Even after the Erie canal was built and long lines of boats were carrying the grain and other products of the West to New York, the men of Virginia and Maryland did not give up the notion of still making the trade of the western country come their way. They planned the Chesapeake and Ohio canal, to reach the Ohio river, and thought that other canals across the state of Ohio would let them into lake Erie. By the Ohio river they would connect with New Orleans and the upper Mississippi river, and through lake Erie they could reach the towns and farms that border lake Huron, lake Michigan, and lake Superior.

A canal along the Potomac valley had been talked of several years before the Revolution, when Richard Henry Lee laid a plan for it before the Assembly of Virginia. Doubtless others thought of it too, as of the Erie canal, long before it was made. At the end of the War of the Revolution Washington made a long journey into the wild woods of New York. He went to the source of the Susquehanna at Otsego lake, visited the portage between the Mohawk and Wood creek, and saw for himself that New York had a great chance for navigation and trade. But he had a natural love for his own Virginia, and he did not intend to let New York go ahead of his native state. His journeys across the mountains as a surveyor and as a soldier gave him a knowledge of the Ohio country, and as he had himself taken up much good land there, he wished to have an easy way, by land or water, from the sea to the rich Ohio valley. So he thought much about a canal to run by the side of the Potomac, and he joined with others who felt as he did to form the Potomac Company. They started a canal, but they found so much in the way that they were not able to go far with it.

The plan for a canal came up again twenty years after Washington died, and in 1823 a charter was given for building the Chesapeake and Ohio canal. New York had then been six years at work on the Erie canal and would finish it in two years more. If the Virginia and Maryland people had known that most of them would be dead before their canal was half done, and that it would never be really finished, they would not have undertaken it.

They did not begin the work until five years later, in 1828. Then a great crowd came together at Georgetown, now a part of Washington, on the Potomac, to see the first earth thrown out. President John Quincy Adams made the principal speech and then took a spade to begin the digging. The spade hit a root and would not go into the soil. The President set down his foot more firmly, but still the spade would not move. At last, determined to succeed, he pulled off his coat for the job. The crowd liked this and cheered loudly, while Mr. Adams accomplished what he had set out to do.

On this very day something else was going on at Baltimore, forty miles away. Baltimore was not on the Potomac, but her people did not propose to be left out of the western trade on that account. After much disputing a charter had been granted for building what became one of the most famous, as it is one of the oldest, American railways,—the Baltimore and Ohio. Hence Baltimore had a celebration of her own on this same Fourth of July, 1828.

They did not have the President of the United States to help them, but they fared very well. They had great faith in what they were doing, and doubtless would have shouted even louder had they known what a great railroad they were starting and what a hard time the canal people would have.

There was only one man remaining of all the patriots who had signed the Declaration of Independence almost fifty years before. This was Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and he was the guest of Baltimore on that day. A prayer was offered, the Declaration was read, and after an officer of the railway company had spoken Mr. Carroll removed the first earth. As if nature would be kind to an old man, no root made his work hard; and the superstitious may say that the President’s toilsome digging over in Georgetown was a bad omen for that enterprise. It is easier to look back than to see into the future.

Both canal and railway went on building, but as they needed nearly the same route in some places, they did not get on well together. The canal was located in the state of Maryland, along the north bank of the Potomac. This was done in some measure because a large part of the water which would be needed for the canal came down from the uplands on the north side. It took twenty-three years to dig the trench as far as Cumberland, so that it was 1851 before boats could run between Cumberland and tide water. The original plan of carrying the canal beyond Cumberland and across the mountains was never carried out.

Just below the point where Wills creek enters the Potomac there is a dam, and from the pond so made the water is taken into the upper end of the canal. Much traffic has passed up and down the canal, but, on the whole, it has not paid for the cost of building and repairing. Sometimes it has been out of use, and a few months ago the state of Maryland sold it for a small sum to the Wabash Railway Company.

The North American Review has been published for a long time. At least seventy-five years ago this magazine printed two articles on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. By reading them we can see how the intelligent people of that time felt about building it.

In favor of the proposed railroad they said, first, that it would not be closed by ice for several months each year, as the Erie canal and the rivers were. Secondly, they reminded the public that Baltimore is two hundred miles nearer the Ohio navigation than New York is, and one hundred miles nearer than Philadelphia. Thirdly, they argued that New Orleans was a long way off, and its climate hot and unhealthful. Provisions sent by that route would be likely to spoil, and the traders taking the goods down the river might fall sick. Further, the rivers in a dry summer would be too low for navigation.

Nor did Baltimore people think that the Erie canal could get much trade except from regions close to lake Erie, and they had noticed that lands not far from the canal still sent a good deal of produce down the Susquehanna river to Baltimore. There was no port south of them that was so good as theirs; in short, they showed a very proper pride in their own home and a conviction that Baltimore was as good as any other American city, if not, perhaps, a little better.

They said also that the lime used for building in the city of Washington was brought all the way from Rhode Island, while there was a great abundance of good limestone in their own mountains, although it could not be carried by wagons. There was coal also, in seams so thick and wide that it could never be used up, but there was no way of getting it down to the sea where it would run factories, smelt iron, and propel the new steamships that so soon would make the ocean a well-traveled highway. Slate also was to be had, and marble, and gypsum, and timber, but these could not be brought to the towns where they might be used. There was, moreover, much iron ore all along the proposed route, and we all know that iron is the most important of the metals.

It had long before been learned that there were many fish in Chesapeake bay, and that New England was not to have the fishing business all to herself. Better even than this, there were then, as there are now, places under the shallow waters where countless oysters lived and multiplied. It was said, even in 1827, that if there could be a railroad to carry things quickly, oysters might be sent to people living far from the sea.

