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Visit a section of river between Great Falls and Georgetown...
Great Falls
Claude Moore Colonial Farm
Glen Echo, Md.
Potomac Overlook Regional Park
Little Falls
Chain Bridge
Georgetown, Washington, D.C.
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Here the Potomac begins a precipitous drop toward the Coastal Plain. The river drops 60 feet in less than a mile and then travels through a deep gorge, flows over Little Falls then drops to the level of tidewater as it flows on to Georgetown.
While the C&O canal remains the best known canal on the Potomac, the Patowmack Company, headed by George Washington, made an earlier attempt at creating a navigable Potomac. Washington's company dealt with the challenges of Great Falls and Little Falls by creating skirting canals to take boats around each of these falls. Although never very successful, these canals made way for the later effort to create the C&O canal. Remains of the Great Falls skirting canal can still be seen today on the Virginia side at Great Falls Park.
Georgetown, where canal boats from the C&O were lowered down an incline plane and back into the Potomac, formed the first major port on the Potomac. This was as far up the river as truly seaworthy vessels could travel. Tobacco and other products brought down along the canal and railroad were transferred for final delivery up and down the coast and across the ocean to Europe. Later, the Aqueduct Bridge was constructed to carry canal boats over the Potomac to a canal on the Virginia side that led them on to the port of Alexandria.
Water for the District of Columbia water system is taken from the Potomac at Great Falls, where it enters the Washington Aqueduct. This structure, built in the 1860s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is still carrying much of the area's drinking water today. |
