page_title: Chesapeake and Ohio Canal
section_title: Steamboats on the canal
hierarchical_section_title: Chesapeake and Ohio Canal / Boats on the canal / Steamboats on the canal
caption_attribution_description: English: Steamboat on Chesapeake and Ohio Canal near Williamsport, Maryland. The panels of the cargo holds are seen stacked up and coal can be seen still in the rear hold. Coal is being loaded onto a Western Maryland railcar. There is also a steam engine powering the stiff legged derrick to lift the coal from the boat into the waiting coal car.
context_page_description: The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, abbreviated as the C&O Canal and occasionally called the "Grand Old Ditch," operated from 1831 until 1924 along the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., to Cumberland, Maryland. The canal's principal cargo was coal from the Allegheny Mountains.
  Construction on the 184.5-mile canal began in 1828 and ended in 1850 with the completion of a 50-mile stretch to Cumberland. Rising and falling over an elevation change of 605 feet, it required the construction of 74 canal locks, 11 aqueducts to cross major streams, more than 240 culverts to cross smaller streams, and the 3,118 ft Paw Paw Tunnel. A planned section to the Ohio River at Pittsburgh was never built.
  The canal way is now maintained as the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park, with a trail that follows the old towpath.
context_section_description: There were occasionally steam boats, one being authorized in 1824 In 1850, the N S Denny company operated some steam driven tugboats on the Canal. The board of directors discussed having steamboats for Big Slackwater, but that was abandoned in favor of a towpath along the side. Records indicate that in the 1879, a single steamboat could go 3 ¹⁄₄ miles per hour (5.2 km/h) loaded downstream, 4 ¹⁄₂ miles per hour (7.2 km/h) unloaded going upstream, and took 5 to 7 minutes to lock through whether going upstream or downstream (respectively) and used about a ton of coal per day for operation.
caption: A steamboat on the C&O Canal. Note the steering wheel and the smokestack on this boat
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "15354", "Image ImageLength": "10629", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Model": "Microbox GmbH - Booky A2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2009:04:09 12:15:23", "Image ExifOffset": "280", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "418", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5282", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1000", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "660"}