, however, enough of them to have stalled it to
date. It is not yet dead, for it emerges in each new discussion of the
city's water situation. It will not be dead until the metropolitan water
problem, short-term and long-term both, has found a full satisfactory
solution in other terms.

Our feeling remains unchanged since the publication of our _Interim
Report_: that when all factors are weighed and future uncertainties are
taken into account, Seneca should not be built at this time. If the
price in money would not be high in relation to immediate "market"
advantages gained, the permanent price, in river and countryside and
those other intangibles that are getting to have more and more weight in
men's minds year by year, would be heavy.

The full main stem Potomac, carrying the water from the combined North
and South Branches and the Shenandoah and the other upper tributaries
down through the Blue Ridge water gap and across the rolling Piedmont
and the Fall Line, is at its most typical in the 39 miles from Harpers
Ferry to Great Falls. Seneca as originally proposed would inundate 35
miles of this stretch, together with islands and bottomlands, forests of
big hardwoods, meadows and productive fields, and that much-used
segment of the publicly owned C. & O. Canal, with the trail along its
wooded towpath. Even reduced in size and designed as strictly a water
supply structure, it would have many of the same effects. There is
special and tranquil beauty in this piece of the river, which makes a
fine float trip and is much fished, as well as a lot of historical
significance dating back to the Senecas and the Piscataways and before.
Here these things are not forgotten and removed from men's reach but are
available to metropolitans who go to the trouble to seek them out, as
many do. Nor is there anything else around to take their exact or even
approximate place if they were gone.

It has been pointed out that if the metropolis grows according to
predictions, a major part of that growth is going to be upriver, and the
main stem of the Potomac will have the same relationship to the
metropolis of the future that Rock Creek has to the Washington of today.
Thus the decision that is made about the main stem in our generation is
similar to the decision that planners had to make about Rock Creek
three-quarters of a century or more ago. Those planners decided
magnificently well, bequeathing to the future an urban stream and park
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