If the Potomac has been much studied, it has nevertheless been subjected
to only meager "development" over the centuries of its service to
civilized men. Most past attempts to alter it significantly for man's
use have either failed or have not led to lasting results, though their
changing purposes over the years summarize, to a degree, America's
shifting attitudes toward the utility of flowing water. Early projects
under George Washington and others to assure the navigability of the
main river above the Fall Line, which they saw as an artery for eastward
and westward currents of trade, left only some quaint ruined locks and
flowing bypass canals around falls and rapids. The later C. & O. Canal,
which ran alongside the river and was replenished by its water above
occasional low dams, required over two decades of toil and death and
heavy expense to complete upriver to Cumberland, Maryland, which it
reached in 1850. There had been some public opposition to the project
and it was never a great success even after completion, for the railroad
era had begun and the Canal suffered periodic heavy damage from Potomac
floods, being finally abandoned to picturesque decay after a mighty
inundation in 1924.
Largely because of a stalemate between public and private power
advocates, the early 20th century heyday of small-scale hydroelectric
power development of rivers mainly missed the Potomac, though at one
time a power company acquired land at Great Falls in anticipation of
such development. Other modern water projects in the Basin have been
relatively modest or have run afoul of strong opposition. Therefore,
today a sprinkling of small channel power dams and water intake
structures, some levees and improved creek channels, and a few
unimposing reservoirs of various sizes and types high up on small
tributaries are the sum total of the development to which the Potomac
water resource has been lastingly subjected, if we disregard for the
moment its waste disposal function and the maintenance of navigation in
its estuary.
In general this is undoubtedly a fortunate thing, for the application of
modern technology to rivers in the past half-century of our national
growth has not always had happy results. "A river," Justice Holmes once
wrote, "is more than an amenity, it is a treasure." His feeling is
shared by thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people who live
along the Potomac and its tributaries or who go there to float down them
in bass time, to picnic and swim, to hunt, to dig into the region's
history, or just to listen to the purl of green water against the rough
stonework of a ruined bridge pier. Deteriorated though a few stretches
may presently be, these rivers are still treasures.
The lack of development also presents planners with a fairly clean slate
on which to write. In terms of water, few massive human mistakes
confront them except the pollution of the upper estuary and certain
other reaches like the afflicted North Branch. Therefore they can begin
more or less from scratch and can usually find various choices for
action against the water problems of the Basin--against pollution,
against flood damages, and against impending or existing shortages of
water for municipal and industrial use.
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Though for clarity in discussion we need to classify these various kinds
of problems separately, in practice they do not so neatly divide from
one another. Nor do they divide from the way the land in the Basin is
used or from the pleasure and fulfillment people find in the outdoors.
If a region's use of a stream's water is heavy in a dry August, for
instance, whatever pollution the stream gets below towns and factories
will be more concentrated and damaging than if the stream were flowing
well. Pollution itself can affect the utility of water as well as
people's enjoyment of it in a stream. A creek watershed that has been
ignorantly farmed or roughly assaulted with bulldozers for urban
development is an eyesore of erosive destruction, unproductive of crops,
wildlife, or poetic appreciation, and can cause both heavier stream
flooding in time of storm and lower flow in time of drought by the way
its disruption alters the normal behavior of rainwater. The silt that
storms wash off of it is not only a major ugly pollutant of flowing
water below that point but can complicate flooding and bank-cutting and
navigation and other things by settling out into bars and shoals in
still stretches, including reservoirs.
All of these things, and others as well, have to be considered together
as parts of a whole problem. And that problem is that men's hugely
increasing numbers and their multiplying technological power over their
environment have made it necessary to readjust the balances somewhat in
great natural units like river basins--to restore, manage, and protect
them in such a way as to be able to hand them over decent and whole and
useful to the people who come after.