Qualla: Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park

Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bonnachoven, CC0. On July 4, 1828, two ground-breaking ceremonies happened the same day in two different states. In Baltimore, the first stone of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was laid. Two hundred and fifty miles south, on the bank of the Potomac at Little Falls, President John Quincy Adams turned the first shovel of dirt for the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. The race for the West was on. The railroad and the canal would both head into the Appalachian gap, both following the Potomac valley, both trying to reach the Ohio River first. The canal lost. By the time it crawled into Cumberland twenty-two years later, the railroad had already been there for eight. But the canal was built anyway, and it ran for seventy-four years, and what remains today is one of the longest, narrowest national parks in the country.

Image: Bonnachoven | CC0

Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park: The Slow Path West

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bonnachoven, CC0. The canal was 184.5 miles long, six feet deep, and sixty to eighty feet wide. It used seventy-four lift locks to climb 605 feet from sea level at Georgetown to the Cumberland terminus. It crossed eleven aqueducts and pulled water from seven dams. Its most ambitious engineering, t...

Image: Bonnachoven | CC0

Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park: A Thin Green Ribbon

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zeete, CC BY-SA 4.0. The park is a thin band of green along the Maryland bank of the Potomac, never more than a few hundred yards wide, sometimes only the width of the canal bed itself. Twelve thousand acres in total. The towpath is wide, sandy, and almost completely level, which makes it one of the ...

Image: Zeete | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park: Great Falls

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ilovecollegepark, CC0. The signature destination of the park is Great Falls, about fifteen miles upstream from Georgetown. Here the Potomac drops seventy-six feet through a complex of small cataracts and rapids in less than a mile, then funnels through Mather Gorge below. The Olmsted Island Bridges Tra...

Image: Ilovecollegepark | CC0

Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park: Living Edge of the Mid-Atlantic

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bonnachoven, CC0. One of the canal park's less obvious distinctions is its biodiversity. The Park Service considers it among the most biologically diverse units in the entire National Park System. The Potomac cuts a continuous corridor across multiple physiographic provinces, from the tidewater Co...

Image: Bonnachoven | CC0

Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park: Visiting the Length

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kevin Smith, CC BY-SA 3.0. Five drive-in campsites are scattered along the route at ten dollars a night, with basic tent pads, grills, chemical toilets, and potable water. Thirty free hiker-biker sites are spaced roughly every five miles between Swain's Lock at mile 16.6 and Evitts Creek at mile 180.1, eac...

Image: Kevin Smith | CC BY-SA 3.0