Times of Uncle Ernest - Chesapeake City and Beyond– Bill Chapter 4

Times of Uncle Ernest -

Chesapeake City and Beyond– Bill

Chapter 4

And then, Nina, the calm was broken by a shrill whinny. Over at the fence stood Bill's mare, with her shoulders up against the top rail and her head thrust towards us as far as it would stretch. "Ho there, Babe," Bill called out." Babe's ears twitched and she whinnied louder, sputtering her lips in a razz, as kids do for scorn but horses do for fun. While Bill limped over to his orchard for an apple, I scratched the white patch on her forehead, patted her broad, flat cheeks, and ran my hands up and down between her ears, which twitched and rolled—collapsing in response to my touch.

       "Here, boy," Bill said, handing me an apple. Holding it in my flat palm, I offered it to Babe, who enveloped it with groping, rubbery lips, which tickled the daylights out of my hand until she finally lifted it, exposing large, yellowed teeth that scraped my fingers in the process.

       "Do you give her sugar cubes sometimes too, Bill?" I asked.

       "Never give a horse sugar, boy; it makes 'em go blind."

       "Well, I sure wouldn't want a blind horse. But don't they put blinders on horses anyway? How come?"

        "Course they put 'em on horses that frighten easily, young ones especially. Blinders keep the animal looking straight ahead. They ought to put them on some people I know. You know, boy, most people don't know why they build covered bridges. You've seen pictures of the enormous one that spanned the canal at Summit haven't you?"

       "Yeah, oh sure, and I think I know why they built them. They protect the people and the roadbed from rain and snow and stuff."

       "Now boy," Bill said, one-eyeing me as only he could do, "that's partly right, but I thought you'd see the main reason, which is to keep animals from spooking when they crossed over that water."

       "All right, Bill, OK. They were big horse blinders!"

     So, Nina, after the fun with Babe, we went back and sat down again on the weathered boards of his porch steps, next to his box of old maps and other junk. "How come they dug the canal through Chesapeake City, Bill? Was that the shortest route?"

       "Well Booyeee, Bill drawled, slicing off another chunk of tobacco from his plug and spitting the used-up glob over in the grass."It pretty near didn't get dug here. The politicians fought like bandy roosters over where to put the thing. They all wanted the money it would bring, don't you see. But some people didn't want it at all. People from Pennsylvania—Philly especially—pushed the canal idea pretty hard. The bigwigs and rich birds knew about the timber and other resources all along the Susquehanna River. The canal would make possible a total water route from Western Pennsylvania to Philly, a town that was growing like wild fire. And, sure enough, during the 1800s the trade from the Susquehanna and the success of the canal company went hand in hand."

       "But, Bill," I said, "didn't the people in Chesapeake City want a canal too?"

       "What people, boy?" Bill asked, punctuating his question with a juicy squirt of tobacco into the grass. "The canal brought the people—built the town. There were only two buildings here in 1800—the tavern, which is now Bill Herriot's hotel and the Bristow House, which is now across from Ralph Bungard's store. And, Boy, there were damned few roads. They were more like cart paths, no roadbed at all—full of muddy potholes after a rain. Why, the wagons would sink in up to their axles, and you'd spend half a day digging 'em out. The first cart road was built by Augustine Herman from here to the Delaware River."

       "You mean our road here, Bill, Saint Augustine Road?"

       "That's right. It was called 'Manor Road' for a while, and after that 'Old Man's Trail,' meaning old man Herman's cart path."

       "Was he your grandfather or somethin', Bill?"

       "Oh, we're related all right but, my God, boy, that was way back in the late 1600s."

       "I got it, Bill. But, tell me, why did it take 'em so long to dig that short cut?"

       "Because Delaware and Maryland dragged their feet on it; they didn't want Philly to get one up on them. But they finally came to their senses and saw the value. The Baltimore port needed the canal especially, so vessels could have a quicker and safer route to the Atlantic Ocean than the Chesapeake Bay. So, boy, finally just about everybody supported the short cut. Why shoot, boy, anybody with a brain in his head knew a canal was important. Even the first European settlers in the area—the Swedes in the Delaware Valley and the Dutch along the Delaware River—wanted an all water route for trade with Northern Virginia and Maryland. Suppose they had a lot of goods to haul from Philly to Baltimore or Washington. How would they do it, short of sailing all the way around Cape Charles?"

       "Horses and wagons, Bill," I answered, "just the way you do when you take me to a sale with you. You hook Babe up to the wagon and bring home what you need." He had been fairly patient with me up to a point, but when I said that he cut loose. Stomping his good foot on the splintered, rickety steps, he glared at me for a long time, so I just hung my head and hummed."

       "Boy, your brain is about as good as the sorry politicians around here. The pack of them isn't worth the powder it would take to blow them to hell. You know there weren't any decent roads for a horse and buggy, let alone wagonloads of goods. Here's what they had to do, boy. Now let it sink in that hard head of yours. The merchants would hire haulers who would transport their goods somewhere across the narrow neck of the Delmarva Peninsula, say between Saint Georges Creek and Back Creek. The sloops would go as far as they could through the creek, and then the men would load the goods on a big sled drawn by a team of oxen. Another big sled and team would carry the sloop to the other creek to where it was deep enough to float. Then they'd reload the goods and away they'd sail."

