On the first two days of my recent three-day guided bike tour, I and my ten fellow bikers rode on the Great Allegheny Passage or “GAP” trail – an unpaved but relatively smooth rail trail that begins in Pittsburgh, PA, and ends in Cumberland, MD.
On day three, we rode the westernmost 30 miles of the C&O Canal towpath – which was bumpier and, in places, muddier.
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We left our Cumberland hotel and hit the C&O bright and early on a gorgeous September day. Unfortunately, there were several major mudholes on the towpath, and a couple of our group’s members took a tumble as a result.
The C&O Canal towpath
The trail was drier and a little smoother after the first ten miles, but it was still a slower ride than the day before – that’s because the part of the GAP Trail that we had ridden on the previous day features a 1.5% downhill grade, while the C&O towpath is purt near level.
Factor in the fatigue that we were all feeling after riding 75 miles in our first two days, and you can understand why we were happy to get the damned ride over with.
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Our guides laid out lunch just before the towpath passed through the Paw Paw Tunnel, which was by far the most interesting thing we saw on our day three ride.
The Paw Paw Tunnel is a 0.6-mile-long structure that was built to bypass a series of five horseshoe bends along the Potomac River. If the towpath had followed the twists and turns of the Potomac rather than going through the tunnel, it would have added more than five miles to the length of a canal trip.
The western entrance to the Paw Paw Tunnel
Work on the tunnel began in 1836, and it was supposed to take two years to complete. In fact, it took 14 years to finish and cost almost 20 times as much as it was supposed to.
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The towpath within the Paw Paw Tunnel is extremely narrow, and the tunnel isn’t lighted. I had a headlight for my bike, but it was what a Louisiana friend of mine would call a piss-po’ headlight.
I rode a short distance within the tunnel just to say I had, then walked the rest of the way.
Inside the Paw Paw Tunnel
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If you’re wondering where the Paw Paw Tunnel’s name comes from, it comes from the pawpaw tree, which is native to eastern North America.
In 1541, Spanish explorers reported that native Americans cultivated the pawpaw tree for its fruit, which has a very soft texture and tastes vaguely like a banana. (Maybe that’s why it’s also called the Indian Banana, the West Virginia Banana, the Hoosier Banana, the Appalachian Banana, the Ozark Banana, etc.)
Chilled pawpaws were a favorite dessert of George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson grew pawpaw trees at Monticello.
Our guide gathered a few pawpaw fruits from trees growing between the C&O towpath and the Potomac, and sliced them up for us to sample:
To be perfectly honest, the pawpaw doesn’t do much for me.
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After our pawpaw-tasting session was over, the guides loaded our bikes on to the roof of our van. We then loaded ourselves in the van and settled back for the hour-and-a-half drive back to Ohiopyle, PA, where we had parked our cars at the beginning of our trip.
We said our goodbyes and hit the road to drive to our respective homes in Colorado, Oklahoma, Tennessee, New Jersey, and Maryland.
In my case, I hit the Falls City Pub and had one for the road first. (Yes, I said one – not that it’s any of your business.)
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“Way Down Yonder in the Paw Paw Patch” is an American folk song that’s over 100 years old.
Click here to listen a 1959 recording by the legendary folksinger Pete Seeger, his daughter Mika, and the Rev. Larry Eisenberg.
Click on the link below to buy a recording of the song by Burl Ives from Amazon:
Now that we’ve presented the songs that make up the 2019 inductees into the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME, it’s time to announce the 2019 inductees into the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME.
But before we clear the plates from our first course and serve the second one, perhaps a spoonful of palate-cleansing sorbet is in order.
Another day, another bike ride
On second thought, let’s skip the sorbet and take our refreshment in the form of a nice bike ride.
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The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal – which is usually referred to as the C&O Canal – follows the course of the Potomac River from Washington, DC, to Cumberland, Maryland.
