By the Waters of Washington, Part 1

Reflecting on the Potomac, the life force of the National Capital

During my sophomore year at Georgetown, I lived in a campus townhouse that overlooked the Potomac River.  Across the way was Rosslyn, Virginia, its then-modest skyline dominated by the graceful silver curve of the old USA Today building.  To get to any Metro station from Georgetown, then and now, we had to descend the Exorcist Steps and cross Key Bridge.  Ignorant of that fact that I was looking at the Potomac just where it begins its widening below the fall line, and dismissive of the crew teams rowing beneath me, to my callow undergraduate mind the river was an obstacle, not the majestic force of nature that gives life to the National Capital. 

Washington’s hydrology is both perhaps its most visible physical feature as well as its most hidden and complex.  In pride of place among Washington’s waters, the Potomac is the dominant feature that determined Washington’s layout and subsequent development, inspired early attempts to create a viable local economy, provided its water, and came to shape recreation throughout the region. 

Washington’s share of the Potomac is but a sliver of the river’s long course.  It rises at Fairfax Stone, West Virginia, in the Appalachian Plateau, and runs for just over 400 miles, until it meets the Chesapeake Bay at Point Lookout in extreme southern Maryland.  The Potomac drainage basin covers four states and includes 14,670 miles, of which just over 50 percent currently is forested, while nearly 15 percent of the basin’s land is developed.  At Washington, the river’s flow is around five million gallons per minute, and at its mouth, between Point Lookout and Smith Point, Virginia, it is eleven miles wide.

(Image of Potomac River drainage basin from American Rivers)

Like many East Coast cities founded in the colonial era or early Republic, Washington was built near the river’s fall line, lying roughly 115 miles from the Potomac’s mouth.  Fall lines mark the end of the navigable sections of major rivers, where higher-lying uplands slope down to lower-lying coastal areas, and can be up to several miles wide. 

The Potomac Fall Line is part of the larger Atlantic Seaboard Fall Line, which runs up and down the East Coast, separating the rocky Piedmont from the sandy Coastal Plain.  Along the fall line are strung long-established cities, including Princeton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Richmond, and Rocky Mount, logical places for settlement in colonial days and today linked by I-95.  In Washington, the fall line bisects the city diagonally, southwest to northeast, running from Fort Belvoir on the south through Roosevelt (Analostan) Island in the Potomac, up roughly along the valley of Rock Creek Park, and on into Silver Spring, in Maryland, as it moves northward. 

It was up to the fall line at Little Falls, presumably, that Captain John Smith sailed in his little shallop when he explored the Potomac (or, in his spelling, the Patawomeke) in the summer of 1608. Rocky waterfalls or cataracts generally mark the fall line, so ships can travel no further upstream from that point without artificial means of bypassing the rapids, such as canal-and-lock systems.  Because of the high volume of rushing water at the fall line, watermills for grain and lumber processing often were built at those locations, leading to towns springing up nearby.  Near Washington, both the Great Falls and the Little Falls of the Potomac sit astride the fall line. 

Below the Little Falls, at the Chain Bridge, the Potomac becomes an estuary, rising and falling with the Chesapeake tides, finally smoothing out just by Key Bridge and Georgetown.  The now-tidal river widens dramatically below Georgetown and Analostan Island, sweeping majestically past the Tidal Basin and West and East Potomac Parks.  In the early days of Washington, the river came up almost to the White House grounds and where the Washington Monument now stands.  Decades of filling in the low-lying areas of Washington substantially altered the riverbanks of both the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers (more on that in the next post).

(Confluence of Potomac (l) and Anacostia (r) Rivers, with East Potomac Park in left center, Analostan Island upper left center; image from NASA Earth Observatory)

At the southern tip of East Potomac Park, a mile or so past Analostan Island, the Eastern Branch, or Anacostia, joins the Potomac.  Here, Hains Point encompasses the vista from the National War College across Anacostia, Maryland, to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and downriver to Alexandria.  The Potomac Tidewater proper begins from here, continuing on for another 115 miles, past Alexandria, Mount Vernon, the southern shore of Maryland, and Virginia’s Northern Neck, before finally emptying into the Chesapeake Bay. 

(Panoramic view looking south from Hains Point, where the Anacostia (l) and Potomac (r) Rivers meet; photo by the author)

***

As the potted description above shows, the Potomac offered excellent advantages to regional traders, such as the Indians who had lived along its course for centuries. Though upwards of 30 different Indian tribes had lived on the lower Potomac as part of the Powhatan Confederation, in the area around present-day Washington, the primary tribe was the Piscataway, on the Maryland side of the Potomac, while in the immediate area around what became the District of Columbia was the Nacotchtank tribe (also known as the Necostin, from which ‘Anacostia’ is a corruption). Even before the arrival of the English, inter-tribal conflict with the nearby Patawomeke tribe had pressured the Nacotchtank.

