destroyed. shrubbery is being planted on slopes and hillsides to stop soil erosion. more spectacular is the moving of matured trees for landscaping purposes. there is a world of power in this mighty movement, men and machinery, old dobbin and even his more picturesque brethren. the restoration program, which is an important part of the park development plan, represents another form of conservation. historic events in the life of the nation are still marked by an old fort year and old mansion there and other material evidence is associated with things of importance that have happened. restoration work is saving or conserving more vividly than would be possible than in any other way general knowledge of these events. historic parks have great spiritual and patriotic recreational value. old fort frederick is being restored as a center of

attraction in one of maryland's state parks. it is a most interesting veteran of three wars. the french and indian, the war for independence, and the war between the states. on bold banks near morehead city, north carolina, the civilian conservation corps is doing another job of repairing the ravages of time. at fort mikan, the sea and wind have been destroying one of the early masterpieces of fortification. on this site for 200 years, forts of one kind or another protrekted this strategic point from invasion from the sea. the present fort required 12 years to build. when completed, sometime after 1824, it was considered the last word in coastal defense and cost the then amazing sum of $463,700. an active commission during the war between the states, it was seized by the confederates in 1861 and recaptured by the union forces the following year. the walls are of brick and mortar, four feet thick, and

they're rock solid after more than 100 years. arches, garrison rooms and ammunition magazines test the artisanship of the original builders. the civilian conservation corps under national park service direction is restoring many details of the old fort. here as in all national park service work of this character, exhaustive research is done to ensure that the restoration is accurate and authentic. not only the fort, but all the immediate surrounding property is being improved to make it more accessible and interesting to the thousand s who visit it

each year. an interesting state park in georgia surrounds the one time home of alexander stevens, vice president of the confederacy. long ago the memory of this outstanding southern statesman was honored by the erection of a statue on his state. now the mansion with the slave quarters and outbuildings is being restored and the grounds are being made more attractive to visitors. strict attention is being paid to details, reproductions of the hardware used are being made by conservation corps enrollees under skilled direction. along georgia's subtropical coast are many memories of a spanish civilization which mark this part of the world a century before jamestown. on the banks of the canal between savanna and brunswick, santo domingo state park is being developed with crumbling oyster shell walls as a center of interest. the national park service painstaking investigation of the

history of these beautiful and interesting old ruins is still in progress. here is the first town in ohio being restored. beautiful spring near new philadelphia was founded in 1772, abandoned in 1777 and the site rediscovered many years later. the government's rehabilitation program is transferring citizens from localities in which they have been finding it difficult to make a living into more desirable surroundings. it is most vivid illustration is in the case of farmers whose lands have been destroyed by soil erosion and one crop farming. this program is pertinent to the park plan because much of the nonproductive land being abandoned is being transformed into parks and recreational areas. in the functioning of the civilian conservation corps plan, however, there is another and even more interesting form of rehabilitation. among hundreds of thousands of

young men and war veterans enrolled, there have been many unable to read or write. others whose schooling has been interrupted were found to be slipping in the matter of education and morale. important job of mentally rehabilitating this extremely valuable cross section has been entrusted to the office of education department to the interior. competent instructors and conservation corps camps conduct classes in many of the educational branches. the boys are given the opportunity to go to school just as they might have done years ago. in addition, there are many practical manual training courses intended to prepare the enrollees for happier and more immune tiff work when association with the corps has ended. many of the conservation corps camps communicate with each other over short wave radio sets for both transmission and

reception which the boys themselves have made. through the enrollees welcome these opportunities, well a field report not long ago disclosed in a single conservation corps camp within a single month, five enrollees in their joy of knowing for the first time how to use them spent a big share of their $5 cash allowances for fountain pens. chipmunks, squirrels and all the other little brothers of the forest which we expect to see in our journalese outdoors have a very definite place in nature's scheme of saving and rebuilding. without them, there could be no real conservation. all too few of us are concerned about the rapidly progressing extinction of wildlife in the united states. we may know of the spectacular passing of the buffalos from our western plains, where they once provided a fresh meat supply so essential to the accomplishments of our pioneering forefathers, but we do not know that the extinction of the buffalos and little chipmunks, squirrels, beavers, skunks and snakes most

maligned of all wild creatures has for a long time been making even our present day lives more difficult to live. this without mentioning the truly heroic service many of our native birds perform in checking the crop destroying insects. the preservation of wildlife is an important part of state park planning. in many of the conservation corps camps, great friendships have been developed between the boys and the native ofs of the areas. in the conservation corps development of state parks has found the perfect blending of conservation and recreation. besides protecting and saving land and timber and wildlife, this phase of the program developed recreation areas for people who have not had them before. many kinds of work are required to develop this recreation plan. hundreds of dams will make lakes

