The Great American Canals Author:Archer Butler Hulbert Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE POTOMAC COMPANY GEORGE Washington's efforts to promote internal improvement in Virginia and Maryland with special reference to the Middle We... more »st have been lightly sketched in other portions of this work.5 A more or less complete examination into the Potomac Company must be essayed here, for among the improvements of internal waterways in America that of the Potomac urged by Washington meant to the last quarter of the eighteenth century what the building of the Erie Canal meant to the first quarter of the nineteenth. Having maintained with earnestness for many years that Virginia and Maryland should, through the Potomac River, secure the trade of the rising empire west of the Historic Highways of America, vols. iii, pp. 189- 204; xii, pp. 15-30. Alleghenies, Washington, at the close of the Revolution, gave himself wholly up to this commercial problem. Before peace was declared he left the Continental camp at Newberg and made a long, dangerous tour up the Mohawk Valley, examining carefully the portages to Wood Creek at Rome, and to Lake Otsego at Canajoharie. With that far-sighted shrewdness which, of itself, made him a marked man, he felt that this route which avoided the mountains was the great rival of his Potomac River. Yet he was no narrow partisan. Returning from his tour he wrote Chevalier de Chas- tellux from Princeton, October 12, 1783: " Prompted by these actual observations, I could not help taking a more extensive view of the vast inland navigation of these United States and could not but be struck with the immense extent and importance of it, and with the goodness of that Providence, which has dealt its favors to us with so profuse a hand. Would to God we may have wisdom enough to improve them. I shall not rest contented, till I have explored...« less