At mile 140 of the C&O Canal
Construction on the C&O began in 1829 and was completed in 1850. It is essentially a 60-foot-wide, six-foot-deep, 184.5-mile-long ditch through a wilderness that was dug with picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows, so it’s not surprising that the job took so long.
The C&O is now a national historical park, and the towpath where the mules who towed the canal boats walked has become a popular trail for hikers and bikers.
I’ve ridden about three-fourths of the length of the canal, and plan to ride the remaining one-fourth by the end of the summer. The towpath is a little rougher than I would like it to be, and it can be pretty wet and muddy after thunderstorms – not to mention buggy.
But it’s uncrowded and offers many lovely views of the Potomac River, and you pass through some interesting little towns and villages.
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Earlier this week, I drove to Little Orleans, Maryland, a tiny village in distant western Maryland, to take a ride along a stretch of the C&O that was new to me.
In 1839, a hundred or so armed Irish immigrants who were helping to dig the canal rioted and attacked a German work camp near Little Orleans, killing one worker and injuring many others. A local priest who witnessed the mayhem wrote to the C&O’s chief engineer that “were I superstitious I would really believe [the Irish rioters] are incarnate devils.”
Irish canal diggers
The Little Orleans riot wasn’t the only outbreak of labor unrest during the years when the canal was being built. That’s not surprising given the backbreaking work – canal diggers worked 12 to 15 hours a day in all kinds of weather – the primitive living conditions, the constant threat of cholera and other deadly diseases, the bad blood between the Irish and German workers, and the ready availability of cheap whiskey.
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The highlight of my trip to Little Orleans was my visit to Bill’s Place, a bike-friendly combination restaurant/bar/grocery store that’s located in a rustic building just off the canal towpath:
Bill went on ahead some time ago, it seems. The current owner is Jack, a good-natured fellow who holds court from a stool behind the bar.
The Bill’s Place menu is surprisingly lengthy, but I kept it simple and ordered a ham and cheese sandwich, potato chips, and a Dr. Pepper when I stopped for lunch.
At then end of my ride, I returned for a couple of Old Germans. When I arrived, Jack was telling another local about a mutual acquaintance who had been slapped with a $55 citation from a state game warden for drinking beer in a nearby state forest. Jack had called the head forest ranger and confirmed that the consumption of beer in a state forest was not illegal, although drinking beer in a state park was verboten. He and the other local agreed that their friend should go to court and fight the ticket – put that uppity game warden in his place.
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There were many noteworthy things in Bill’s Place but the most remarkable aspect of the joint was its ceiling, every square inch of which was covered with signed dollar bills:
Here's a closer look at a few of these bills:
Based on my quick-and-dirty count, I’d say the overhead array of Washingtons was about 50 bills wide by 300 bills long.
In other words, there was roughly $15,000 pinned to the ceiling of Bill’s Place.
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Neil Young wrote what are arguably his three best songs – “Cinnamon Girl,” “Cowgirl in the Sand,” and “Down by the River” – when he was ill, half out of his mind with a 103-degree fever.
Neil Young in 1969
Here’s how Young explained the meaning of the lyrics of “Down by the River” when introducing the song before a performance in 1984:
I'd like to sing you a song about a guy who had a lot of trouble controlling himself. He let the dark side come through a little too bright.
One afternoon he took a little stroll down thru a field and thru a forest, until he could hear the water running along there. And he met his woman down there. And he told her she’d been cheating on him one too many times. And he reached down in his pocket and he pulled a little revolver out. Said, “Honey I hate to do this, but you pushed me too far.”
By the time he got back to town he knew he had to answer to somebody pretty quick. He went back to his house and he sat down on his front porch. About two hours later the sheriff’s car pulled up out front. It started sinking in on him what he’d done. The sheriff walked up the sidewalk and said, “Come with me son, I want to ask you a few questions.”
At other times, he has denied that the song is about a murder.
The first thing that struck me about Fort Frederick – an 18th-century fort located on the Maryland side of the Potomac River about 100 miles northwest of the U.S. Capitol – was how thick and high its stone walls were.
