Potomac Company
The Potomac Company (spelled variously as Patowmack, Potowmack, Potowmac, and Compony) was created in 1785 to make improvements to the Potomac River in order to improve its navigability. The Potomac Company built five skirting canals around the major falls. When completed it allowed boats and rafts to float downstream towards Georgetown, a major port of the time on the Potomac River, now in the District of Columbia. George Washington was its first president, as well as an investor in the company . Notably, the George Washington University was founded, in part, with fifty shares of the company donated by Washington. Tobias Lear, Washington's personal secretary, was its chairman for a period. Other principals of the company included Thomas Johnson of Maryland.[1]
While slim boats called bateaux could be poled up-river in even the shallowest of waters, they could not traverse the fall line, the area where an upland region (continental bedrock) and a coastal plain (coastal alluvia) meet, typically in waterfalls.
One of the major constructions of the Potomac Company was the Patowmack Canal. A major engineering feet of the time, the Potomack Canal permitted boats to navigate around Great Falls, where the Potomac River drops a treacherous 75 feet through the unnavigable Mather Gorge.
After 21 years, the Potomack Canal was later sold, along with the other assets of the Potomac Company to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company, which built a canal on the opposite, Maryland side of the Potomac River.
The Potomac Company [1], an investment bank based in Philadelphia, is not related in any way to the original Potomac Company referenced above.
References
- ^ George Washington (1905). Washington and the West: Being George Washington's Diary of September, 1784. The Century Co. p. 187.
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