Potomac Company

The Potomac Company (spelled variously as Patowmack, Potowmack, Potowmac, and Compony) was created in 1785 to make improvements to the Potomac River and improve its navigability for commerce. The project is perhaps the first conceptual seed planted in the minds of the new American capitalists in what became a flurry of transportation infrastructure projects, most privately funded, that drove wagon road turnpikes, navigations and canals, and then as the technology developed, investment funds for railroads across the rough country of the Appalachian Mountains. In a few decades, the eastern seaboard was Chris-crossed by private turnpikes and canals were being built from Massachusetts to Illinois ushering in the brief seven decades of the American Canal Age. The Potomac Company's achievement was not just to be an early example, but of being significant also in size and scope of the project, which involved taming a mountain stream fed river with icing conditions and unpredictable freshets (floods).

The Potomac Company built five skirting canals around the major falls of the Potomac opening the river to commercial bulk goods traffic from the Chesapeake Bay mouth to Cumberland, Maryland in the Cumberland Narrows notch leading west across the Alleghenies, where it intersected Nemacolin's Trail ne' