Free SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) by Edward A. Stabler Page B

him as he stood
on the stone wall of Lock 20, midway between the gates. Vin and
Nicky walked their bikes within earshot. Vin noticed that Lock 20
was well preserved, probably because it was used for
demonstrations. Like all the other locks he’d seen, its upstream
gates were closed and downstream gates open, leaving it with
thigh-deep water.
    The ranger resumed his presentation. “From
the time the C&O opened in 1850 until it closed in 1924, the
canal went from one financial crisis to another. Floods and
breakdowns were a headache, but the main problem was that the
C&O was competing with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad from the
start. And the railroad got bigger, faster, and cheaper year after
year, until the canal couldn’t compete.
    “In the first few decades the canal carried
timber, limestone, grain, and other agricultural products, but the
only cargo that ever really amounted to anything for the canal was
coal. During the later stages of the canal era, coal accounted for
over 99% of the business.”
    He pointed back to the barge the group had
just examined. “That barge is essentially identical to all of the
barges that carried coal down from the Cumberland mines in the
later years. Not surprising, since after 1890 all the coal barges
were built and owned by the Consolidation Coal Company. Anybody
want to guess who owned the Consolidation Coal Company?”
    “Rockefeller?” said a fleshy man at the
front.
    “Nope. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad,” the
ranger said with a conspiratorial squint. “In fact, toward the end
the B&O Railroad owned the canal, too. But that’s another
story.” He shifted his stance and cleared his throat.
    “Anyway, that coal barge behind you is
ninety-three feet long and fourteen-and-a-half feet wide. And all
the locks on the canal are a hundred feet long and fifteen feet
wide. So you can see that putting a barge through a lock was a
pretty tight squeeze. And the boats coming downstream loaded with
coal had momentum – they were hard to stop. So they would use a
snubbing post to bring the boat to a halt inside the lock. That
would keep it from crashing into the downstream gates.” He turned
and pointed to a waist-high cylindrical post about six feet back
from the opposite lock wall. “A boathand would wrap a heavy rope
from the boat around the snubbing post and the boat would come to a
stop as the rope tightened.”
    He spun back toward his audience. “Most boat
captains would tie up for the night somewhere along the berm side
of the canal by ten or eleven, but some captains wanted to make the
circuit from Cumberland to Georgetown and back as fast as possible,
so they kept their boats moving around the clock. That meant a
locktender had to be ready to lock a boat through at any time of
day or night. So most of them would sleep in a shanty near the
lock. That way they could hear the mule driver yell or blow a horn
when a boat was approaching.”
    “Now a boat like that one,” he said,
gesturing back to the barge again, “would be carrying over a
hundred and ten tons of coal down the canal. So the boatmen would
call that a ‘loaded boat’, and it would ride low in the water and
be hard to start or stop. After unloading its cargo in Georgetown,
it would head back upstream as a ‘light boat’. With boats coming
and going at any time, locktenders would usually keep their locks
set for a loaded boat. That means the upstream gates would be open
and the downstream gates closed. So a loaded boat could drift right
in and be snubbed to a stop. Then they would close the gates behind
it.”
    Vin stepped away from the group for a better
view of the upstream gates. Each was a thick wooden door that
pivoted around a wooden post set into the lock wall. When closed,
the gates formed a shallow V-shape, which helped them seal tightly
against each other and withstand the water pressure they faced when
the lock was empty. The pivot-posts each supported a heavy
swing-beam that was a foot wide