1774-1974.

Baltimore, MD: U.S. Army Engineer District, 1978.

Kirkland, Edward Chase. Men, Cities, and Transportation: A

Study in New England Histo ry, 1890-1900. 2 vols. Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1948.

Klawonn, Marion J. Cradle of the Corps: A History of the New

York District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1775-1975. New

York: U.S. Army Engineer District, 1977.

Lane, Wheaton J. From Indian Trail to Iron Horse: Travel and

Transportation in New Jersey, 1620-1860. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1939.

Lippincott, Isaac. “A History of River Improvement.” Journal of

Political Economy 22 (1914):630-660.

Love, W. DeLoss. “The Navigation of the Connecticut River.”’

Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, New Series

15 (1903):385-441.

Luetscher, G.D. “Atlantic Coastwise Canals: Their History and

Present Status.” Annals of the American Academy of Political

and Social Science 31 (January-June 1908):92-101.

MacGill, Caroline E. et al. History of Transportation in the

United States before 1860. Washington: Carnegie Institution

of Washington, 1917.

Manhart, George Born. The English Search for a Northwest Passage

in the Time of Queen Elizabeth. Studies in English Commerce

and Exploration in the Reign of Elizabeth. Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1924.

Marvin, Winthrop L. The American Merchant Marine: Its History

and Romance from 1620 to 1902. New York: Charles Scribners

Sons, 1902.

Moore, Jamie W., and Moore, Dorothy P. “Effect of Harbor

Improvement on Inland Commerce and Economic Development, The

Case of Charleston.” In National Waterways Roundtable

139
Papers: Proceedings On the History and Evolution of U.S.

Waterways and Ports. Ft. Belvoir, VA: U.S. Army Engineer

Water Resources Support Center, Institute for Water

Resources, 1980.

Morison, Samuel Eliot. The European Discovery of America: The

Northern Voyages, A.D. 500-1600. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1971.

The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages,

A.D. 1499-1616. New York: oxford University Press, 1974.

Morison, Samuel Eliot, Commager, Henry Steele, and Leuchtenburg,

William E. The Growth of the American Republic. 2 vols.,

8th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Nettels, Curtis P. The Roots of American Civilization. 2d ed.

New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1963.

Newlands, Francis G. “The Use and Development of American

Waterways.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and

Social Science 31 (January-June 1908):48-66.

Parkman, Aubrey. Army Engineers in New England: The Military

and Civil Work of the Corps of Engineers in New England,

1775-1975. Waltham, MA: U.S. Army Engineer Division, 1978.

Poor, Henry Varnum. History of the Railroads and Canals of the

United States of America. 1860. Reprint. New York:

Augustus M. Kelley, 1970.

Powys, Llewelyn. Henry Hudson. New York: Harper & Brothers,

1928.

Quinn, David Beers. England and the Discovery of America,

1481-1620. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.

Ransdell, Joseph E. “Legislative Program Congress Should Adopt

for Improvement of American Waterways.” Annals of the

American Academy of Political and Social Science 31 (JanuaryJune 1908):36-47.

Reid, William James. The Building of The Cape Cod Canal, 

1627-1914. Privately printed, 1961.

Ringwalt, J.L. Development of Transportation Systems in the

United States. Philadelphia: J.L. Ringwalt, 1888.

Roberts, Christopher. The Middlesex Canal, 1793-1860. Harvard

Economic Studies, vol. 61. Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1938.

140
Rubin, Julius. “An Imitative Public Improvement: The

Pennsylvania Main Line.” In Canals and American Economic

Development. Edited by Carter Goodrich. New York: Columbia

University Press, 1961, pp. 67-114.

Rush, Thomas E. The Port of New York. Garden City, NY:

Doubleday, Page & Company, 1920.

Sanderlin, Walter S. The Great National Project: A History of

the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. The Johns Hopkins University

Studies in Historical and Political Science, vol. 64, no. 11

—

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1946.

Shaw, Ronald E. Erie Water West. Lexington: University of

Kentucky Press, 1966.

Smith, Alfred Glaze, Jr. Economic Readjustment of an Old Cotton

State: South Carolina, 1820-1860. Columbia: University of

South Carolina Press, 1958.

Snyder, Frank E., and Guss, Brian H. The District: A History of

the Philadelphia District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,

1866-1971. Philadelphia: U.S. Army Engineer District. 1974.

Taylor, George Rogers. The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860.

The Economic History of the United States, vol. 4. New York:

Rinehart & Co., 1951.

Walker, Paul K. “Building American Canals: Part l--The

Federalist Period,” and “Part 2--From Erie to the Present.”

Water Spectrum 12 (Winter 1979-1980):18-25 and (Summer

1980):12-23.

Ward, Christopher. The Dutch & Swedes on the Delaware, 1609-

1664. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930.

Ward, George Washington. The Early Development of the Chesapeake

and Ohio Canal Project. The Johns Hopkins University Studies

in Historical and Political Science, vol. 17, nos. 9-11.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1899.

Weaver, Charles Clinton. Internal Improvements in North

Carolina Previous to ‘1860. The’ Johns Hopkins University

Studies in Historical and Political Science, series 21, nos.

3-4. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1903.

Williams, T. Harry, Current, Richard N., and Freidel, Frank. A

History of the United States. 2 vols., 2d cd., rev. New

York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964.

141
Williamson, James A. The Voyages of the Cabots and the

Discovery of North America. London: Argonaut Press, 1929.

Winsor, Justin, ed. The Memorial History of Boston, 1630-1880.

4 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Co., 1881.

Writers' Program of the Work Projects Administration,

Massachusetts. Boston Looks Seaward: The Story of the Port,

1630-1940. Boston: Bruce Humphries, 1941.

Writers Program of the Work Projects Administration, New York.

A Maritime History of New York. Garden City, NY: Doubleday,

Doran and Company, 1941.

Wroth, Lawrence C. The Voyages of Giovanni da Verrazzano, 1524-

1528. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

*U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE: 1983-399-067

142
January 1983

Navigation History NWS-83-10