The Potomac Company (spelled variously as Patowmack, Potowmack, Potowmac, and Compony) was created in 1785 to make improvements to the Potomac River and improve its navigability for commerce. The Potomac Company built five skirting canals around the major falls. When completed it allowed boats and rafts to float downstream towards Georgetown, a major port of the time on the Potomac River, now in the District of Columbia. George Washington was its first president, as well as an investor in the company. Tobias Lear, Washington's personal secretary, was its chairman for a period. Other principals of the company included Thomas Johnson of Maryland.
The Potomac Company had the goal of linking the East Coast with the Old Northwest. The endeavor eventually failed due to a combination of factors such as an unstable American economy, unreliable government aid, and conflicts between states. Although the charter was surrendered to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company in 1828, it is significant because it serves as an example of how a deficient amount of support from the federal government can undermine a large, desirable infrastructure project. The U.S. government was more conscious of the effects of its involvement in developing infrastructure in the fledgling republic.
While slim boats called bateaux could be poled up-river in even the shallowest of waters, they could not traverse the fall line, the area where an upland region (continental bedrock) and a coastal plain (coastal alluvia) meet, typically in waterfalls.
One of the major constructions of the Potomac Company was the Patowmack Canal. A major engineering feat of the time, the Potomack Canal permitted boats to navigate around Great Falls, where the Potomac River drops a treacherous 75 feet through the unnavigable Mather Gorge.
After 21 years, the Potomack Canal was sold, along with the other assets of the Potomac Company to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company, which built a canal on the opposite, Maryland side of the Potomac River.
Read more about Potomac Company: History, Economic Impact, Legacy
Famous quotes containing the words potomac and/or company:
“The city of Washington is in some respects self-contained, and it is easy there to forget what the rest of the United States is thinking about. I count it a fortunate circumstance that almost all the windows of the White House and its offices open upon unoccupied spaces that stretch to the banks of the Potomac ... and that as I sit there I can constantly forget Washington and remember the United States.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“We noticed several other sandy tracts in our voyage; and the course of the Merrimack can be traced from the nearest mountain by its yellow sand-banks, though the river itself is for the most part invisible. Lawsuits, as we hear, have in some cases grown out of these causes. Railroads have been made through certain irritable districts, breaking their sod, and so have set the sand to blowing, till it has converted fertile farms into deserts, and the company has had to pay the damages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)