Fort Frederick has some big-ass walls
Construction on Fort Frederick, which was one of a chain of forts built during the French and Indian War to protect the British colonists who lived on the western frontier, began in 1756.
Many of the frontier forts of that era were made of wood. The Indian tribes who were allies of the French were certainly capable of setting fire to wooden forts. But Fort Frederick’s stone walls are three to four feet thick and 17 feet high. Walls that thick and high would have stymied them completely.
The French troops in the area may have possessed some light field artillery, but nothing that would have made a dent in a three-to-four-foot thick stone wall – that would have required much more formidable weaponry, like siege mortars or shipborne cannons.
Given the lack of roads and the shallowness of the Potomac River, there was no reason for the colonists to worry about mortars or ocean-going men of war.
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Horatio Sharpe, Maryland’s colonial governor, was the driving force behind the construction of fort Frederick. He told the colonial legislature that the fort “will not be completed for less than £5000.”
Fort Frederick from the air
That turned out to be an understatement. A year later, the legislature expressed alarm at the amount of money that had spent on Fort Frederick, which was nowhere near being complete:
Near the Sum of £6000 has been expended . . . and tho’ we have not any exact Information what Sum may still be wanting to compleat it, (if ever it shall be thought proper to be done) yet we are afraid the Sum requisite for that Purpose, must be considerable . . .
The legislators were also concerned about the size of the force necessary to man the very large fort:
[W]e are apprehensive that Fort is so large, that in Case of Attack, it cannot be defended without a Number of Men larger than this Province can support, purely to maintain a Fortification.
The fort had barracks sufficient to lodge some 300 soldiers. That may not sound like many, but the area surrounding the fort was very thinly populated.
* * * * *
In 1758, a British expedition captured Fort Duquesne, a French fort located in what is now downtown Pittsburgh. That victory freed western Maryland from the threat of attack, and whatever militia garrisoned Fort Frederick at that time were sent back home.
The fort was abandoned until 1763, when several hundred settlers took refuge there during Pontiac’s War, a wide-ranging Indian uprising that broke out just after the British and French signed the Treaty of Paris, which brought a temporary end to hostilities between those two empires.
Fort Frederick reenactors
The tribes who united under Chief Pontiac’s leadership attacked several British forts in western Pennsylvania, but never got as far as Fort Frederick. After a month or so, the settlers returned to their farms.
Fort Frederick was pressed into service to hold British prisoners of war during the Revolutionary War. Nearly a thousand British soldiers and officers – including some family members – were housed there at the end of that war.
The fort fell into disrepair over the next decades. Some of its stones were removed and used in the construction of the C&O Canal and for the foundations of several houses in the area.
Maryland sold the land around Fort Frederick to a local farmer in 1791. (The fort was occupied by a Union regiment during the Civil War, and there were some skirmishes between Union and Confederate forces in the area early in that war.) The state repurchased the property in 1922, and the Civilian Conservation Corps restored it during the Great Depression.
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I visited Fort Frederick recently during a two-day bike ride on the C&O Canal towpath.
Before entering the fort proper, I sat down on a shaded bench and enjoyed an egg salad sandwich, dill pickle-flavored potato chips, and some Dr. Pepper, which I had picked up at a truck stop just a few miles away.
I posted a photo of the egg-salad sandwich on Facebook, claiming that I had purchased it at a gas station the morning before, stuck it in my backpack, and promptly forgot about it for 24-plus hours.
What a kerfuffle this caused among les femmes d’un certain âge who are my Facebook friends.
“Don’t eat it!” said one. “Don’t you eat that!” said another. “If you decide to eat it, please post the name of the hospital where you're being treated so we can send get well wishes,” said a third. (HOW STUPID DO YOU THINK I AM, LADIES?)
Imagine the psychic cost of being the husband or child of one of these literal-minded neurotics . . . these worry-warts! . . . these nervous Nellies!
