Above: early
twentieth century; tomato barge at Delaware City on the
Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. |
Lord Baltimore’s surveyor, Augustine Herman, first dreamed of a canal
connecting the Chesapeake Bay and Delaware River in 1661. But his dream did not become
reality until the 1820s, when regional businessmen raised over 2 million dollars to
construct the C&D Canal. Between 1825 and 1829 engineers and laborers carved out the
fourteen-mile lock canal that connects Back Creek in Maryland and St. George’s Meadow
in Delaware. Farmers and businessmen on both ends of the canal benefited from the
short-cut that eliminated the long dangerous voyage around the peninsula.
The private C&D Canal Company charged tolls for the wide variety of goods that
passed through the canal. By 1833 steamboats carried passengers between Baltimore and
Philadelphia in less than a day. After the Federal Government purchased the canal in 1919,
the Army Corps of Engineers eliminated the locks by enlarging the canal. Today the Corps
maintains the canal and provides traffic control for shipping. The canal carries more
tonnage than the Suez and Panama canals combined and is the only nineteenth-century
improvement still in operation.
