A partial collection of people, places and events that have made
Chesapeake City the unique and desirable location that it has become today.
Source: The Sun Magazine, January 26, 1969
By Roy V. Lowe
Courtesy of Vicki Kennedy
The Chesapeake and Delaware Canal was part of my life for many a year. Although I was born in Talbot County, my family moved when I was just a boy to Delaware City, which was then at the eastern entrance of the canal. (In the Twenties, after the federal government bought the C.&D., a new entrance was cut about 2 miles south of [Delaware City] the town. A lot of people were upset by that cut because the canal meant a great deal to them financially. Whenever it was frozen shut many of them would board stranded crewmen in their homes.)
In those early days I saw many a sailboat go through the canal - bugeyes, scooners - and I saw steamboats, too. There were even some of those old long barges that had to be towed through by mules.
There were four locks on the canal as it was originally built. They were made of stone, I remember. One, a tidal lock, was at Delaware City. Another lock was at St. Georges, and two more were just west of Chesapeake City. The level of the canal was at its highest, 17.6 feet above mean low water of the Delaware River, for the 9 or so miles between St. Georges and Chesapeake City.
The locks were done away with during the Twenties - again after the government bought the canal from the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal Company and turned it over to the Corps of Engineers. They replaced narrow, rickety wooden drawbridges that were drawn up by cables hitched over mastlike poles.
When I was 23 or 24 I owned a big log boat that I used on pile driving and wharf building jobs, and on a towing job once when some relatives of mine tried to get through the canal with a houseboat they had bought. Like all relatives they didn't pay me anything for doing it.
Later on I worked on the MacIntosh, which has got to be the funniest looking boat I've ever seen. She was about 65 feet long, with a big, wide open end and an old engine that had been used on a fish boat to make ice. Some New York people had bought her and were going into the business of carrying excursionists from Jersey to Cambridge, Annapolis, Claiborne and other Chesapeake ports.
Ater that, in the early Thirties, I became a patrolman on the canal. A cousin of mine, Capt. Harry Ogle Tunnis, was in the Corps of Engineers and had been put in charge of the canal. It was he who approached me about being a patrolman.
Up until then patrolmen had used open boats with outboards. I was lucky. They brought in new boats - the Eleanor S. and a sister ship - right when I joined. I was aboard the Eleanor S. as operator, and I had a dispatcher with me. The boat was about 28 or 30 feet long, with an inboard engine and a cabin. Even with the cabin, though, it could get as cold as the devil on that boat in the winter. The Eleanor and her companion ship were replaced by the Joy and the Dragon, which were real freaks. They looked like small PT boats and had engines three times as big as engines should be. They couldn't run as fast as other boats could and that made pursuit a real joke. They always broke down, too. If you had to go backwards, you could do that alright, but that's all you could do. You'd have to work over the whole engine before she'd go forward again.
After the Joy and the aptly named Dragon came the Pilot [pictured below] and the Escort. I was aboard the Escort, a diesel-powered boat whose high pilot house and fat stack decorated with the Corps of Engineers castle made her resemble a tug.
The following picture of the Pilot and
details were not a part of the Sun Magazine story.
All of them were outfitted with what you might call seagoing offices, stools and high desks on which we could write up our forms. And were there forms! We had to meet every vessel that approached the eastern end of the canal and check its papers and cargo. In 1935 more than 9,000 ships passed through the canal, so you could divide that by four and get a rough idea of the ones my dispatcher and I handled on our shift.
Sometimes we would take the pilots out to the ships they were to guide through the C.&D., and sometimes we'd have to deny a ship permission to use it. We did that a couple of times during Prohibition when we found loads of whiskey aboard. And we'd hold them up if we felt the pilots were so drunk they couldn't handle the ships.
Sometimes too we had a few chases. Once we had to go after a yacht whose captain hadn't paid his wharfage fees. We caught him out in the Chesapeake, and hauled him back to the sheriff.
We must have argued 400,000 times among ourselves whether we had the power to arrest somebody or not. We never reached a formal conclusion - but we did it if we felt the situation warranted it.
What we did
on the eastern end of the canal Joe Schaefer did on the western side. Schaefer
ran a chandlery and grocery store in Chesapeake City - his place is pictured on
this page - in addition to operating a patrol boat. His place was near the end
of a wharf that extended from one bank of the canal, it was a favorite stopping
place for small boats and tugs. He had a sort of restaurant in addition to the
grocery store, so you could get a meal there as well as take on provisions.
There's been many a change on the canal since i"ve known it, but I've heard that
the old chandlery is still there.
Return to Canal after 1919
Return to Site Contents