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Glen Campbell, who died last year, was one of 12 children of a poor Arkansas sharecropper. An uncle gave him a five-dollar Sears guitar when he was four years, and within a few years, he was performing on local radio stations. He was a talented and highly sought-after studio musician in the sixties, and later became a very successful solo artist. He eventually released over 70 albums – 12 went gold, four went platinum, and one was double-platinum.
Today’s featured song – which was released on his 2008 album, Meet Glen Campbell – was written and originally recorded by Tom Petty.
Meet Glen Campbell also includes covers of songs by John Lennon, Jackson Browne, Lou Reed, U2, Green Day, and the Foo Fighters. (Bet you didn’t see that coming.)
Life today is incomprehensibly different today than it was in the 19th century.
If you don’t believe me, all you have to do is take a bike ride along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which follows the course of the Potomac River between Washington, DC, and Cumberland, Maryland.
Boat on the C&O Canal
Thousands of men equipped only with picks, shovels, and wheelbarrows labored from 1828 to 1850 to dig that 184.5-mile-long canal.
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Most of the workers who worked on the C&O were Irish immigrants attracted by advertisements in the newspapers of Belfast, Cork, and Dublin.
Frances Trollope – whose son Anthony was the most prolific and probably the greatest of all the 19th-century British novelists – described the life of these Irish immigrants in her 1832 book, Domestic Manners of the Americans:
Of the white laborers on this canal, the great majority are Irishmen; their wages are from ten to fifteen dollars a month, with a miserable lodging, and the large allowance of whiskey. It is by means of this hateful poison that they are tempted, and indeed enabled for a time to stand the broiling heat of the sun in a most noxious climate: for through such, close to the romantic but unwholesome Potomac, the line of the canal has hitherto run.
The situation of these poor strangers, when they sink at last in “the fever,” which sooner or later is sure to overtake them, is dreadful. . . . Details of their sufferings often reached us; on one occasion a farmer calling at the house, told the family that a poor man, apparently in a dying condition, was lying beside a little brook at the distance of a quarter of a mile. The spot was immediately visited by some of the family; he was conveyed to the house, and expired during the night. By inquiring at the canal, it was found that he was an Irish laborer . . . . He did not appear above twenty, and as I looked on his pale young face, which even in death expressed suffering, I thought that perhaps he had left a mother and a home to seek wealth in America.
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Not surprisingly, many of the canal workers turned to alcohol to assuage their suffering. (Wouldn’t you?)
The canal company soon prohibited the consumption of spirits by its workers. You can imagine how well that went over. (We’re talking about the Irish, after all.)
From National Park Service historian Harlan Unrau’s history of the C&O:
The company had considerable difficulty enforcing its prohibition in the absence of sup- porting Maryland laws, as the contractors continually faced trouble with shopkeepers along the line who maintained grog shops or surreptitiously sold liquor to the men. . . .
Drunkenness had actually increased during the period of prohibition as the men, deprived of a steady supply of spirits during the day, drank excessive quantities of alcohol at neighboring grog shops in the evening. The intoxicated men rioted throughout most of the night, and morning found many of them lying on the ground where they had fallen exhausted, unfit for work that day.
* * * * *
Fights among the canal workers were an everyday occurrence.
Harlan Unrau described the most serious outbreak of violence, which took place in 1834:
In 1834 open warfare broke out between two long feuding rival factions of the Irish workers – the Corkonians and the Longfords, sometime called Fardowners – during the idle winter months.
[Note: The “Corkonians” hailed from County Cork, the southernmost county of Ireland. Longford County in central Ireland was a very small and very poor county.]
The first encounter in January 1834 was the result of a fight between on of the Corkonians and one of the Longfords named John Irons, the latter man being beaten badly that he soon died. . . . The skirmish between the Corkonians, who were working near Dam No. 5 above Williamsport, and the Fardowners from the vicinity of Dam No. 4, below the town, resulted in several deaths and many wounded in the clash before two companies of the Hagerstown Volunteers arrived on the scene to restore order. The following day the militia returned to Hagerstown with 34 prisoners who were sent to jail. . . .
