By Ken Mammarella
Contributing Writer

The Chesapeake & Delaware Canal is more than 14-mile shortcut across the Delmarva Peninsula.

“It’s an important maritime corridor,” said Stephen Rochette, spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which owns the canal and the bridges that cross it. “We work hard to maintain it.”

Traffic today includes 1,500 to 2,000 barges a year – motor vehicles are the most common cargo, supplanting petroleum products and coal as economic drivers – and even more pleasure craft. Ships between the Port of Baltimore and points north save 300 miles by using the canal, and it’s generally estimated that 40% of the traffic to and from that port goes through the canal. The port made big news in March when a cargo ship hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge, temporarily closing the port.

From Chesapeake City, Maryland, the Corps’ marine traffic controllers “keep things flowing smoothly, efficiently and, above all, safely,” a 2015 documentary on What’s Up? Media noted. Corps operations also include regular dredging of the canal and its approaches and upkeep of the bridges.

Over the centuries, all that dredging has exposed a lot fossils, most famously the pen-shaped belemnite, which is Delaware’s state fossil. However, “most of those spoils are no longer accessible [to fossil hunters] due to the construction of a new bridge and a bicycle path, riprap deposits, use of the spoils for barrow and returning vegetation,” according tot he Natural History Society of Maryland.

The canal is also important culturally. Just like the Mason-Dixon line symbolizes cultural differences between the northern and southern parts of the United States, the canal does the same for Delaware. Upstate is more urban and faster-paced, and downstate is more rural. But growth in coastal Sussex County is redefining what it means to live “below the canal” (or in Lower Delaware or Slower Lower Delaware, as some say).

Key dates in canal history

From the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Edward J. Ludwig III’s “The Chesapeake & Delaware Canal 150th Anniversary: Gateway to Paradise,” David A. Berry’s “A History of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal,” Maryland Public Television’s “The Chesapeake & Delaware Canal: Gateway to the World.”and other research.

1661: Augustine Herman is the first European to suggest building a canal across the peninsula. Later supporters include polymath Benjamin Franklin. 

1802: The Chesapeake & Delaware Canal Co. is formed. It surveys various routes, with the top two running from the Elk River to New Castle and from Back Creek to St. Georges Creek. The company – partly backed by three states and the federal government – starts digging an eventually unneeded feeder canal in 1804-05. They run out of money and make a dozen fruitless appeals to Congress for bailouts. 

1822: The canal company orders more surveys (there would be about 30 over the decades) and decides on the current route, 10 feet deep, 66 feet wide at the waterline and 35 feet wide at the bottom, with four locks. Surveyor John Randel Jr. dismisses concerns about the difficulty of cutting through an 80-foot-high ridge (near the Summit North Marina) and spongy soil near Newbold’s Landing (now Delaware City). He later buys Bohemia Village (renamed Chesapeake City in 1839) and leads building the eastern end of the canal. He clashes with management, and his contract is suspended. He sues.

1824: On April 15, digging of the canal starts. A bridge over the canal at St. Georges opens in 1826.

1829: The canal officially opens on Oct. 17, at a cost $2.5 million, or $165,000 per linear mile, eight times the linear-mile cost of the Erie Canal. That uncooperative marshy soil had added $1 million to the cost and delayed work several years. Tolls are set for 206 products, from a penny for a bushel of grain to $12 for a bushel of fresh fish. Fines authorized in 1832 end rampant toll fraud. Randel sells his village. The canal company, much to its later regret, does not charge individual passengers. 

1830: The canal company marks $51,000 in revenue from about 5,300 boats, but it would deliver a dividend to stockholders in only 11 of the next 116 years.

1831: The New Castle & Frenchtown Railroad opens just to the north. Companies that ferry people try to counter the competition and petition the canal to allow steam-powered boats, which had been banned because the wakes from fast boats eroded canal banks. The railroad, the canal company and steamboat companies argue over revenues for more than a decade.

1833: A storm damages the banks so much that the canal closes for 10 days. Major landslides follow in 1834, 1837 and 1839. The canal closes for three weeks in 1837 because of problems with the locks.

1834: Randel wins a $226,000 judgment from the canal company, which Berry calls “the largest award for unliquidated damages up to that point in the United States legal system.” The company ignores the ruling. Randel files more lawsuits and sets up his own tollbooth in Delaware City. He eventually receives money from the canal company.

1872: The canal company marks its best year in cargo: 1.3 million tons. Tugboats and mules (teams of three to five, plodding on the north bank) take five to six hours to tow boats from end to end.

1873: Heavy rains in August and the collapse of its largest reservoir close the canal for two months. 

1894: The federal government asks the Corps to study various routes for a sea-level canal. 

1906: The Angus Commission in 1906 recommends that the United States buy the canal for no more than $2,514,289.70. It does, for that amount in 1919, and removes the tolls. 

1926: Edna Ferber publishes “Show Boat,” following research of the James Adams Floating Theatre on the Chesapeake Bay and into the canal. The novel becomes a hit on Broadway and as a movie.

1927: The canal is rebuilt without locks. The $10 million project makes it 12 feet deep and 90 feet wide. The eastern entrance goes two miles south to deeper water (but still marshy land) at Reedy Point. In 1933, the corps starts another expansion (27 feet deep and 250 feet wide). “Still, the canal was not big enough and between 1938 and 1950, eight ships collided with bridges,” the Corps writes. 

1942: On July 28, the Franz Klasen hits the lift bridge at Chesapeake City, closing the canal. It’s wartime, and people photographing the ship – carrying six anti-aircraft guns and lots of ammo – have their film confiscated. The Corps sets up ferries, which run until 1949, when the new bridge opens.

1952: On May 15, the F.L. Hayes, carrying 640,000 gallons of gasoline, collides with the freighter Barbara Lykes. The Hayes explodes, closing the canal for 103 days until the wreckage is cleared.

1954: Congress authorizes $100 million for another expansion (35 feet deep and 450 feet wide). The work is completed in the 1970s.

1965: The lock complex in Chesapeake City is declared a national historic landmark. In 1968, the Corps opens a museum in the original lock pump house. The replica Bethel Bridge Lighthouse near the museum exemplifies the lighthouse that used to warn vessels of locks and bridges prior to 1927. Both Chesapeake City and Delaware City have districts on the National Register of Historic Places.

1975: Chesapeake City starts an event celebrating the canal, variously called Canal Day, Canal Days and CanalFest. On the water, partying is unsanctioned and raucous. The official event ends in 2012.

1980: Delaware City starts its own event celebrating itself, called Delaware City Day.

2013: The towpath becomes the Michael N. Castle C&D Canal Trail for pedestrians, bicyclists and sometimes equestrians. Trailheads are at Delaware City, Biddles Point, St. Georges and Lums Pond State Park, going on to the Ben Cardin trail and a trailhead at Chesapeake City. The Delaware Division of Fish & Wildlife manages 5,000 protected acres on both banks for hunting, fishing and recreation.

2014: The canal becomes part of the National Park Service’s Network to Freedom, a listing of places that helped enslaved people escape to freedom. One of the best-documented of these efforts occurred in 1856, when Harriet Tubman led a woman named Tilly from Baltimore north to her fiance.