tys crossroads 2010: Williamsport to Harpers Ferry-41 miles

Today we biked about 41 miles to Harpers Ferry. Our stay in Williamsport was not the greatest as there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do in this town. OK, other than the ice cream shop and Tony’s where we had a beer. Our B & B was also not the greatest, so we were glad to be leaving and got a reasonably early start at about 7:40 a.m. I am quite sure that at Williamsport, that our bed was the WORST I have ever slept in. So we were glad to get on the road.

Today the scenery was quite pretty and we saw a lot of nice campgrounds and recreational areas along the canal. We saw a lot more people than we saw yesterday. In fact we saw a cyclist sleeping on a picnic table at 10 a.m. over 2 hours after we started. Do you spell moron with a capital M???

I am posting a shot of one of the eleven aqueducts which is where the canal went OVER the water. You can see the rightmost canal wall in the background. These are pretty cool feats of engineering and are in remarkably good shaped for being almost 180 years old. There are numerous viaducts (150 or too many to count) where streams are channeled under the canal as well. The Potomac river is notorious for flooding as you are channeling the water from the entire surrounding mountain ranges and combining the water of the upper and lower Potomac, the Cacapon and the Shenandoah (at Harpers Ferry) along with numerous creeks.

We also had a stretch of a few miles where the canal boats went into the Potomac which was dammed and created what was known as the “big slack”. The "little slack" was the day before. The cliff walls are solid rock and the engineers building the canal decided that this would have been too much of a task to carve a canal out of solid rock for 3 miles. You might recall that dynamite (invented by Alfred Nobel of the Nobel peace prize) was not invented until 1867. They dammed upstream and downstream to control the water level which not only created a stable area for navigation but also created a steady water supply to feed the canal. The picture of me on my bike has the downstream dam in the backbround. Remember the canal was really almost outdated when it was completed as railroads were introduced in the early 1800s and by had supplanted the canal by 1850s. The canal was built in 1835 and never really paid for itself. Today, the Federal government would just subsidize it (read passenger rail) and we would still ship goods on the canal under prevailing wage. I hope you all get the humor in this.

We also biked very close to the Antietam battlefield which was one of the three battles fought in Lee’s Maryland campaign. Lee was heavily outnumbered by McClellan (2 to 1) and had his army spit (Jackson was at Harpers Ferry) but despite finding a copy of Lee's plans McClellan didn't capitalize on this and the Maryland campaign was a draw. McClellan didn't concentrate his forces. Subsequently he was sacked by Lincoln. This all occurred in 1862. It was amazing that Lee was able to escape with his army as it is pretty basic military strategy not to fight a superior force with your back against the river.

In 1863 Lee undertook his second attempt at invading the North and we all know what happened at Gettysburg. This time he went up againts Meade who had replaced Hooker who had replaced McLellan or something like that. After his retreat, Lee tried to cross the Potomac (remember he had to get back to Virginai). At Shepherdstown, we saw the area where Lee had to wait a week after Gettysburg to ford his army as the Potomac was flooded from the storms of July 4^th (Gettysberg was July 1, 2, 3 of 1864) that he couldn’t cross and the Union army just dawdled and didn’t take advantage of the situation.

Finally we arrived at Harpers Ferry where the river is very shallow, wide, rocky and fast moving. An ideal place for tubing which was in abundance on Sunday when we went through. To get to Harpers Ferry I had to lug our bikes up a steep spiral staircase where we then crossed a pedestrian bridge to the other side. Neat, but a lot of work.

Harpers Ferry was heavily contested in the Civil War changing hands 8 times. Prior to the battle at Antietam the Union surrendered Harpers Ferry (12,000 plus troops) which was the largest U.S. surrender until Bataan. Antietam ironically was the bloodiest battle in U.S. history up until that point.

Lots of history and not many people, but lots of pictures. Hope you enjoyed today's history lesson.