[A] major battle erupted [on] January 24. A party of 300 Longfords, armed with guns, clubs and helves [i.e., ax handles], were permitted to cross the aqueduct and march up to Dam No. 5, when they announced that their intentions were merely to make a show of force. Farther up the line they were joined by 300 to 400 more . . . . In a field on a hilltop just above Middlekauff’s Mill near Dam Mill near Dam No. 5, they met about 300 Corkonians armed with “military weapons.”
Dam #5 today
Accepting a challenge, the Longfords charged up the hill amid an exchange of volleys that killed a number of men. Soon the Corkonians fell back and fled before the superior forces of the Longfords. A merciless pursuit took place until nightfall, and many of the fugitives that were over taken were savagely put to death. Later five men were found in one place with bullets through their heads. In addition, the bodies of other dead and wounded were strewn in every direction. . . .
The Maryland House of Delegates passed a resolution asking the President of the United States to order out a sufficient number of troops to preserve the peace at Williamsport. The Maryland Senate substituted a resolution of its own authorizing the Governor to call out the state militia, but President Andrew Jackson had already issued orders to send two companies of the 1st regiment of the U.S. Cavalry stationed at Fort McHenry to proceed to the canal. Arriving via the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, the federal force remained along the line of the waterway for several months.
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I recently took a two-day, 60-mile bike ride along the C&O, which ceased operating in 1924 and was eventually acquired by the federal government and turned into a national historical park.
The first day, I rode from mile 99.8 (Williamsport, Maryland) to mile 72.8, which is just across the Potomac from Shepherdstown, West Virginia. (I parked in Shepherdstown and arranged for the owner of a local bike store to shuttle my bike and me to Williamsport so I didn’t have to ride that stretch of the canal in both directions.)
The second day, I drove to Williamsport and rode from mile 99.8 to mile 114.5 (where the towpath is adjacent to the paved Western Maryland Rail Trail) and back.
The most notable canal structure I saw that day was Dam #5, one of several “feeder” dams built on the Potomac to provide a reliable water supply for the canal.
Dam #5 – which was built by Corkonians – is about six miles upriver from Williamsport.
In December 1861, Stonewall Jackson and his men attempted to destroy the dam, which would have deprived the canal of sufficient water for boats to carry coal from western Maryland to Washington. But Jackson’s attacks failed to knock the dam out of commission.
The dam currently produces over 1200 kilowatts of hydroelectric power.
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A couple of miles upriver from the dam is the house that was the home of the lockkeeper assigned to operate lock 49.
Lockhouse 49
Lockhouse 49 is one of six C&O Canal blockhouses that you can rent. It sleeps eight and costs only $125 a night. While it has electric baseboard heat, it doesn’t have a kitchen or running water. There’s a portapotty, however.
* * * * *
The highlight of my second day’s ride was Fort Frederick State Park, the site of a stone fort built in 1756 to protect settlers during the French and Indian War.
I’ll tell you more about Fort Frederick in the next 2 or 3 lines.
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“I Predict a Riot” was released in 2004 on Employment, the Kaiser Chiefs’ debut album:
The Kaiser Chiefs aren’t Irish – they hail from Leeds. (Close enough for government work.)
In case you’re not familiar with the word “fairy,” the Cambridge English Dictionary says it means “behaving in a loud, excited manner, especially when you are enjoying yourself or drinking alcohol.”
Not surprisingly, the word is almost always used to describe men, not women.
I’m not sure why it snowed on March 21, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the fault of the Rothschilds.
* * * * *
By contrast, the day before the first day of spring – in other words, the final day of winter – was lovely in the DC area.
I took advantage of the 61-degree temperature to load up my bike on my new bike rack and my new car and head to the C&O Canal towpath for a ride.
The C&O Canal, which is 184-plus miles long, was built between 1828 and 1850. No freight-carrying boat has used the canal since 1924.
In 1971, a law was passed that established the C&O Canal National Historical Park, and today the towpath is a popular place to hike and bike.
