Searching for the Canal Builders' Camps on the C&O Canal

Workers cutting a canal, an illustration for Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (McDonnell Bros., 1886)

The Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal is one of the most intact and impressive survivors of America's canal-building era. Built between 1828 and 1850, it runs 185 miles from Washington, D.C., to Cumberland, Maryland, to carry goods between the coal country of the Allegheny Mountains and the ports and industrial cities of the East. The laborers who built its dams, aqueducts and the Paw Paw Tunnel camped along the way — and archeologists went looking for those camps.

The workers

• Skilled tradesmen — carpenters and stonemasons — built the locks, aqueducts and culverts.
• The back-breaking digging of the canal bed was done by the lowest-paid laborers, with shovels, picks and wheelbarrows, often waist-deep in mud or water, 12 to 15 hours a day, sunup to sundown, in all weather. Injuries were common; maiming and death were far from rare.
• Most were Irish immigrants, with some Germans and native-born Americans. Enslaved people worked on the canal early on, but the practice had largely ended by the time construction reached the Blue Ridge, near present-day Hagerstown.
• From 1834 to 1840, the company saw at least ten major disturbances and near-constant labor unrest; ethnic groups — German against Irish, for example — often fought one another over their working and living conditions.

At day's end, workers went back to makeshift shanties at the worksite, often a bunkhouse shared by 15 to 20 men; some married men built huts for families who followed them along the line. Wages were low, and the company kept costs down to maximize investors' returns — so archeologists expected some trace of hundreds of people living for months in one place, but not clear remains of buildings.

Canal workers with horses and tools. NPS photo

Where they looked

Archeologists tested places where major works were built, re-examined old collections, and combed maps, newspapers, diaries and the C&O Canal Company's extensive records.

The Paw Paw Tunnel brickworks

The tunnel bypasses a stretch of the Potomac that meanders 5 times in 6 miles, and is lined with 7 to 11 layers of brick — about 5 million bricks.

Bricks then were often fired in clamps: molded, sun-dried bricks stacked in parallel rows about three bricks thick, with fuel — usually wood — in the gaps between; at about two feet high the rows were joined with brick arches, a brick structure built over them, and the outside sealed with tightly packed bricks to hold in the heat. The company planned to make the tunnel's bricks on site from local materials, but they proved too poor to use, and the brickworks were likely abandoned where they stood.

A brick clamp. NPS photo

Excavation found two carefully laid brick platforms about 2 feet down, one partly covered by a band of ash and charcoal about 2 feet wide — possibly the flues of the last clamps fired before the brickworks were abandoned in 1838. Nearby lay the foundation of the company office and store: three courses of brick under two layers of rough stone, a wall 70 feet long — a large building. Yet it held only a few cut nails, a sherd of whiteware and some bottle glass, although records say the contractor and some workers lived there.

Remains of a brick clamp; the dark streak is ash from the fire that baked the bricks. NPS photo

What the absence means

The camps were never found conclusively. The only firm archeological evidence of construction is the brick clamps and building foundations at the Paw Paw Tunnel; other sites yielded a handful of 1800s artifacts that could as easily have come from railroad workers, canal travelers or nearby farms.

Sometimes not finding something is the finding. The missing camps suggest the shanties were built with few resources, that the workers owned few durable goods — and, surprisingly, that the camps were kept fairly clean: trash from a hundred people over six months, if scattered and trampled, should leave a trace, but not if it was gathered into privy pits or dumps. The workers' hardship survives mainly in what they built — the canal itself.

Sources

Based on "Locating Workers' Camps on the C&O Canal," National Park Service, Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park; a work of the United States government in the public domain. The article's caption dates its engraving to 1864, long after the canal was finished, so the caption here gives only the illustration's source; it also spells the mountains "Allegany."