Next, we travel about 15 miles northwest of washington, d. C. To Great Falls Tavern Visitors Center where well take a boat ride to learn about the history of the chesapeake and ohio canal. I would like to introduce myself. My name is cassandra and i am a seasonal park ranger here at the chesapeake and ohio canal. I think were going to cast off here shortly, but well go ahead and start to give you a brief history of here on the canal. So it is called the chesapeake and ohio canal, but definitely doesnt reach the Chesapeake Bay or doesnt go all the way up to the ohio river, which is your intention of the canal when we first started building it july 4th of 1828. We wanted to try to connect the Eastern Shore with what was considered the west back then. The west was up in ohio, pennsylvania, that area. We wanted to connect pittsburgh to the Chesapeake Bay, and so what we did was we started building this canal. We tried earlier, it was George Washingtons dream to actually use the Potomac River as to way a transport goods. Back then it seemed a reasonle thing to do so he had a canal system built by using locks to get around, and it wasnt a very reliable usage. It didnt actually have longtime use. It was very kind of broken, didnt work very well. So we went ahead and took his dream and built a canal right next to the potomoc deliver so we could use it. You took a boat over the falls, you probably wouldnt last very long. So we used this canal and we ran it from georgetown all the way up to cumberland is where we stopped. We ran into problems known as the appalachian mountains. We didnt take that into consideration when we were building the canal itself so we kind of got stuck either going through the mountains or trying to go around them. But this canal is 184. 5 miles long and throughout that 184. 5 miles there are 74 lift locks and were going to go through one of them today, lock 20 that were going to go through. So what these lift locks do, there is a very big elevation difference between georgetown and cumberland. As you can tell, georgetown is at or a little bit below sea level, where cumberland is along the edge of the appalachian mountains. Therefore its about a 600 foot elevation difference. So what these lift locks do is help us control that difference so that were able to go both ways instead of just having one big river rushing downstream and only being able to transport goods from cumberland to georgetown. So whats going to happen here, we have our bowsman in the front. We do things differently from what they did back then. He has a tow line thats connected to the lock itself, so hes going to take that line and start pulling it in so that we can pull ourselves into the lock. Hopefully you guys didnt have too big of a breakfast so you dont make him do too much work. Hes going to start pulling us in. Back then they would usually have their mules connected to the boat and then you could be walking on the path and they would be the ones that would pull us in. We didnt have any of the crew members actually doing any of that work. What would happen is once we were completely inside of the lock, we would go ahead and close the two downstream gates, which well pass on our way in. And what that allows us to do is that allows us to make a sealed tight area so that no water can exit out so that we can actually raise water in that area. And this system was actually created by a man way past our time. His name was leonardo davinci. He created a lot of those things. Unfortunately, a lot didnt work, but this was one that we decided was a good idea. We did a few modifications to his drawing that he had in the sketch book. But most of it is all the same. So what happens is this is one side of our lock door that we have here, and so with our lock door, theres two little doors down here at the bottom. These little doors are called wickets and these are connected to stems that lead all the way up to the top. As you can see in front of you, since were in a lock, we need a key to open the lock. So we take a key and post it right here on top of the stem and then we go ahead and turn these doors down at the bottom so it lets the water from upstream downstream. So once again, key, door, stem and then we open the doors at the bottom. And i did say every lock needs a key and this is actually a key that was found in the bottom of the canal. We found it when we took over the park, the National Park service. Its made out of castiron. Its about 10 to 15 pounds. Pretty heavy. And this is what our lockkeepers would carry around all day. Im going to stop talking because its really hard to yell over the rushing water. This part actually right here is the slowest part of the lock filling because the water is actually almost equaling out, so its not rushing in like you saw obviously when we first opened those lock doors. So it takes a little bit longer for the water to finally slowly equal out. Once everything is equaled out, then we also have to open up those gates, make sure everything is good on the boat, and then thats when we actually start moving. You would have lock keepers that would do that. Especially with the wicket doors, they would be the ones in charge of opening up those doors and the wickets. And so our lockkeepers were always in charge of that and they would live in lock houses kind of like the one that is here to my right. The only difference about this lock house, its a very special lock house because it was the only hotel that was here on the canal. So the middle section of the great falls tavern was the original lock house that was built in 1828 and was where the first lock family would live. Then in 1831 we had finished the two additions on the north and south end. The north end is the hotel part of the tavern and the bottom floor where you bought your tickets from, that was where it was called the ballroom and it was the tavern at one point. So it did serve alcohol back then. So thats where people would come from georgetown, they would take about a fourhour trip up here to great falls and they would go ahead and ride boats just like this one. This is called a passenger boat. So they would take those trips to kind of escape the city and stay here at great falls just to kind of get away from it, relax. And they would stay up in the second or third floor. The second floor was for men and female quarters, so they had to stay