6. interstate trade - The Patowmack Canal

• The 1632 Maryland Charter won by George Calvert in a card game with King Charles I gave Maryland control of "the river Pattowmack"
• However, George Washington hoped to improve and develop the river as a pathway to the west
• Washington had grown up on the Northern Neck lands of Lord Fairfax, became a surveyor for western speculators and the Ohio Company founded in 1748 by Thomas Lee that included the Washington brothers Augustine and Lawrence, George Mason, Robert Dinwiddie, John Tayloe and Thomas Cresap
• In 1748, young Washington helped George Fairfax on a survey trip to the Cresap house in Oldtown Maryland on "the worst Road that ever was trod by Man or Beast" and noted in his journal that the straw beds were full of lice and there was "neither a Cloth upon the Table nor a knife to eat with."
• In 1753 Washington was sent to build a fort at the forks of the Ohio but was forced to surrender to the French in the battle of Fort Necessity
• In 1759 he married Martha Dandridge Custis and became a successful Virgina planter owning 62,000 acres
• When his mother died in 1761 he inherited Mount Vernon
• The Virginia assembly in passed in 1772 a bill "for clearing and making navigable the River Patowmack from the Great Falls of said River, up to Fort Cumberland" and connecting with the Ohio River, but Baltimore merchants opposed it
• The Revolution delayed plans to develop western lands and Virginia in 1781 gave up its land claims to gain ratification of the Articles of Confederation
• In 1784 Washington wrote "how necessary it is 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."
• In June 1784 on the recommendation of Washington and James Madison, the Virginia assembly appointed 4 commissioners to meet with Maryland regarding "the jurisdiction and navigation of the River Patowmack," especially the exchange of currency and the charging of tolls, but the meeting was a failure
• In March 1785 the commissioners from Virginia and Maryland met again in Alexandria, and after 4 indecisive days were invited to Mount Vernon by Washington.
• The Mount Vernon Compact agreed on free use of the river, and the need to settle the larger problem of interstate commerce. This compact was in direct violation of Article VI of the Articles of Confederation, but Madison had started the process to replace the Articles, starting at a meeting in Annapolis the next year
• On May 17, 1785, the Patowmack Company was founded with Washington as president to begin the improvement of the river
• Henry "Lighthorse Harry" Lee (father of Robert E. Lee) joined the company to build a town on the Potomac where a canal would be built to bypass the rapids. With money from his wife Matilda, Lee founded Matildaville, one of the first planned towns in the U.S.
• James Rumsey was hired to build the canal and designed the first canal locks in America, but he quit after a year to build the first steamboat in America in 1787
• The 5 locks at Matildaville raised riverboats 76 feet to the canal that bypassed the Great Falls and rejoined the river above Wing Dam
• The canal was built in part from the red sandstone quarried at Senaca Creek and used also to build Georgetown University and the Smithsonian Castle
• Special boats seven feet wide were built for the canal, some piloted by George Pointer, the ex-slave who bought his freedom with $300 he earned working on the canal, later a supervisor and company boat pilot
• The locks and canal operated until taken over by the C & O Canal Company in 1828