and regions where large natural bodies of water are unknown. hiking and bridal trails wind through the parks. each of these trails being constructed by the conservation corps and state parks in 42 states is carefully placed by expert park manners so the natural growth of the area will be harmed as little as possible and yet so points of interest can be reached. splendid views few men have seen because the peaks were inaccessible now open up as the trails lead hikers to the mountaintops. racing brooks and deep streams are spanned by rustic bridges of good design. they're built by skilled labor and conservation corps enrollees according to plans of graduate engineers and architects. though thousands gather in the

parks to enjoy these new recreational facilities, the old parking problem is no bother. adequate spaces have been provided. camping is encouraged and every outdoor convenience is furnished. open stools and picnic tables are spotted through the areas, these too built by the corps enrollees under the direction of skilled laborers and expert designers. any health menaces that might exist are obliterated by the construction of complete water and waste disposal systems to serve all developed areas. probably the most attractive feature of the typical state park is the cabin community, located in one of the areas desirable spots and open to visitors who want to spend the night or the week. state park conservation corps companies cover the country and work through all the seasons. these snug cabins are going up despite the winter snow.

recreation building and picnic shelters are state park essentials. this one stands on the mall straight blanks of the edisto, one of the loveliest low country streams. in some sections, notably the southwest, park development runs more strongly than elsewhere to building operations. in the country as large as america, the characteristics of the various regions differ widely. there are mountainous areas covered with fresh green trees and drifting with clear cold streams. in other sections, vast ranges and plains of rock. and still elsewhere, the lowlands that stretch down to the sea. the natural features of the state parks vary with the regions in which they're located. in each section there is a different recreational appeal. it follows then that a park's development plan generally conforms to the features and requirements of the surrounding

country in order that the park may best serve the peculiar recreational needs of the people in its particular locality. in texas, where nature takes on a rough magnificence, many of the required park structures are built of stone. here is the land of the cliff dwellers, and architects designed park buildings to re-create a prehistoric atmosphere. this recognition and further development of the architecture typical of the history and natural characteristics of the country's several sections is important in emergency conservation work. building trails, cutting fire lanes and protecting and improving timber and land make the conservation work program essentially one requiring well directed masked manpower. but on the construction projects, skilled labor is necessary. carpenters, brick layers,

plumbers and electricians are hired. these men work on the park jobs with the conservation corps boys as helpers. not only does this furnish employment for skilled labor and get the job well done, but it provides the enrollees with excellent opportunity to learn trades. splitting handmade shingles is a colorful task. the tools are ingenious and the appliances devised for holding the shingles during the finishing processes. and almost every camp has its own village blacksmith, buying his fascinating and still useful trade. so it is all these factors joining forces in this unique phase of the recovery program, a federal aid project to save and enjoy a country to keep nature unsullied and unspoiled wherever possible. the project directed by that government agency which has given the world the american national parks, the national parks service of the united

states department of the interior. ♪ each week, american history tv's american artifacts visits museums and historic places. next, we travel about 15 miles northwest of washington, d.c. to great falls tavern visitors center where we'll take a boat ride to learn about the history of the chesapeake and ohio canal. >> i would like to introduce myself. my name is cassandra sohyda. i'm a seasonal park ranger here. i think we're going to cast off here shortly. but we're going to go ahead and start and give you a brief history of here on the canal. all right. so it is called the chesapeake and ohio canal. but definitely doesn't reach to

the chesapeake bay and doesn't go to the ohio river, which is our intention of the canal when we first started building it near in july 4th of 1828. we wanted to try to connect the eastern shore with what was considered the west back then. the west was up in ohio, pennsylvania, that area. we wanted to connect pittsburgh to the chesapeake bay. and so what we did was we started building this canal. we tried earlier, it was george washington's dream to actually use the potomac river as a way to transport goods. back then it was seen as a very reasonable thing to do so he went ahead and had a canal system built on that side and

built a canal right next to the potomac river so that we could use that water source. but had something that is more controlled and reliable compared to the potomac river, because you took a boat over the falls, you probably wouldn't last very long. so we used this canal and we ran it from georgetown all the way up to cumberland is where we stopped. we kind of ran into some problems also known as the appalachian mountains. didn't take that into consideration when we were building the canal itself and so we kind of got stuck either going through the mountains or trying to go around them. but this canal is 184.5 miles long. and throughout that 184.5 miles there are 74 lift locks and we're going to go through one of them today, that's lock 20 we're going to go through. so what these lift locks do, there is a very big elevation difference between georgetown and cumberland. as you can tell, georgetown is at or a little bit below sea level. cumberland is right along the

