George Washington was 22 years old in 1754. He journeyed to the Great Falls, a short journey from Mount Vernon, and looked on the massive waterfall. He began to think about ways a boat could travel around those falls and continue upstream or pass downstream without danger. It was a problem that wouldn’t be solved until he had more than doubled in age.
Navigating Great Falls
At Great Falls, the Potomac River dropped nearly seventy-six feet over 1,200 yards. It tumbled and frothed over the steep and jagged rocks that made up twenty separate waterfalls and then all that forced was channeled through the Mather Gorge, where the river narrowed from 1,000-feet wide to sixty feet.
The Potomac built up speed on its way east from its mixing with the Shenandoah River at Harpers Ferry. Harpers Ferry also had rapids, not only from the mixing of the two rivers from the parallel ledges of rock beneath the water. Washington had shot the rapids in a canoe during one his trips on the Potomac, but traveling the river by boat at Great Falls was impossible…or so it appeared. While a boat might navigate the rapids, could any craft survive a fall of 76 feet onto rock?
To this point, anyone who wanted to use the river had to beach their boats above the falls, unload its contents, carry the contents and boat around the falls, and reload the boat below the falls. It was a long and cumbersome process and one that limited the cargo that could be carried downriver.
But if this river could be improved…if it could be made navigable, the benefits to Virginia would be great as cities like Alexandria could become shipping ports to the West.
Opening the Potomac to Cumberland
From Great Falls east, one could navigate the river by boat about 14 miles to Georgetown. From this point west, one could navigate the river by boat about 8 miles to the Seneca rapids. And beyond that, additional falls and rapids would need to be overcome to navigate the river further west.
That could happen, though and when it did, the river would be open for navigation to Cumberland.
The Problem of the Falls
But it was here, here at Great Falls that would be the major sticking point to making the Potomac River navigable.
The ground here was hard, granite-like. Washington had walked the cliffs and felt the hardness of the stone beneath his boots. The rock would not give easily. It hadn’t worn away after all the hundreds of thousands of years this river must have worn on it.
A Western Transportation Route
After the Revolutionary War, George Washington was considered a hero and military genius by the young United States, but the Great Falls caused him hesitation because he was not sure how to conquer it in order to make his dream come true. He only knew it must be conquered for the future of his country lay to the west of the Allegheny Mountains, according to the National Park Service in Chesapeak and Ohio Canal (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1991).
A dependable and safe transportation route would join the eastern states with the western lands and “to apply the cement of interest to bind all parts of the union together by indissoluble bonds, especially that part of it, which lies immediately west of us, with the middle states,” Washington wrote (Evans, Lawrence B., Writings of George Washington, G.P. Putnam and Sons, NY, 1889, pg. 490).
Beginnings of a Solution
One man had already begun to overcome some of the problems at Great Falls. John Ballendine had built a dam and small skirting canal around Little Falls to help power his grist mill. Around 1770, Ballendine had persuaded Washington and others to help fund construction of the skirting canal (Achenbach, Joel, The Grand Idea, Simon & Schuster, NY, 2004).
While the grist mill didn’t interest Washington much, the skirting canal did and it would lead to his first presidency…not of the United States, but of the Patowmack Company.
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