Life on the C&O Canal

A Labor Day Memory by Alf

This is the story of a young boy whose family lives in a boat on the C & O Canal.  The time is the 1800s—just before the railroad made the canal a memory. 

 Here is Jody’s story of life on the canal.

My name is Jody Smith.  I am twelve years old, and I come here to go to school in the winter.  It is too cold and icy for my family to travel up and down on the canal, so we stay in town.  This is my story about last summer that I am writing for my teacher.

What I did on my summer vacation.

I can only go to school for about four or five months each year because the rest of the year I drive the mules for my family on the C & O Canal.  We have a canal boat, and we travel back and forth, taking loads of coal from Cumberland to Georgetown; then we come back from there with finished products, like linen, to sell.  We make between twenty-five and thirty trips a year.

It is my job to harness the mule teams to pull a load that can weigh up to a hundred and twenty tons.  The mules walk in front of the boat along the towpath.  We own two teams with two mules each that work in six-hour shifts.  When one team is working, the other team rides in its own little stable in the front of our boat. 

Our boat is ninety feet long and fourteen feet wide.  Our family’s living cabin is in the back of the boat where we sleep on beds of straw.  The cargo hold is in the middle of the boat.  We usually stop to tie up overnight unless we are running late; when this happened once, we had to travel all night long.

It’s my job, along with my younger cousin, Richard (who is ten) to feed the mules, oil their harnesses, and brush them down.  My dad shoes the mules himself, but he is starting to show me how this is done so that I can do this too when I am bigger.  A lot of people who have never been around the mules think they are all the same, but that isn’t true.  Each one of our mules has her own personality.  Usually, if you know how to talk to them, they will do just about anything you need them to.  They aren’t as stubborn as people think they are.

I have one sister, Maybelle, who is four years old.  My mother often has to tie Maybelle to the center of the boat because she is so rambunctious and curious about everything that she would probably fall overboard if she wasn’t tethered.

The creepiest part of our trip is when we pass through the Paw Paw Tunnel.  This used to scare me a lot when I was younger, but I think I’m getting used to it now.  It’s awful dark in there, and I’m still glad when we come out the other side.  My cousin clings to my shirt-tails when we go through it, but I’m sure he will outgrow that pretty soon.  My little sister is okay until our dog starts barking—which he does about fifty feet into the tunnel—then Maybelle cries until we come out into the daylight again.

Well, to finish up, I’ll just say that if I had my way, I think I’d like to keep hauling cargo on our boat for the rest of my life.  It’s just so nice there.  So now I’m looking forward to the spring again when school is over, and we can start another trip down the old C & O Canal.