Even by Washington standards, this groundbreaking was auspicious: It was held on Independence Day. For the first time, the Marine Band performed "Hail to the Chief" for a living president. That president, John Quincy Adams, would be turning the first spadeful of dirt for the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal--the long-sought gateway to prosperity for the District of Columbia.

On that day in 1828, thousands joined a procession that had begun in the District and paraded slowly, by boat and by foot, to a spot on the Maryland bank of the Potomac just below Little Falls. Among those in the forefront was a portly Virginian named Charles Fenton Mercer, president of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Co., whose task it was to hand the symbolic spade to Adams.

As Mercer picked up "the consecrated instrument," reported the Daily National Intelligencer, "the sun shone out from behind a cloud," like a portent from Heaven. Turning to the president, Mercer prayed that God would "crown your labor with His blessing, and our work with immortality."

Adams took the spade and began to speak. He compared the fledgling United States to the empires of Assyria, Persia, Greece and Rome. He invoked the Constitution and the memory of George Washington. He cited man's duty to subdue the earth. Then he invited the multitudes to witness as he struck with his spade.

And hit a tree root.

He struck again, and again turned no dirt.

As the multitudes slowly comprehended what was happening, the president of the United States shed his jacket and started hacking at the soil.

Direct to the West
As portents go, Adams's predicament proved more reliable than the sun's timely cameo. The great groundbreaking of 1828 raised the hopes of almost everyone who cared about the District's fortunes, but the serial disappointments that attended the building of the C & O Canal warped the capital's economy and outlook well into the Industrial Age.

It seemed like such a good idea at the time. In the three decades Washington had been the seat of national power, the municipal fathers had had little luck developing sources of local wealth. The District economy depended on real estate sales, which were sporadic, and the federal payroll, which wasn't big enough to support the grand metropolis Washington was supposed to become. But beyond the Allegheny Mountains lay the vast resources of the wild West--the Ohio Territory. The federal government had a powerful interest in making sure that no foreigners beat Americans there. And the Potomac offered a more direct route to the unsettled West than any other river on the Eastern seaboard.

Not only that, but the District included the ports of Alexandria and Georgetown, plus the wannabe port of Washington. And running right through them all was the Potomac--the pipeline to profit! A broad band in a new national network! A great waterborne superhighway running right past the docks of the capital!

So what if the river was unnavigable above Georgetown?

As a young surveyor, George Washington had measured the Potomac's obstacles as well as its possibilities. In 1785 he led an enterprise that built a series of canals around the river's more obvious impediments, such as Great Falls. The builders subdued the earth, but not the Potomac: It was still a one-way highway. It still flooded in rain and lay low in drought. It wasn't dependable. But if the inspiration of George Washington wasn't enough--and in the 1820s, it might have been--the people of Washington had the example of New York.

In the previous decade, Gov. DeWitt Clinton had been ridiculed for proposing the digging of a 363-mile trench between Buffalo and Albany, linking Lake Erie and the Hudson River. Still, he got his way--and set off a nationwide canal-digging binge even before the Erie Canal opened in 1825 and started making Manhattan stinking rich.

Charles Fenton Mercer, a congressman from Loudoun County, was passionate in his belief in such "internal improvements." Infrastructure, along with banking, education and establishing colonies in West Africa for free African Americans, was part of the broad vision he had of a productive, peaceable and industrialized (if largely white) America.

He also had a farm near the Potomac (on the site of the modern-day village of Aldie, which took its name from his house) and financial troubles that might be eased by commercial development on the river. And he served on House committees that had jurisdiction over roads and canals and the District of Columbia.

He was a natural champion for a Potomac canal. In 1822 and '23, Mercer helped organize, and then quietly dominated, a canal convention in Washington; that convention proposed digging a 360-mile ditch linking the Potomac and Ohio rivers. In 1824 the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Co. received a charter from Virginia. Congress, still somewhat wary of federal involvement in internal improvements, confirmed the charter the next year. So did Maryland. So did Pennsylvania, in 1826.

By 1827, the canal company was soliciting buyers for stock. The cities of Georgetown and Alexandria subscribed to $250,000 apiece. Washington anted up $1 million. Congress allowed them all to borrow the money.

At the end of June 1828, the Chesapeake & Ohio Co. was formally organized, and the stockholders elected Mercer president. That July Fourth, the crowd began to cheer President Adams, now coatless, as he finally carved a hole in the earth. On the same day, there was cheering in Baltimore, too--at the groundbreaking for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. Which was also headed for the Ohio Valley.

