Times of Uncle Ernest -

Chesapeake City and Beyond

Chapter 5 - Bill

I was one lonely boy, Nina, without old Uncle Ernest and his antics to break up the monotony. Oh, I had the wonders and beauties of nature—life on our quiet farm of the early forties—and I had Wiggsey to play with. But that wasn't enough, Nina. So, often, I would visit Bill Herman, an old man who lived across the road. I didn't think someone 91 years old could remember so much about the history of our old town, Chesapeake City. But I was wrong. Whenever I went down there he would eventually get around to filling my head with stories about the town, with its bridges, its steamers, its locks, its buildings, its people, and its canal. He spoke especially about the canal, that winding band of swiftly-moving water that split our town in half, that ever-expanding ditch with a life all its own.

One day I saw him in his yard, so I ran barefoot down our dirt lane, up a couple hundred feet of rough, hot blacktop, and into his orchard. It was late summer, and he stood there—tall, erect—and peered down his beak nose at me. Peered, I say, if you can peer with only one eye, for that's all he had, his sightless eye sunken under ravaged, brown-wrinkled skin. "Well boooooyeeeee!" he said, extending the syllable with a high-rising pitch and turning his head to spit a brown stream of tobacco juice, "Come sit down here." He had a large apple, and before moving he cut it into quarters, pared away some of the worm holes, and sticking a piece on the tip of his tobacco-smeared knife shoved it my way with a grunt.

"Booyee, you know I'm a carpenter don't you?"

"Sure."

"I set the keel in the Maine—finest piece of timber I could find. She was a fine ship, too, till those skunks blew 'er up."

"What's a Maine," I asked, trying to figure out what he was talking about.

"My God, there's no sense even talking to you. Don't they teach you anything at all?"

"Bill, you know about boats and rivers and stuff. Could you tell me how come we have a creek running through the middle of our town?"

"The thing's a canal boy," he said shaking his head. "And it wasn't there at all before 1824. That's when they first started messin' with it anyway. The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal Company finally got 'er dug and open for business in 1829. Before that, if you wanted to visit a relative in Philadelphia you had to walk to Frenchtown, catch a coach to Newcastle, and steam up the Delaware River on a side-wheeler. Not only that, boy, but the canal meant more money for merchants and other businessmen. Before the canal was dug, if a Philadelphia manufacturer wanted to transport products to a buyer in Baltimore, he'd have to ship them down the Delaware River, around Cape Charles, and up the Chesapeake Bay, a distance of 392 nautical miles. But Philadelphia to Baltimore through the canal was only 98 nautical miles. And using the canal he wouldn't have to worry about the rough seas of the Delaware and Chesapeake bays, especially around the cape. Time is money, boy, and time is important in war, too. Didn't they teach you how the Union soldiers steamed through our canal to save the Capitol during the Civil War?"

"Nope," I said, hoping he'd stop bringing up the school business.

"God Almighty! Lord help this country," he growled, as he cut a black chunk from his tobacco plug and stuck it in his mouth with his knife hand. "Hold on here, boy," he said as he limped into his house. In a couple of minutes he came out carrying a large box of pictures and papers. He set it down, rummaged through it, and pulled out a weathered poster. "This is the broadside I found stuck on the Herriot Hotel wall." I read the poster, Nina, which told in fancy print that the canal was officially open and that the locks were 100 feet long and 22 feet wide. It also advertised that the new canal was the cheapest and safest route between the two bays.

"So they finished digging it in 1829. Man, that's a long time ago, Bill."

"That's right, boy. It was nothing but a shallow ditch back then.”   [To be continued Tuesday, 5/08/2012]