Excerpt from Chesapeake and Ohio Canal: A Guide to Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park, Maryland, District of Columbia, and West Virginia Looking back, canals of the period made roads of that day obsolete, but many canals were in turn made obsolete by railroads. On July 4, 1828, President John Quincy Adams turned the first shovelful of dirt on the canal. On that very day Marylander Charles Car roll was similarly launching construction of the Bal timore and Ohio Railroad in Baltimore, Maryland. The railroad beat the canal to the Cumberland coalfields and soon reached the Ohio River, but the canal was never completed beyond Cumberland. President Adams' shovel struck roots, then rocks, symbolizing the obstacles that would confront the canal builder. The ordinarily stiff and formal Presi dent took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and tried again. The Fourth of July crowd cheered. Pres ident Adams would call this the greatest moment of his life. He had begun a project that would cost invest ors $14 million, a sum that represented then the same percentage of Gross National Product the Federal Government would one day spend to put a man on the moon. As you jog, backpack, or bike the tow path from Cumberland to Washington today, the cost strikes you as a bargain many times over. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.