Baltimore’s notion of swift carrying was much like that of the Erie canal packet owners. Trains could go four miles an hour, and thus goods might be sent from Baltimore to the Ohio river in sixty-two and one-half hours. Some hopeful people thought that the speed might even be raised to eight miles an hour. When cars run at that rate in these days we begin to talk about getting out and pushing the engine.

The builders of the railroad had what seem to us curious ideas of laying a foundation for the track. They dug a trench in some places, putting into it broken stone, and on this they laid long slabs of stone, or “stone rails.” On these, in their turn, the iron rails were riveted down. Until car springs were invented the jolting must have been like that of a farm wagon.

Even when the track was finished no decision had been made as to how the cars were to be moved. Mr. Hulbert, in one of his stories of historic highways, tells of several experiments which were made. Some one invented a locomotive in which a horse was to tread an endless belt and thus make the machine go, carrying with it the horse and dragging the cars. On one trip, when several newspaper men were present to report the trial, the train ran into a cow and they were all tipped out and tumbled down a bank. The method did not have much praise in the papers. Sails were also tried, and one car which was thus moved by wind was called Æolus. This car, with its mast and other ship-like rigging, made much talk, but that was all. And no one could quite see how it would ever be possible to draw a car on a curved track. This meant much, for it was out of the question to build a railway through the mountains without many curves, and some of them rather short ones. But there were those who thought that if a curved road were possible, it would be a good thing because the engineer could occasionally look back along the line and see how his train was coming on.

But steam was to win the day. Mr. Peter Cooper had a locomotive, called Tom Thumb, built in 1829, and an old picture shows an exciting race between this little engine and a horse car. The steam car won the race, and it is now to be seen whether or not electricity will drive steam out of business on the railways.

By 1833 the road was laid as far as Harpers Ferry, a place made lively by armies and guns in the Civil War. It is a rugged old town, built near the spot where the Shenandoah joins the Potomac, and both together have cut a fine gorge through the Blue Ridge. To-day as one stands in the upper part of the village and looks down through the great gorge, he sees the bridge and tracks and trains of the Baltimore and Ohio, and the channel of the Chesapeake and Ohio canal (Fig. 41). The railway outstripped the canal, for the road was finished to Cumberland in 1842, nine years before canal boats floated into that place; and in 1853 the first train rolled into Wheeling, on the Ohio river.

Another part of the road now runs farther north to Pittsburg and leads on to Chicago, while yet another passes south to Cincinnati and St. Louis. Eastward the main line runs to Philadelphia and stops at the Whitehall terminal in New York City. These long lines, with many spurs and side lines, make up the Baltimore and Ohio Railway system, which, like the Pennsylvania and the New York Central, joins the seaports of the Atlantic coast with the fields and cities of the Mississippi, and carries in either direction the rich mineral products of the intervening mountains.

Like her neighbors on the Atlantic, Baltimore stretches out her hands to sea and land. The city was begun in 1730, at which time a Mr. Carroll sold the land for it at forty shillings an acre. When Washington first went to the Ohio there were only twenty-five houses in Baltimore, but in 1770 there were twenty thousand people, and the new city was drawing trade from Philadelphia. In 1826, when the Erie canal was building, Baltimore had become a city of sixty thousand inhabitants. Now it has more than half a million people, and is the sixth American city. In foreign trade, however, it stands third, and its docks are busy places. The Hamburg-American, the North-German Lloyd, and the Red Star lines all send regular steamers between Baltimore and Europe, and hundreds of others sail to ports on our own coast, to the West Indies, and to South America. Baltimore builds ships as well as sails them, to carry the corn, flour, and meat of the prairies and the great plains to foreign lands, and to bring back their products in exchange. Where there are railways and ships there are always merchants and factories. Out of the gains of trade a Baltimore merchant built one of the most famous of our schools, the Johns Hopkins University.

There has been no more important factor in the development of the United States than is found in the great railway systems, which, by linking all sections together, give unity and strength to the whole fabric of our government. Washington’s dreams of his country’s future are already overtopped by her actual achievements, and the most hopeful among those who first saw the advantages of steam engines could hardly have looked forward to the swift transportation of to-day.

In the year 1901 an American ship and American railway trains ran a great race to London over land and sea. The start was from Australia and the distance was more than thirteen thousand miles. The race was not against other ships and other trains, but against time. The mail from Sydney in New South Wales usually went by the Red sea and the Suez canal, a route which is a thousand miles shorter than is the Pacific route, and which took thirty-five days and a few hours. It happened on August 13, in the morning, that three hundred and sixty-seven sacks of important mail for London were piled on the dock, beside which lay a new American ship, the Ventura. Because no good British ship was at hand that morning, the post-office authorities thought that they would let the vessel with the Stars and Stripes carry the mail. She did carry it, and on the evening of September 2 she laid down the bags on the pier at San Francisco.

The American railroads tried their hand at carrying the British mail. The Southern Pacific took it swiftly across to Ogden, in Utah. The Union Pacific seized it, two hours late, and said that the time should be made up. The train raced a thousand miles to Omaha and made up some of the time but not all. Then it was off for Chicago, where the Lake Shore road had a “special” ready to overtake the Fast Mail. It ran two hundred and forty-four miles in two hundred and sixty-five and a half minutes, and did overtake it. Then came Buffalo, New York, Queenstown, and London. The carriers in that great city started out with the mail early in the morning of September 14. If the bags had come by the shorter route under the British flag, they would not have reached London until September 16. This is what great railways and great ships do in our time,—they make neighbors of all men.