on appointed
to examine the affairs of the company reported "that the floods and
freshets nevertheless gave the only navigation that was enjoyed." As
for the road between the Potomac and the Cheat or the Monongahela, the
records at hand do not show that the money voted for that enterprise had
been used.

The Potomac Company nevertheless had accomplished something: it had
acquired an asset of the greatest value--a right of way up the strategic
Potomac Valley; and it had furnished an object lesson to men in other
States who were struggling with a similar problem. When, as will soon be
apparent, New York men undertook the improvement of the Mohawk waterway
there was no pattern of canal construction for them to follow in America
except the inadequate wooden locks erected along the Potomac. It is
interesting to know that Elkanah Watson, prominent in inland navigation
to the North, went down from New York in order to study these wooden
locks and that New Yorkers adopted them as models, though they changed
the material to brick and finally to stone.

Pennsylvania had been foremost among the colonies in canal building, for
it had surveyed as early as 1762 the first lock canal in America, from
near Reading on the Schuylkill to Middletown on the Susquehanna. Work,
however, had to be suspended when Pontiac's Rebellion threw the inland
country into a panic. But the enterprise of Maryland and Virginia in
1785 in developing the Potomac aroused the Pennsylvanians to renewed
activity. The Society for Promoting the Improvement of Roads and Inland
Navigation set forth a programme that was as broad as the Keystone State
itself. Their ultimate object was to capture the trade of the Great
Lakes. "If we turn our view," read the memorial which the Society
presented to the Legislature, "to the immense territories connected with
the Ohio and Mississippi waters, and bordering on the Great Lakes,
it will appear... that our communication with those vast countries
(considering Fort Pitt as the port of entrance upon them) is as easy
and may be rendered as cheap, as to any other port on the Atlantic tide
waters."

Pennsylvania, lying between Virginia and New York, occupied a peculiar
position. Her Susquehanna Valley stretched northwest--not so directly
west as did the Potomac on the south and the Mohawk on the north. This
more northerly trend led these early Pennsylvania promoters to believe
that, while they might "only have a share in the trade o