BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Mall -- Lockkeepers House (Washington City Canal House)

DC -- Mall -- Lockkeepers House (Washington City Canal House):

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[1] WCANAL_970810_01.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[2] WCANAL_970810_02.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[3] WCANAL_970810_04.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. WCANAL_970810_01.JPG: Lock Keeper's House When Washington DC was founded, the Tiber Creek flowed down from Maryland and had made much of Washington DC a murky marsh. To try to fix this, the Tiber Canal was constructed between 1810 and 1815. The canal was built to make the land itself more managable and to form a route for transportation. It flowed from the Potomac River (which came up to where the Washington Monument was being built), past the Ellipse, down the present location of the Mall, and around the Capitol, and then back into the Potomac River. The northern end here corresponded to where the C&O Canal ended. By the mid-1850's, railroads had made the canal obsolete and it had turned into a muddy open sewer. It was finally covered over by Boss Shepherd in the 1870's. This building, however, was built in the mid-1830's, during the hey-day of the Canal. Barges stopped here for inspection and for transferring goods between the Tiber Canal and the C&O Canal. It is stilled labeled "Weighing Station for the Washington Canal" and is used to store landscaping equipment by the National Park Service.
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Wikipedia Description: Washington City Canal
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Washington City Canal operated from 1815 until the mid-1850s in Washington, D.C. The canal connected the Anacostia River, called the "Eastern Branch" at that time, to Tiber Creek, the Potomac River, and later the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (C&O). The canal fell into disuse in the late 19th century and the city government covered over or filled in various sections.

History

Early planning and development

In the early years of the United States there was great interest among political leaders in building canals to support and stimulate economic development. Construction of a canal to run across the city of Washington was supported by local leaders, both in business and government. The plan was to connect the Eastern Branch, which was navigable into Maryland, with the Potomac, which was seen as a gateway to the West. President George Washington had founded the Potowmack Company in 1785 to improve navigation on the Potomac.

Pierre (Peter) Charles L'Enfant, in designing a master plan for the development of the capital city, supported construction of a canal between Eastern Branch and Tiber Creek. To raise funds for canal construction, lotteries were conducted in 1796, but these efforts were unsuccessful. There was little additional work done until 1802, when Congress granted a charter for the Washington Canal Company. A small amount of construction was started, but obtaining major financing for the canal continued to be difficult.

Congress created a new canal company in 1809 and authorized capitalization of $100,000. A groundbreaking ceremony in southeast Washington, attended by President James Madison and other officials, took place on May 2, 1810. Construction was delayed by the War of 1812 and resumed in 1815.

Canal opening and operation

The canal formally opened in late 1815. The canal route began at the Eastern Branch, near the Washington Navy Yard and proceeded north and northwes ...More...
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (DC -- Mall -- Lockkeepers House (Washington City Canal House)) directly related to this one: [Display ALL photos on one page]:
- 2022_DC_WCCanal: DC -- Mall -- Lockkeepers House (Washington City Canal House) (88 photos from 2022)
- 2019_DC_WCCanal: DC -- Mall -- Lockkeepers House (Washington City Canal House) (8 photos from 2019)
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Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [(NPS) C&O Canal NHP] [Display ALL (NPS) C&O Canal NHP photos] [(NPS) Natl Mall Parks] [Natural Beauty] [Park (National Park Service)] [Transportation (Water)]
1997 photos: Since 1984, I've lived in Silver Spring, Maryland. From 1981 to 2002, photos were taken using a Pentax ME Super camera. From 1989 to 2002, I was doing all pictures as prints (instead of slides which I had grown up on). In 1997, at the age of 40, my photo obsession began and I started taking thousands of photos per year. In September, 2002, I switched to digital cameras and the number of photos exploded. Image quality is going to be variable because these are scans of slides and/or prints. The images shown here were scanned in two phases. In the early years of the website, I rescanned a selection of pre-digital images, all at fairly low quality settings. During the COVID pandemic, I launched the Great Rescanning Effort, rescanning ALL of my pre-digital images from various media (prints, slides, negatives, etc) at higher resolution and quality settings. Mutilple versions of images -- some from the initial scannning phase, some from prints, some from slides/negatives -- were posted so there are frequently duplicate images on the same page. At some point, I hope to have time to do a final review and get rid of the duplicates but that'll have to wait until all of the pre-digital images are finally posted. Trips this year: North Carolina (Dad), Florida (Mom), using a time share in Arkansas to visit Civil War sites in Missouri, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Civil War became my excuse to see places I'd never been to in my life and it was a great motivator for 20 years or so.
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