separately on that second floor unless they were able to provide a marriage license. If they were able to do that, then they could stay on the third floor, which was the attic or honeymoon suite. So for a little extra charge, they could go ahead and stay up on the top floor. And then the south end of the tavern was the new lock house where the lock family stayed, and so with this particular l k lock, in its time, the lockkeeper would tend to three different locks. So they would tend to lock 20 here, but also lock 19 and 18 a little further downstream. So youve got to imagine one man taking care of three different locks is a very hard job to do, so he would depending on how many locks he actually tended, would depend on how much money he got paid by the chesapeake and ohio Canal Company. So with three locks, you would get about 250, and what that would do is allow him to actually hire an assistant so that he would be able to go ahead and have him help with the rest of the locks. But the Canal Company was very smart and they decided that they needed to hire men that had large families, because if you hired the husband of a large family, you would get the rest of the family for free. And so the rest of the family would help him as well working. The wife would help, and even some of the older children that they had. And they would all be able to stay here ain the lock houses fr free. They would get the 250, along with the house and they would also get an acre of land. So what that acre of land allowed them to do is to be able to provide for themselves. So they were able to do produce, have any type of farm animals that they needed like cows, chickens, pigs, anything they could have on their land so that they would be able to sustain themselves. Because that 250 was per year. In the peak of the canal, if you were waiting on a lock in a span of 30 minutes, there was about 15 to 20 boats that were waiting just at the lock, and so at the peak of its days, there was about 550 boats that were operational here on the canal. So our mules, theyre obviously not horses, but a lot of people confuse them for horses and donkeys. They are a combination of the two. But its a very special combination. So the male is going to be the donkey and then the female is going to be the mare or the horse, and that is how youre going to get a mule. You need a female horse and a male donkey. If you did it the other way around where you had a male horse and a female donkey, you would get something called a henney. They dont have the same type of working genes that we want the mules to have on the canal. All throughout history, there was a lot of uses of horses. So you had the pony express, they would pull wagons, and they were used throughout history for various things. So the question that always usually comes up is why are mules used here instead of horses, and there is some various reasons for that. You can tell a few of the characteristics that the mules get from the donkey. You can obviously see their ears, which makes them very aware of their surrounding. Their feet are more oval shape, and what that does is takes them very surefooted and allows them to know where theyre placing their foot at all times. So theyre not very skittish like horses where, whereas horses at the sight of anything, they tend to rear up and it takes awhile for them to calm back down. Our mules, since they know where theyre placing their feet at all times, theyre not as jumpy. Back then there would be snakes that would call on the towpath, and with a horse you would have to wait for it to calm down. A mule would just stop because it sees that theres a snake and it would go ahead and just wait for you to move it out of the way so that it wouldnt cause any harm to itself. Theyre also very smart. Mules are smarter than horses are and so with a horse, you can work a horse to death because horses are there to please their master. They want to do nothing more than to make you happy. So if you had a horse on the canal, you could literally run it dead onto the ground. Whereas mules, im sure youve all heard the saying stubborn as a mule. You can take that as a compliment, because theyre just saying that youre smart theyre not saying that youre stubborn. So with a mule, we cant work it to death. After about six hours, its going to go ahead and stop working. Its going to say im not trying to hurt myself, therefore you cannot push me any further and im just going to stand here until you change me out. Our mules today, it looks like our dolly and eva are the two mules pulling us today and they are two of our youngest mules. Dolly is 11 and eva is 10. And you can see that they are connected together by two chains that are in the middle of them and then eva, on the back of her, has a tree which isnt really a tree, but its a metal bar that connects our tow line to our boat. And they are currently pulling us at the speeding rate of about 2 miles an hour, maybe. They could pull us a little bit faster, but we dont usually want to go any faster than this. Back then they actually couldnt go any faster than this because there was a speed limit of 4 miles an hour here on the canal. Seems a little crazy, but theres a very good reason as to why. If you look on the sides of the canal, you can tell that some spots are kind of covered up with rocks, but most of the time there are no rocks that are covering the sides of the canal. And so if we had a boat that went any faster than 4 miles an hour, we would start to cause a wake, and with that wake, since you had 550 boats here on the peak of its canal, you would end up causing the wake to rush up on the sides of the canal and cause erosion, and that would go ahead and sink the sides of our canal in and kind of damage the canal and make it not last as long as it should. So that 4 miles an hour was very enforced here on the canal by our lockkeepers and thats why we couldnt go any faster than that. So our typical boats here on the canal, these are what our barges would look like. They were about 90 to 91 feet long and about 14. 