Chesapeake & Delaware Canal
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Eastern Lock of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal
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Eastern Lock of the Chesapeake & Delaware Canal, Battery Park, December 2011
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| Location | Battery Park, Delaware City, Delaware |
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| Coordinates | 39°34′44″N 75°35′14″W / 39.5788°N 75.5873°W |
| Built | 1829 |
| NRHP Reference # | 75000543 |
| Added to NRHP | April 21, 1975 |
Coordinates: 39°32′34″N 75°43′14″W / 39.54278°N 75.72056°W
The Chesapeake & Delaware Canal (C&D Canal) is a 14-mile (22.5 km)-long, 450-foot (137.2 m)-wide and 35-foot (10.7 m)-deep ship canal that connects the Delaware River with the Chesapeake Bay in the states of Delaware and Maryland in the United States. The C&D Canal is owned and operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Philadelphia District. The project office in Chesapeake City, Maryland, is also the site of the C&D Canal Museum and Bethel Bridge Lighthouse.
In Delaware, the canal is considered to divide the northern and southern parts of the state. It is also widely considered the beginning of the Delmarva Peninsula, although the fall line onto the Atlantic Coastal Plain lies farther north.
As early as the 17th century, settlers to the New World realized that industrial and commercial growth would depend upon economical transportation of goods across both land and water. In the mid‑17th century, Augustine Herman, a mapmaker and Prague native who had served as an envoy for the Dutch, observed that two great bodies of water, the Delaware River and Chesapeake Bay, were separated only by a narrow strip of land. Herman proposed that a waterway be built to connect the two.
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