BGuthrie Photos: VA -- McLean -- Great Falls Park

VA -- McLean -- Great Falls Park:

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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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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. GFALVA_040424_076.JPG: Head of Canal: Here, river water enters the Great Falls portion of the Patowmack Canal. To your left [where the smooth water turns rough], you can see the rock wall (wing dam) built out into the river to funnel as much water as possible into the canal during low water. From here, a trail parallels the canal most of the way to where it rejoins the river 3/4 mile downstream.
2. GFALVA_040424_209.JPG: Mill Site: The stonewall here is all that remains of a mill erected in the 1790's by Samuel Briggs. It was unusual in that its millrace was fed from the canal, rather than directly from the river.
3. GFALVA_040424_213.JPG: The Patowmack Canal 1785-1828 This canal, skirting the 76-foot drop of the Great Falls of the Potomac, was the most demanding and complex of the five canals built by the Patowmack Company. The company was founded by George Washington on May 17, 1785 to improve the Potomac River for access and trade with the western frontier. The agreement that was developed between Maryland and Virginia to share the river for their common purpose led to further meetings -- Annapolis (1786) and Philadelphia (1787) and to [the] drafting of the U.S. Constitution.
4. GFALVA_040424_250.JPG: Margot Lebow and Bruce Guthrie @ Great Falls
5. GFALVA_040424_270.JPG: (Margot Lebow's standing in front of the guard gate which stopped the water from entering the canal. The holding basin is the area behind me as I'm taking this photo. You can see the first lock in the distance.) Holding Basin Since entering the woods, you have been walking through what was the holding basin of the Patowmack Canal. Water held here by wooden gates was used to fill the locks for boats locking through.
6. GFALVA_040424_281.JPG: This is the first of the locks
7. GFALVA_040424_293.JPG: There are three locks in the distance as the topography drops rapidly
8. GFALVA_040424_298.JPG: You can see there are more locks down the crevasse which was built by hand using black powder.
9. GFALVA_040424_306.JPG: Note the rock caught in the roots of the tree
10. GFALVA_040424_351.JPG: These were giant hornets
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AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Wikipedia Description: Great Falls Park
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Great Falls Park is a small National Park Service (NPS) site in Virginia, United States. Situated on 900 acres (3.65 km�) along the banks of the Potomac River, the park is a disconnected but integral part of the George Washington Memorial Parkway. The Great Falls of the Potomac River are near the northern boundary of the park, as are the remains of the Patowmack Canal, the first canal in the United States that used locks to raise and lower boats.

History:

Native American petroglyphs have been discovered within the park on cliffs overlooking Difficult Run.

The Patowmack Canal, which George Washington partially funded, was a one-mile (1.6 km) bypass canal that began operating in 1785 to give small barges the opportunity to skirt around the falls and to distribute manufactured goods upstream and raw materials downsteam. The park visitor center has the bottom portions of two wooden canal lock gates excavated in the 1980s from the canal. The gates survived from at least the 1830s and were found during restoration projects on stonework which were erected for the canal locks. Stone mason marks found on the stones are unique to each artisan and are identical to some found in foundation stones of the White House and the U.S. Capitol.

During the construction of the canal, blasting powder, which at the time was essentially gunpowder, was used to blast through solid rocks. This is one of the first known examples of blasting powder being used for engineering purposes anywhere in the world. The canal was never a profitable enterprise. With the completion of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal on the opposite side of the river, and the oncoming age of railroads, the project was abandoned in 1830. The canal is a Civil Engineering Landmark as well as a Virginia Historic Landmark. Along the trails, the ruins of the small town of Matildaville can also be found.

Between 1906 and 1932, the Great Falls and Old Dominion R ...More...
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Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (VA -- McLean -- Great Falls Park) directly related to this one: [Display ALL photos on one page]:
- 2018_VA_Great_FallsVA: VA -- McLean -- Great Falls Park (75 photos from 2018)
- 2012_VA_Great_FallsVA: VA -- McLean -- Great Falls Park (88 photos from 2012)
- 2003_VA_Great_FallsVA: VA -- McLean -- Great Falls Park (24 photos from 2003)
- 1991_VA_Great_FallsVA: VA -- McLean -- Great Falls Park (24 photos from 1991)
Sort of Related Pages: Still more pages here that have content somewhat related to this one :
- 2018_VA_Great_FallsVAVC: VA -- McLean -- Great Falls Park -- Visitor Center (104 photos from 2018)
- 2003_VA_Great_FallsVAVC: VA -- McLean -- Great Falls Park -- Visitor Center (2 photos from 2003)
- 2012_VA_Great_FallsVAVC: VA -- McLean -- Great Falls Park -- Visitor Center (14 photos from 2012)
Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [Natural Beauty] [Park (National Park Service)]
2004 photos: Equipment this year: I bought two Fujifilm S7000 digital cameras. While they produced excellent images, I found all of the retractable-lens Fuji models had a disturbing tendency to get dust inside the lens. Dark blurs would show up on the images and the camera had to be sent back to the shop in order to get it fixed. I returned one of the cameras when the blurs showed up in the first month. I found myself buying extended warranties on cameras. Trips this year: (1) Margot and I went off to Scotland for a few days, my first time overseas. (2) I went to Hawaii on business (such a deal!) and extended it, spending a week in Hawaii and another in California. (3) I went to Tennessee to man a booth and extended it to go to my third Fan Fair country music festival. Number of photos taken this year: 110,000.
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