5 feet wide. And i did say we like to cut things close. We were on a tight budget on the canal, so we had about 3 inches of clearance on each side of our boat to come in, so you had to be very good at your job stirring in as the tiller. Because if you ended up doing any damage to the lock itself, obviously that means youre doing damage to your boat, therefore you had to pay for any damage that you did to the lock, and also to your boat. The towor would located in the back. This is called the family cabin and this was 12 1 2 by 12 1 2 feet, so it was extremely small. The only space that you had in there for room, you would have your cooking would be done back here, and then some cleaning of any sorts. You would have a toilet back here, which their toilet was a bucket, and then you would have maybe one or two beds that were back here. Up here in the front, this is our bow and this little barn right here was the barn. It was where our extra set of mules were held. Therefore, i said they would only work six hours. We would have two sets of mules, making four mules in total, so that we could go ahead and change them out every six hours or about 15 miles, so that we can continue working throughout the day. On top of that, the barn was also the place where most of the family would sleep, because there were also very big families here on the canal boats. So if there wasnt enough room back here in the family cabin where the beds were, they would end up sleeping here in the barn. And then all throughout the middle of our barge, this is where our cargo was kept. Coal was our main cargo here on the canal. It was used to heat the homes through the various ports that were in between cumberland and georgetown, used for cooking and goods like that. You would have goods coming from georgetown, though, as well. Georgetown was kind of the factory town back then, so you did have mills that would produce grains and wheats and everything. You would have timber that would come from there, any type of furniture, textile goods, clothing, all of that would be coming from georgetown and would be shipped up north to the various ports in between there. So this was a twoway kind of traffic back then and there was only one towpath that we had that was used for our mules. So the question, im sure you guys are all thinking of it, is how are two boats, if theyre going in opposite directions, going to pass each other . Were going to all pretend that there is a boat thats coming downstream right now at us. They are loaded up with coal and, so if theyre loaded up with coal, that means theyre about 120 tons and were about 8 tons maybe. So that means that they have the rightofway because its a whole lot harder to start and stop their boat than it would be our boat. And so that would go ahead and tell our mule driver that we need to stop our boat. Our tiller back there would yell a canal saying and the canal saying we used was tiyipyaw. So that was our canal saying, and all that means is our mules stopped right on cue and they would push them to the further side of the towpath and we would push our boat to the berm side and that would let our lines sink down to the bottom of the canal. Once our line was completely sunk, the downstream boat can go ahead and cross over our tow line and now were going to actually turn our boat around. Back then, like i said, you wouldnt be able to do this because your boats were a whole lot longer than this. We are cutting it really close turning us around. And so, like i said, these were very familyoriented boats. We would have the father that would usually be on the front of the boat, who would be in charge of looking out for any danger, making sure the tow line was safe or there was nothing that was in our way. On the back of the boat you would have the mother, the mother would be in charge of steering, along with doing chores, mostly sewing. She could steer while sewing, so men can no longer say that we are not good at driving. The children, if they were of a certain age, 9 years old, we would get them to work and have them walking with the mules. So at the age of 9, they would go ahead and start working. I promise that it wasnt child labor. And so if they were any younger than the age of 9, we obviously had to do something with them. They couldnt work, but they couldnt be running around the boat causing any problems. And so what we would do, is we would take something that looked like this. This is an old mule harness. We would go ahead and take this top section right here, so we would go ahead and take the rest of that off and use the top section right here. You can obviously see theres a rope attached to it. So you might see where this is going. If not, i have a picture. Its awesome. And so this is a family. The mom is off to the side doing laundry. She didnt want her kids running around the port of georgetown, so she went ahead and tied them up. So in the winter we would actually close for four months. It would usually start in early november, we would go ahead and close down, and then wouldnt open back up until maybe april is what we would do. And when we did close down, it was a lot of times that we did main nens maintenance on the canal, because it had to be kept 6 feet deep because the draft of the heaviest boat was about 4. So you had to make sure you had enough room between the bottom of the canal and the bottom of the boat. And obviously we have little creeks that run into the canal and they bring in sediment that ends up making it hard for us to maintain the 6 feet. So in the winter months when we closed down, there was no boats running. We would go ahead and drain out certain sections of the canal so that we would be able to use a shovel and go ahead and dig out the dirt that was in there so that we could keep it at that minimum of 6 feet deep. Once we finally got the maintenance all done, we would go ahead and let water back in. And how we would do that is we couldnt use the potomac, but its a good water source, so we would have locks that were called inlet locks. It was a twopart system. They connect right to the Potomac River, and we would allow the water from potomac to rush into the canal and we would have a backup source of water just in case we had problems with the Potomac River. Only the first two miles now actually has water and then it gets very spotty throughout. So our kids, it doesnt sound like they had a very good life, but during the four months that they were closed, the canal, they would actually go to school for those four months and our School System back then was very different. You had a series of books that you had to go through, so no matter how old you were or what grade you were particularly in, if you couldnt ge