       "Is a sloop a type of barge, Bill?"

       "It's like a big canoe, boy, with a single mast. Some of them weighed thirty tons. It got the job done all right, but the whole process was a muddy, sloppy mess for sure, so you can see why the merchants wanted a canal so badly. They all got a belly-full of that nonsense. Why, boy, before the commerce made possible by the canal, this was a nothing town, just a tiny shipping terminal called Bohemia Village. In the late 1700s and very early 1800s there were only eight houses, a gristmill, and a tanning yard. A company called the Old Dominion Line from Baltimore and other southern ports unloaded their vessels here. The roads were still terrible so they would load their cargoes on large wagons with huge wheels and lug them to Port Penn where they'd load their boats bound for northern ports.

       "So, as I told you, everybody eventually supported the digging of the canal. But it wasn't until the 1760s that someone pushed hard to get the job started. The guy's name was Thomas Gilpin of Pennsylvania. He helped convince everybody that here—the upper Delmarva Peninsula- was the natural place to cut 'er through. Look at it, boy," Bill emphasized, waving his finger across the area on the map. "It's a short distance; it's fairly flat except for the deep cut at Summit here, which is only eighty feet or so above sea level. And look at these streams that run towards each other from the Chesapeake Bay to the Delaware Bay."

       "So why the problem, Bill? Even you and I can see the best place to dig 'er through; right here from Broad Creek to Saint Georges Creek," I said, tracing my finger across the map.

       "Money was the problem, boy, money. Everybody had his ax to grind. For instance, Thomas Gilpin and his family owned a bunch of land down here, at the head of the Chester River, so he wanted the canal to run from there to Duck Creek in Delaware. Notice how much more digging would have to be done this far south? But Gilpin wasn't dead set on this particular route because he was responsible for the surveying of several others. He also pushed the canal idea in all kinds of other ways: submitting numerous newspaper ads and articles, pestering the politicians, and getting the American Philosophical Society on his side. All kinds of surveys, studies, and estimates were done.

       "Look at all of the different routes, boy. Now, pay attention," Bill demanded, shifting his weight as he pointed out each proposed route from left to right across the map. "Here at the head of the Sassafras River, east of Georgetown, was one; it was to go up to Appoquinimink Creek, near Cantwell's Bridge. Another was to run from the Bohemia River, here at the Maryland-Delaware line, over to Appoquinimink Creek. And another, starting all the way up here at Frenchtown on the Elk River and running across to Hamburg on the Delaware River. Still another was to begin at the head of the Elk near Elkton and go northeast up next to Christina Bridge on the Christina River."

       "Geez, Bill," I said, "these all seem dumb to me, a lot more digging."

       "That's right, boy, but look at the route they actually started digging; talk about being dumb. In 1799 the Maryland legislature finally passed a law incorporating the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal Company. Pennsylvania and Delaware soon followed suit and in 1803 they started selling stock to raise money. The company hired a guy named Latrobe to do the surveying, decide where to put the canal, and start digging. He had to put up with all kinds of bickering and nonsense. He almost quit because of all the selfish buggers. But he kept at it until finally they decided where to dig the thing.

       "The plan was to start here, at Welsh's Point where Back Creek branches off from the Elk River, and dig towards the northeast to the Delaware line a little northwest of Glasgow, then east to Bear, and then north all the way to the Christina River, almost to Wilmington."

       "That's really stupid, Bill. A big waste of time and money."

       "Course it was, but they thought they had it figured out. You see, they were going to run a feeder canal, or a branch ditch, from the Big Elk Creek at the Elk Forge Company, where Elk Mills is now. The upper Elk area was high and had enough water, they thought, to supply the main canal at the highest level to fill the locks so the vessels could come through. The feeder was to flow southeast and empty into a huge reservoir near Glasgow. The reservoir was to cover about a hundred acres. They figured they'd always have plenty of water from it to lock in the vessels."

       "Do you mean they were going to dig a branch canal before they dug the main canal?"

       "That's right; don't you listen, boy?" The canal company bought the water rights from the forge company and the land rights from people along the way and started digging in May of 1804. They had plans to build fourteen locks along the way to get the vessels through."

       "Geez, that's an awful lot of locks."

       "Aw, that's nothing, boy; in England on one canal those limeys have 180 some locks. Why, shoot, by the time you took your boat through you'd be too tired to eat, even if the queen herself invited you up to the palace for dinner."

       "Who would want to eat with a queen anyway, Bill. You'd have to dress up like church-time and wear shoes and all."

"Hush up, boy. If you go to Elk Mills even now you can see the arches they built above the streams. There's one large one there that had a road across it at one time."

[To be continued Friday, 5/18/2012]