History
image:Aerial view of Pawpaw Area from NPS exhibit.jpg, left, 200px, Aerial view of Paw Paw area. Tunnel is marked on photo. Note the cliffs on the Maryland (left) side of the river, which presented difficulties for the Canal planners At Paw Paw, the canal engineers had a quandary with no easy solutions: follow the river (with its cliffs which would have required crossing over to West Virginia (then part of Virginia), damming the river to make a slackwater, and hacking out from the cliffs on the Maryland side) or make a tunnel. The newly appointed engineer, Charles B. Fisk, managed to convince the board of directors of a tunnel's superiority. The tunnel plan was approved in February 1836, with an expected completion date of July 1838. p. 198 Lee Montgomery, a Methodist minister who had experience from building the canal tunnel for the Union Canal (Pennsylvania), Union CanalHahn, p. 200 was awarded the contract on March 15, 1836. Construction on the tunnel began in 1836. Unfortunately for Montgomery, the Irish people, Irish workers were not skilled at tunnel work, so he obtained English masons, English and Welsh miners, and some "Dutch" [i.e. German] labourers. More unfortunately, this caused ethnic tensions which exploded into violence in 1837 and 1838, specifically between the Irish and everyone else; rioters destroyed the tavern at Oldtown, Maryland, Oldtown, burned shanties, and the like.Hahn, p. 199 There were more riots in 1839 at Little Orleans, Maryland, Little Orleans. Montgomery succeeded in boring the tunnel through on June 5, 1840, at a point from the south portal, but did not finish it. Due to construction and financial problems, no work was done from 1841 to 1847. In 1848, a subcontract was let to McCulloch and Day to finish the tunnel. The tunnel was opened for traffic (and essentially completed) in 1850, but the brick liner was not finished until after the tunnel was opened. The construction costs were $616,478.65, much more than had originally been budgeted. In 1872, a flag semaphore, semaphore signal was installed at the west end of the tunnel to control traffic.Boatmen and the tunnel
Boatmen could usually tell if another boat was in the tunnel because the water level would be down about . The loaded boat going downstream had the right of way, but that was not often honored, and there were occasional fistfights between rival boatmen over the right of way. The tunnel was so narrow that nobody could pass between the mules and the side of the tunnel. There are records of passengers playing music (to hear the echo) or singing in the tunnel to keep up their courage.The tunnel today
Today the Paw Paw Tunnel can be easily explored with a flashlight, as the towpath is still intact. Trekkers can return via the tunnel, or hike back over the Tunnel Hill Trail. This passes interpretive markers about the German and Irish workers who lived along the path during the tunnel's construction. A rockslide in January 2013 closed the trail east of the tunnel for four months, so the tunnel could not be reached from the east side. It reopened on April 17, 2013. A visitor on 26-Nov-2021 found the east end closed again. The NPS started a two-phase construction project to fix the scaling of rock on the downstream tunnel approach in 2017. The first phase, which addressed the most urgent sections of the deteriorating rock slope, has been completed. The second phase will begin the first week of May 2019 and will address additional hazards downstream of the newly completed section. The cost is listed as $750,000.Gallery
See also
*Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical ParkReferences
External links