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THE RIVER IN TIME

Time, abetted by man and nature, has changed the face of the Nation's River. Nature's rains, snows, ice and floods continually carve the shores. Man, also, changes the Potomac through man-made fills, walls, docks, bridges and piers. The arbitrary changes by man and nature have reached the point where careful planning and consideration must be given to the river's future in order to preserve its majestic beauty as The Nation's River.

1830

1936 Flood scene

Civil War Chain Bridge

Early 1900—canoeists near Seneca, Md.

1917 Washington Waterfront

Washington Waterfront today

POTOMAC RIVER BASIN

I. THE WAY THINGS ARE

With good reason, people sometimes claim that the Potomac has been studied more often and more thoroughly than any other American stream. Its intimacy with the national capital at Washington and with great figures and events of our history have centered much American interest on it. In many ways it is a classic Eastern river, copious and scenic, that drains some 15,000 square miles of varied, historic, and often striking landscape, from the green mountains along the Allegheny Front to the sultry lowlands of the estuary's shores where the earliest plantations were established among the Indian tribes. It has tributaries large and small whose names echo with connotations for American ears—the Shenandoah, the Monocacy, the Saint Mary's, Antietam Creek, Bull Run....

And it has long been the subject for debate and discussion over how it may best be handled to serve man's ends, for in common with other rivers in civilized regions it has developed problems of pollution, of landscape destruction, of occasional floods, of impending shortages of water for its basin's increasing population. Out of the debates have emerged studies and plans, some fragmentary and some whole, some specialized and some general. This present report concerns the latest study, made under the leadership of Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall according to a directive given him by President Johnson in 1965. The report is "final" only in that it sums up this study. It is by no means final in terms of the Potomac, for it points toward future action and continuing study and planning, and an important part of its function will be to show why a degree of inconclusiveness in such matters is necessary and desirable.

Within a remarkably few years after Captain John Smith sailed up the Potomac estuary in 1608 to assess its treasures and to make the acquaintance of the Algonquian tribesmen whose villages flourished on either shore, other vigorous white men came there to stay, on both the Maryland and Virginia sides. In the century that followed they raced and leapfrogged one another upriver, elbowing the Indians out, and with the aid of indentured labor and later of African slaves they helped to shape the Tidewater tobacco civilization that engendered so many future leaders of the American republic. Near the head of navigation, shipping centers grew up—among them Alexandria and Georgetown, forerunners of the metropolis that bestrides the river at the Fall Line today. Above there in the upper Piedmont, and then across the Blue Ridge in the Great Valley, the westering waves of migrant English met other waves of Scotch-Irish and the Germans coming down from Pennsylvania, and before the American Revolution the combined breeds of men had built up enough pressure to push Indians almost entirely out of the Potomac Basin and to occupy all the good farmland, even in the Basin's ridged western areas.

Since then their successors have used the land for farming and for other purposes. In using it they have changed it, and the changes have registered in the river system that drains it. For land, water, vegetation, wildlife, minerals, and men's habits are not separable from one another in the natural frame. So that if the early planters, using methods of hoe tillage scarcely less primitive than those of the Indians, mined the Tidewater soils for tobacco production in a way that required new fields every few years, one result was that those soils tired and thinned and finally stopped supporting the social magnificence that had grown up there, for production and prosperity moved inland and west. And another result was that the Potomac estuary itself grew shallower and different with the silt that washed down off the land, and many a tributary bay that once served as harbor for oceangoing ships is now a rich,