Existing comment:
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. |