edge of the appalachian mountains. therefore it is about a 605 foot elevation difference. so that's a very big difference. so what these lift locks do is they help us control that difference so that we're able to go both ways, instead of having one big river rushing downstream and only be able to transport goods from cumberland to georgetown. so what is going to happen here, we have our bowsman in the front, we do things a little differently from what they did back then. but what he's going to do is he has a tow line connected to the lock itself. he's going to start pulling it in so we can actual ourselves into the lock. hopefully you didn't have too big of a breakfast, so you don't make him do too much work. he's going to go ahead and start pulling us in. back then what they would do is they would usually have their mules connected to their boat and the mules would be working on the tow path and they would be the ones that actually would pull us in. we wouldn't have any of the crew members actually doing any of that work. what would happen is once we

were completely inside of the lock we would close the two downstream gates which we'll pass on our way in and what that allows us to do is that allows us to make a sealed, tight area so no water can exit out so that we can actually raise water in that area and this system was actually created by a man way past our time. his name was leonardo da vinci. he created a lot of the things and a lot of those things didn't really work and this was something we decided was a good idea. we did a few modifications to his drawing that he had in a sketch book, but most of it is all the same. and so what happens is this is one side of the lock door that we have here and so with our lock door there's two little doors down here on the bottom. these little doors are called wickets and these wickets are connected to stems that lead all

of the way up to the top as you can see in front of you. what we do sings we're in a lock and we take the key and post it right here on top of our stem and we turn the doors down at the bottom so it lets the water from upstream downstream. key to our stem and we open the wicket doors down here at the bottom, and i did say every lock needs a key and this is actually a key that was found in the bottom of the canal. we found it when we took over the park, the national park service. it's made out of cast-iron. it's about 10 to 15 pounds. pretty heavy. and this is what our lot keepers would carry around all day, and i'm going to stop talking because it's really hard to yell over the rushing water, okay?

this part right here is the slowest part of the filling because the water is almost equalling out so it's not rushing in like what you saw obviously when we first opened the locked doors so it takes longer for the water to slowly equal out. once everything equals out then we have to also open up those gates and make sure we open up the boat and that's when we would start moving. we would have lock keepers that would do that with the wicket doors and they would be the ones in charge of opening up the doors and opening up the wickets

and everything like that. so our lock keepers were always in charge of that and they would live in lockhouses kind of like the one that is right here on my right. all right. the only difference about this lock house. it was a very special lock house because it was the only hotel here on the canal. and so the middle section of the great falls tavern was the original lock house that was built in 1828 and it was where the first lock family would live and then in 1831 we had finished the two additions on the north and the south end. the north end is the hotel part of the tavern and the bottom floor where you guys all had brought your tickets from, that was called the ballroom and it was the tavern at one point so it did serve alcohol back then and so that's where people would come from georgetown. they would take a four-hour trip up here to great falls and they'd ride boats just like this one and this was a packet or

passenger boat and they would take the trips to escape the city and stay here at great falls just to kind of get away from it, relax, and they would stay up in the second or third floor. the second floor was for men and female quarters so they had to stay separately on that second floor unless they were able to provide a marriage license. if they were able to do that then they could stay on the third floor which was the attic or the honeymoon suite is what it was called back then. for an extra charge they could stay up on the top floor and then the south end of the tavern was the new lock house where the lock family stayed and so with this particular lock and its time it was, actually the lock keeper would tend to three different locks and they would tend to lock 20 here and they would tend to lock 19 or 18 downstream. one man taking care of three different locks is a very hard

job to do especially when you saw the work that's down here at the lock. it depended on how much money he would get paid by the chesapeake and ohio canal company. with three locks, you would get about $250. and that would allow him to hire an assistant, so he would be able to go ahead and have him help with the rest of the lock, but the canal company was very smart, and they decided that they needed to hire men that have large families because if you hire the husband of a large family you'd get the rest of the family for free, and so the rest of the family would help him, as well, working, the wife would help and some of the older children that they had and they would all be able to stay here in the lock houses for free. they'd get the $250 along with the house and they would also get an acre of land and so what that acre of land allowed them

to do is to be able to provide for themselves so they were able to do produce or have any type of farm animals that they needed like cows, chickens, pigs and anything they could have on their land so they'd be able to sustain themselves because that $250 was per year, and the peak of the canal was in the 1870s. if you were waiting on a lock in a span of 30 minutes there were 15 to 20 boats that were waiting just at the lock and so at the peak of the -- there were days there were 550 boats that were operational on the canals. our mule, as you will see. they're not horses, a lot of people confuse them for horses or donkeys and they're a combination of the two. it's a special combination. the male is going to be the donkey and the female is going to be the mare or the horse and that is how you will get a mule. you need a female horse and a male donkey.

