Potomac Company
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The Potomac Company (spelled variously as Potowmack, Potowmac, and Compony) was created in 1785 to make improvements to the Potomac River in order to improve its navigability. The Potomac Company built five skirting canals around the major falls. When completed it allowed boats and rafts to float downstream towards Georgetown, a major port of the time on the Potomac River, now in the District of Columbia. George Washington was an investor in the company.
While slim boats called bateaux could be poled up-river in even the shallowest of waters, they could not traverse the fall line, the area where an upland region (continental bedrock) and a coastal plain (coastal alluvia) meet, typically in waterfalls.
One of the major constructions of the Potomac Company was the Patowmack Canal. A major engineering feet of the time, the Potomack Canal permitted boats to navigate around Great Falls, where the Potomac River drops a treacherous 75 feet through the unnavigable Mather Gorge.
After 21 years, the Potomack Canal was later sold, along with the other assets of the Potomac Company to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company, which built a canal on the opposite, Maryland side of the Potomac River.
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