Seventy Years Ago This Week: The Hike That Saved the C&O Canal
Conservation v. Development in Cold War Washington
This week marks the 70th anniversary of the hike that saved the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Though the canal was not made into a national historical park by the National Park Service until 1971, it was a trek made in March 1954 that would result in the canal’s preservation. The campaign to save the C&O Canal occurred against the backdrop of tensions between the need for urban development in postwar Washington and demands to preserve pristine natural areas and historically significant places in and around the national capital. As such, it also became part of a larger debate over how to define and create civic space in Washington at a time both when the capital was becoming a global symbol of democracy during the Cold War and when a distinct narrative about America’s progress was emerging.
At eight o’clock on the morning of March 20, 1954, thirty-nine men, most of them middle-aged, left Cumberland, Maryland to hike the remains of the C&O Canal down to Washington. The canal was one of the great engineering feats of early American history. Constructed from 1828 to 1850, its course shadowed that of the Potomac, from its placid upper river segment, through the cataracts at the fall line, and down to the tidal river at the canal’s terminus in Georgetown, a stone’s throw from where the Watergate now stands (the final, tidal lock can be found on the property of the National Park Service’s Thompson Boat Center). It operated until 1924 but never threatened the dominance of New York’s Erie Canal.
The group setting out was no anonymous group of nature-lovers. They were led by William O. “Wild Bill” Douglas, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and a committed outdoorsman and early conservationist. Among the party were two Washington Post and Times Herald editors, Merlo Pusey and Robert Estabrook (the Post had bought the Times Herald just that year). The two were the reason for Douglas organizing the hike, as they recently had written an editorial supporting a congressional proposal that a scenic motorway be paved along the old canal bed, opening up the nearly 200-mile length to automobiles.
In response, Douglas wrote a letter to the Post, challenging the editors to hike the entire canal with him, hoping to convince them to support a different plan, namely one to make the canal a protected spot and keep it “a place not yet marred by the roar of wheels and the sound of horns.”
Three decades of neglect by 1954 left the canal bed occasionally filled with rainwater and runoff, thick with undergrowth, sometimes swampy, and often covered deep in mud. Fox, muskrat, deer, badger, duck, eagle, and other wildlife abounded along the canal. Setting off that Saturday morning at a brisk pace, Douglas led his group of editors, writers, naturalists, and conservationists through brambles and poison ivy, covering twenty-two miles the first day. Douglas, a seasoned hiker, maintained a military march speed over the next days, exhausting his companions. Their progress was covered daily by the nation’s leading newspapers in often humorous reporting of the arduous trek and the daily casualties along the way. “10 Canal Hikers Still Survive on Fifth Day,” blared the Post on March 25, as though the group were on expedition to the unknown interior of Borneo or searching for the source of the Nile. Photographers and day hikers joined the group on various legs. Eight days later, on March 27, a mere nine members of the original group, the “Immortal Nine,” including Douglas, completed the 189-mile length, leading the Los Angeles Times to announce that the “Blister Brigade” had arrived in Washington.
(The “Immortal Nine” who finished the hike; Justice Douglas fourth from the right)
Though only Douglas and eight others finished the hike, the Justice had won his point. The “footsore” Estabrook and Pusey quickly penned an editorial suggesting a compromise to open some of the Canal’s area to cars, but also preserving much of it in its natural state. While it took nearly two more decades to ensure the Canal’s survival, Douglas’s hike was the critical turning point.
It also gave encouragement to other Washington-area conservation efforts, such as the campaign to turn the Great Falls of the Potomac and the remains of George Washington’s Patowmack Canal into a national historic site. That movement, which began in 1957 as a joint proposal by the Nature Conservancy, the Wildlife Management Institute, and the Fairfax County Park Authority to prevent suburban development on lands adjacent to the Falls, resulted in the National Park Service buying up land held by PEPCO, the Washington metropolitan electric utility, and forming a national park by 1966.
While treated humorously by the newspapers, the friendly battle between Douglas and the Post editors was anything but. In many ways, it was a microcosm of the growing pains that Washington, D.C., faced as it became a global capital. Washington grew rapidly during the 1940s, as first World War II and then the beginnings of the Cold War led to an expansion of government and an influx of new residents. In 1940, the civilian federal workforce was 699,000; by 1953, it had ballooned to 2,026,000, many of them in Washington. The population of the metropolitan region, which included the counties in Maryland and Virginia adjacent to the city, grew from 968,000 in 1940 to over 1.4 million in 1948, and by the end of 1955 would stand at 1.884 million, an increase of nearly a million people, and a doubling of the region’s population in just 15 years.
Washington’s topography was rapidly being transformed by the growth of suburbs to house the newcomers. New developments sprang up all over the region, as builders like Jack Kay in Montgomery County, Maryland and Robert Simon in Reston, Virginia, catered to the needs of the growing national capital region. Numerous studies throughout the 1950s and 1960s attempted to bring a coherence to metropolitan Washington’s urban and transportation planning, but growth outpaced most attempts to maintain an urban-nature balance. Acres of rolling farmland outside Washington soon were covered with tract housing, shopping centers, and roads, and by 1962 even the new Washington International Airport, named for former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.