I’m slowly but surely accomplishing my goal of riding the entire length of the canal on my bike. It’s taking quite a while because I’m doing it all by myself.
That doubles my distance because I have to ride roundtrips. Say I park at mile 50 and ride to mile 60 – then I have to ride back to mile 50 because that’s where my car is. That means I have to ride 20 miles for each 10 miles of the canal that I cover.
And while a good part of the canal is no more than an hour’s drive from my home, the western parts of the C&O are more than two hours away.
That’s OK. I’m retired – I’ve got plenty of time! (At least I hope I do . . .)
* * * * *
On Monday, I started at mile 22 of the C&O – in other words, 22 miles upstream from the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC, where the canal ends. (I felt like I was a lot further than 22 miles from downtown Washington, but I wasn’t.)
Less than a mile upstream is Aqueduct No. 1, which carried the canal over Seneca Creek. That aqueduct was constructed between 1829 and 1832, using red sandstone from a nearby quarry.
Here's a photo of a canal boat using the aqueduct in 1882:
Seneca Creek aqueduct in 1882
The Seneca Creek aqueduct is the only one of the eleven on the C&O that also serves as a lift lock – Lock 24, also known as Riley’s Lock (after one of the lockkeepers who manned that lock).
Here’s the house that Mr. Riley lived in:
Unfortunately, the Seneca Creek aqueduct suffered heavy damage in a 1971 flood. The National Park Service shored up the aqueduct with steel beams, but never restored the entire structure:
* * * * *
A company that offers outdoor-adventure summer camps for kids parks its busses near Riley’s Lock in the off-season:
My oldest grandson, Jack – he’s 20 months old – is obsessed with trucks and busses, so I took some pictures of the camp busses and showed them to him the next day. He stared at them like I used to stare at Playboy centerfolds.
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My turnaround point was Lock 25, which was just short of nine miles from where I started my ride.
The lockkeeper's house at Lock 25
The lockhouse at Lock 25 is available for overnight stays. It looks pretty nice, but there’s no heat, no electricity and no indoor plumbing. (There’s a nearby port-a-potty, however.) The cost? Only $110 a night.
Lock 25 is a stone’s throw away from what used to be the town of Edwards Ferry. This canal had opened to this point in 1830, and a community with warehouses, stores, and a blacksmith quickly sprang up to service the canal traffic. But the Civil War brought all that to an end.
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There’s not a lot to see between Seneca Creek and Edwards Ferry. The Potomac River is wide and relatively placid along this stretch of the canal:
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I got back to my car about 5:30, which gave me plenty of time to drive to nearby Poolesville, MD, and enjoy happy hour at Cugini’s, a popular local pizza and wings joint that always has an impressive selection of local craft beers on tap:
I chose the “Wait . . . Pull What Out?” imperial stout from RAR Brewing, which is located on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. (The beer’s name is a quote from the movie Old School. You could have fooled me . . .)
At 12.5% ABV, one 10-ounce pour was plenty:
As I sipped my beer, I watched the University of Connecticut women’s basketball team play its second-round NCAA tournament game.
I love watching the UConn women, who have been utterly dominant for years. (One sportswriter described them as “a basketball death machine of epic proportions.”)
No women’s college team has ever scored more than 55 points in a quarter, 94 points in a half, or 140 points in a game. UConn broke those records not against some winless punching bag, but against a conference champion that had won 24 games in the regular season.
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Christopher Hall and Walter Flakus formed Stabbing Westward in 1986, when they were students at Western Illinois University in Macomb, Illinois. Hall once told an interviewer what the band’s name signified:
Since we went to Western Illinois University, Stabbing Westward had a certain “kill everybody in the school’ vibe to it! The school's way out in farm country and the country is really close-minded. I was walking around like Robert Smith with real big hair, big baggy black clothes, black fingernail polish and eye makeup. They just didn't get it. We hated the town.
“Save Yourself,” which was Stabbing Westward’s most successful single. was released in 1998 on the band’s third album, Darkest Days.
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