Roadblocks
At the time, the canal backers didn't perceive much of a threat: In 1828 the steam engine was an unproven technology, and cutting a railbed over hills and through forests was almost as much work as digging a canal. It would take a few years before steam power started to displace the horse, but the canal's moment began to pass almost instantly.

This was partly the consequence of good intentions: Under Mercer's leadership, the C & O Canal Co. set out to build the perfect canal, believing it would save on repairs and maintenance later. Though they had no engineering experience, Mercer and his board of directors reserved for themselves final say on even the most technical of decisions.

Meddling management was only one of the canal's problems. Washington, Georgetown and Alexandria feuded over where, exactly, the canal should end in the District. Since Washington held more stock, it had more clout: The canal would go through Georgetown to Rock Creek below what is now K Street, and on to Tiber Creek, which crossed what is now the Mall. From there, the river barges could take the Washington Canal along what is now Constitution Avenue, around Capitol Hill and over to the Anacostia, where they could meet oceangoing vessels. Alexandria would have to build an aqueduct over the Potomac and a seven-mile canal down to its wharves.

Still, the digging for the C & O Canal proceeded--fitfully, as the company's annual reports make plain. Building materials were hard to come by; laborers, too, were rare, and hard to keep sober; there was trouble securing rights of way; the diggers, like Adams before them, kept running into harder ground than expected. It was September 1831 before the first 23 miles of the canal opened, from Georgetown to Seneca.

By then there was litigation: The C & O and the B & O were locked in a battle royal over the right of way on the narrow bank at Point of Rocks. After a costly construction delay, the C & O won its case in 1832--the same year a cholera epidemic depleted the workers' ranks.

By then there were financial problems, too: Stock subscriptions were going uncollected, and the canal was producing little toll revenue. The city of Washington, for one, was in danger of defaulting on the loans it took out to buy its C & O stock and improve the Washington Canal. The first of several federal bailouts ensued.

And then, finally, there was politics. Congress and the states of Virginia and Maryland lost their enthusiasm as they began to perceive the canal as a strictly Washington project. In 1828, a few months after the C & O groundbreaking, the voters elected Andrew Jackson to the presidency--a man noted for his hostility to federal sponsorship of internal improvements generally, to the C & O Canal specifically and to Mercer personally.

By 1833, Jackson had let it be known that he would veto any bill appropriating federal money for the canal as long as Mercer was leading the enterprise. When the C & O stockholders met that June, they replaced him with John Eaton, a noted Friend of Andrew.

Not that it made much difference. The canal went west mile by mile: to Harper's Ferry in 1833, to Hancock in 1839, each section opening as it was finished, each year's revenue frustrating the company's hopes. Money problems and the boring of the Paw Paw Tunnel--through 3,118 feet of rock--slowed progress, but by 1850 the canal stretched 184.5 miles, all the way to Cumberland. Where the railroad had passed through eight years earlier.

Demise
By then, the Chesapeake & Ohio Co. had had enough. It had already spent $22 million, or about four times the original estimate, to produce a trench that featured 74 lift locks, seven dams, 11 aqueducts and assorted culverts and waste weirs. The canal would stop at Cumberland, 180 miles short of the Ohio, its name now as dated as its mule-drawn boats.

Charles Fenton Mercer was gone by then, having resigned from Congress in 1839. He moved to Kentucky and spent much of his energy on the colonization movement. He also traveled in Europe before returning to Virginia to die, in 1858, of cancer.

The canal he got started did carry cargo--tons of it, grain and lumber and flour and, most profitably, coal--but never enough, especially after the railroad figured out more efficient ways of shipping coal. Georgetown and Alexandria saw their fortunes dwindle, and the grand port of Washington never came to be: Its own canal silted over, and even with federal help the city couldn't keep it dredged.

For four decades, C & O shipping supported the canal boat owners more than the canal itself. In 1889, in the same season as the Johnstown Flood, the Potomac let loose and wiped out the canal. The C & O Co. couldn't afford to fix it and, facing foreclosure, sold out--to the B & O Railroad. As the flood waters receded, Alexandria no longer belonged to the District (Congress had handed it back to Virginia in 1846) and Georgetown was pretty much finished as a port. In economic terms, wrote historian Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington was sadder, wiser and back where it started: "The consensus ran that service to the federal government and to the host of yearly visitors offered the national city a sound basis for her economy."

The B & O ran the canal until March 1924, when another flood hit. After letting the ditch lie drained for 14 years, the railroad traded it to the federal government to satisfy a $2 million debt. In the 1950s, the feds seriously entertained the idea of paving the canal over for a scenic parkway. Various forces--including, most prominently, Associate Justice William O. Douglas of the Supreme Court--persuaded them instead to create the national historical park and world-class tourist attraction the canal is today. But that's a 20th-century story.