Around the country, suburbs were blossoming, thanks to the spread of automobiles and soon the development of the interstate highway system. Between 1951 and 1955 federal planning was undertaken for a radial ring around Washington, what would become the Capital Beltway, its first section opening in 1961 and the last in 1964. In a feedback loop, more development pushed more roadway building plans, leading to more development plans. But as automobiles became ubiquitous, so grew the calls to open up undeveloped areas simply for pleasure motoring. Hence, the Post’s idea to pave the C&O Canal, for what seemed better than a 200-mile roadway through untouched areas along the Potomac River?
It may be difficult today to imagine anyone taking seriously the idea of paving over one of the most important historical sites in American history, but Douglas’s hike occurred in the days before historic preservation was as organized and respected an activity as it later became, and when nature conservancy was accepted on the grand scale, but less at the local level.
The first great historic conservation project was the rescue of George Washington’s home in 1858, by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association and its guiding spirit, Ann Pamela Cunningham, of South Carolina. Saving famous national monuments, such as Independence Hall, Abraham Lincoln’s Springfield home, or Fort McHenry, soon was widely supported, and after 1933, often done under the auspices of the National Park Service. But locations less identified with famous people or events, such as the C&O Canal, were more abstract in the public imagination. In the heady postwar growth period, it was not surprising that Congress and the major paper of record in Washington supported turning the old canal into a roadway. Changing opinion required an innovative strategy, like Douglas’s hiking challenge.
Similarly, conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt had long championed setting aside massive tracts of spectacular land, like Yellowstone and Yosemite, as national parks, most in remote areas where development was unlikely. But the C&O Canal was a much smaller, if elongated, area mostly within a growing urban corridor, making the case for saving it harder; much easier would be to turn it into a recreation area for day trips by automobile. Other similar areas were also at risk; in the case of the Great Falls of the Potomac, the proximity to fast-growing suburbs made the area adjacent to the falls attractive to developers.
Douglas was not the first to wage a battle in the capital to protect nature from untrammeled development. The 1901 McMillan Plan to improve the park system of the District of Columbia, which grew out of a Senate committee report, remained the major influence on Washington’s “monumental core” planning into the 21st century. Though the McMillan Plan was focused on the city center and did not deal with pristine areas like the C&O Canal or the Great Falls, it did set the precedent of attempting to ensure that growth in Washington would balance natural space with development.
Perhaps the most notable struggle to preserve nature in Washington was the long campaign to create Rock Creek Park, which begin soon after the Civil War. It took took nearly a quarter of a century, multiple bills in Congress, and the efforts of leading residents of the city like the philanthropists William W. Corcoran and Charles C. Glover, before succeeding in 1890. But even the setting aside of the park did not secure it from the damage of automobiles or the encroaching development along its flanks, which threatened to ruin vistas from inside the park. In 1915, former British Ambassador Lord James Bryce warned in an address to the Committee of One Hundred on the Development of Washington, D.C. (and later published in National Geographic Magazine), that “it is quite essential…that that tract of charming woodland should not be built upon,” since “[t]o Rock Creek there is nothing comparable in any capital city in Europe.”
In the District of Columbia, there had long been efforts to preserve both nature and history and incorporate them into a larger civic space that not only honored America’s past, but also reflected the growing importance of Washington as a global capital. In Washington proper, the National Capital Planning Commission (1924) and the Commission of Fine Arts (1910) both had played official roles in shaping the capital’s public space, ensuring the development of monumental architecture and saving commanding vistas in the spirit of the McMillan Plan. Other organizations, such as the Georgetown Citizens Assocation, which was founded in 1878, worked at the neighborhood level to try and maintain control over development or to commemorate local history.
Outside the city proper, though, there was no controlling authority nor overarching vision. Should civic space be created in the midst of wilderness, preventing development, and if so, how? The C&O Canal, like the Great Falls, combined unspoiled nature with historical significance. The canal was a major engineering feat, if not as grand as the Erie Canal, and though it never lived up to its promise, highlighting its history helped celebrate the progress of American power from the 19th century to the Cold War. As a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor noted of the Douglas expedition, “While they looked at the canal’s ‘sturdy old stone buildings’…other bulletins flooded Washington with reports of the devastation from the latest hydrogen weapon tested in the Pacific. Yet it was only 100 years since a canal was believed to be the last word in transportation.”
As much as Douglas treasured and hoped to preserve the unspoiled natural beauty of the canal, “a sanctuary where [a man] can commune with God and with nature,” it remained a man-made artifact, one whose history could be part of a public narrative about America’s past and its future. This connection between preservation and the nation’s history was laid out explicitly in the 1957 proposal to make the Great Falls a national historic site. Local preservationist C.J.S. Durham, who lauded the “history and cultural importance” of the Great Falls, argued that “[The Great Falls Park and Nature Preserve] would be an ideal place to show in situ the history of our country from the days of John Smith to our own times.”
Those areas around the capital like the C&O Canal and the Great Falls of the Potomac held both local and national significance. Their story was not just a Virginian one, but part of a larger, shared American past. Indeed, when both the C&O Canal and the Great Falls became national historic parks, they were not left as untouched wildnerness. Walking trails were cleared, detailed histories were written by National Park Service staff, historical signage was put up throughout the parks, and visitors centers were built to further explain their role in the capital’s and the nation’s history.
In dramatically, and good-naturedly, drawing attention to the capital’s endangered natural spaces, Justice Douglas not only helped save his beloved canal, he inaugurated another chapter in Washington’s delicate balancing of the growth America’s imperial capital required and the preservation and celebration of its past that it needed.
Now that you’ve read this essay, the National Park Service has an excellent article on Douglas’s hike.
