3-16-10: How the C&O Canal Was Saved

This Saturday marks the 56th anniversary of a 185-mile hike that saved the C&O Canal from destruction and eventually led to its preservation as a national park.

In the 1940s, after railroads had made the canal obsolete, Congress funded plans to fill in the canal and build a parkway. On January 3, 1954, The Washington Post wrote an editorial supporting that plan.

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, an environmentalist who adored the canal, wrote the Post, challenging the editorial’s authors to hike the entire canal with him.

They did. And they changed their tune. Today millions of people visit the C&O Canal National Historical Park each year.

Sheilah talks to Cathy Stone, who was married to Justice Douglas from 1966 until he passed away in Bethesda at the age of 80, and to Allen Swope, a Washington County resident who was part of that historic hike in 1954.

Then Allen Swope takes us on a tour of the “golden half-mile” of the C&O Canal in Williamsport, Maryland.

The C&O Canal features many locks like this, which allowed canal boats to descend in elevation toward Washington, D.C.

The C&O Canal towpath looking north: 90 miles to Cumberland

A power plant looms beyond the C&O Canal

Allen Swope points out damage to stonework on the Conococheague Aqueduct

Allen Swope crosses a bridge on the C&O Canal

Allen Swope in front of his childhood home. The Daniel Donnelly house was briefly a hospital for Confederate troops when General Robert E. Lee’s army fled from Gettysburg across the Potomac into what was then Virginia.

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