my name is cassandra sohyda. i'm a seasonal park ranger here. 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 com