paid their assessments only after much deliberation or not at
all. Thirty-six years later, though $729,380 had been spent and
lock canals had been opened about the unnavigable stretches of
the Potomac River, a commission 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