if you did it the other way around where you had a male horse and a female donkey you would get a henny and they don't have the working genes that we want our mules to have here on the canal. so we decided mules would be a better fit for us here on the canal, but all throughout history there is a lot of uses of horses so you would have the pony express, they would pull wagons and used throughout history for various things and the question that usually comes up is why were mules used here instead of horses and there were various reasons for that. you can tell a few of the characteristics that the mules get from the donkey. you can obviously see their ears. their ears make them very aware of their surrounding. their feet also are a different shape compared to horses and they're more oval shaped

compared to horses where they're more circular and so what that does is that makes them very sure-footed and that allows them to know where they're placing their foot at all times so they're not very skittish like horses are whereas horses at the sight of anything they tend to rear up and it takes them a while to calm back down and whereas the mule where they know where they're placing their feet at all times they're not as jumpy. back then there were snakes that would fall on the tow path constantly and with the horse you would have to wait for it to calm down. it would just stop and it sees that there is a snake there and it would go and wait for you to move it out of the way so it wouldn't cause harm to itself. they're also very smart. mules are smarter than horses are, and so with a horse you can work a horse to death because horses are there to please their master. they want to do nothing more than to make you happy and if you have a horse on the canal you can run it dead into the ground where as mules, i'm sure you've heard the saying stubborn

as a mule. you can take that as a compliment. they're saying that you're smart and not that you're stubborn. with a mule we can't work it to death. after six hours it will stop working and it will say i'm not trying to hurt myself therefore you cannot push me any further and i'm going to stand here until you change me out. our mules today look like dolly and eva are our two mules pulling us today and they're two of the youngest mules. dolly is 11 and eva is 10, and you can see that they are connected together by two chains that are in the middle of them and then eva on the back of her has a tree which isn't really a tree, but it's a metal bar that connects our tow line to our boat and they are currently pulling us at the speeding rate of about 2 miles an hour maybe, all right? they could pull us a little bit

faster, but we don't usually want to go faster than this and back then they couldn't go faster than this because there was a speed limit of 2 miles an hour on the canal. it seems crazy, and there is a good reason why. if you look on the sides, some spots are covered up with rocks, but most of the time there are no rocks covering the sides of the canal and so if we had a boat that went any faster than 4 miles an hour we would start to cause a wake, and with that wake, since you had 550 boats here on the peak of this canal you would end up causing the wake to brush up on the sides of the canal and cause erosion and that would sink the sides of our canal in, and kind of damage the canal ask make it not last as long as it should. so that 4 miles an hour was very enforced here on the canal by our lock keepers. and that's why we couldn't go

any faster than that. so our typical boats here on the canal. these are what our barges would look like. they are about 90 to 95 feet long and about 14 1/2 feet wide. i did say we like to cut things close and we are on a tight budget here on the canal and we have three inches of clearance on each side of our boat to come in from the lock. so you had to be very good at your job steering in as a tiller because if you ended up doing damage to the lock itself obviously that means you're doing damage to your boat and you had to pay for any damage that you did to the lock and to your boat. the tiller is located in the back. this is the stern and with the stern this is a cabin. this is called the cabin and this family cabin was 12 1/2 x 12 1/2 feet. it was extremely small. the only space you had in there for room was you would have your cooking would be done back here and then some cleaning of any

sorts. you would have a toilet back here, which their toilet was a bucket and you would have one or two beds that were back here. up there in the front, this is our bow and this little barn right here was the barn. it was where our extra set of mules were held and therefore i said they would only work six hours. we would have two sets of mule, making four mules in total so we could go ahead and change them out so we could continue working throughout the day. on top of that, the barn was also where most of the family would sleep because there were also very big families here on the canal boats. so if there wasn't enough room back here in the family cabin where their beds were they would end up sleeping on the barn and all throughout the middle of our barge, this is where our cargo was kept. coal was our main cargo here on the canal. it was used to heat the homes