After the coming of John Smith and the Jamestown colonists, English tobacco farmers further encroached on the Nacotchtank territory, who before the turn of the 18th century had given up their land and joined the Piscataways. Within a century, the English had settled riverport towns like Alexandria, in 1749 (which is celebrating its 275^th anniversary this year), and Georgetown in 1751, to take advantage of the Tidewater tobacco trade that had become the primary economic engine of the region.

(Map of early Alexandria from Library of Congress)

It was the Potomac’s longstanding role in regional trade that led President George Washington to choose the area in 1790 to be the site of the National Capital.  Born and raised on the river, Washington had a lifelong passion to develop the region into the nation’s economic center.  With so little known of the American continent before the 19^th century, the Potomac was destined, at least in his mind, to become the major transportation route linking the seacoast with the fertile continental interior beyond the Appalachians. As a landowner in the Ohio Valley and chief promoter of the Patowmack Canal Company, Washington had long sought to improve navigation on the Potomac so as to draw the products of that area to the Tidewater, as well as bind those settlers firmly to the Atlantic Seaboard. 

The President’s preference, however, had to make its way through the First United States Congress, which even then was paralyzed by gridlock.  The political logrolling that led to the Potomac being chosen as the spot for the Federal City is well-known and needs no detailed recounting here.  Briefly, by 1790, disagreement over the permanent location of the new country’s capital had become intertwined with a proposal by Alexander Hamilton that the federal government assume the war debts of the States, thus easing the burden on New England and centralizing the financial role of the national government.  The northern States did not want to see the Capital in the South, while the southern States opposed increasing the fiscal role of the federal government. Some feared the impasse could lead to disunion before the Union even got on its feet.  In mid-June, Thomas Jefferson organized a dinner in the then-capital, New York, at which he, James Madison, and Hamilton reached a critical agreement that the Southerners would support the federal assumption of war debts, while the Northerners would not oppose locating the National Capital on the Potomac.

Though the Residency Act allowed President Washington to choose a ten-mile square area along a wide stretch of the river, he selected a spot near the head of navigation at Georgetown, giving access to ocean-going ships but far enough upriver from the Chesapeake to be defensible from sea-borne attack. He never flagged in his passion for the site or for the river that would give it life.  A letter written just three years before his untimely passing is worth quoting at length, as it sums up well his unabated enthusiasm for the city and its river:

“the Lands on the Waters of the Potomack will, in a few years, be in greater demand, and in higher estimation than in any other part of the United States. … that they lye in the most temperate latitude of the United States; that the main river runs in a direct course to the expanded part of the Western country, and approximates nearer to the principal branches of the Ohio than any other Eastern water, & of course must become a great, if not (under all circumstances) the best highway into that Region…” 

Washington went on in this same letter to predict great things for the as yet-unoccupied District of Columbia, thanks to its unique setting:

“… the amazing extent of tide navigation afforded by the Bay & Rivers of Chesapeak has scarcely a parallel. When to these are added, that a site at the junction of the inland, & tide navigations of that river is chosen for the permanent Seat of the general government, and is in rapid preparation for its reception. that the inland navigation of the River is nearly completed to the extent abovementioned, & that its lateral branches are capable of great improvement, at a small expence through the most fertile parts of Virginia, in a Southerly direction, and crossing Maryland and extending into Pennsylvania in a northerly one; thro’ which (independent of what may come from the Western country) an immensity of produce will be water borne, thereby making the Federal City the great emporium of the United States.” 

(11 Dec 1796, George Washington to John Sinclair).

George Washington’s vision for the Federal City as the ‘great emporium’ of his country never materialized, but as to the beauty of the site and the outstanding importance of the National Capital, his prescience was fully borne out.  That Washington never lived to see the government take up residence in the city that he championed and was to bear his name, is a sad coda to one of the most extraordinary periods in our national history.

Next up: A bit more on the history of development along the Potomac in Washington, as well as some lesser-known waters of the District of Columbia. Read Part 2 here.

Further reading: Frederick Gutheim’s now out-of-print The Potomac (1949; 1968) remains the most comprehensive overview of the river, at least up until its revised publication.  Kenneth R. Bowling’s Creating the Federal City, 1774-1800: Potomac Fever (1988) remains an excellent, focused treatment of the founding of Washington, D.C. A more recent study of the Indian habitation of the area was done through George Washington University.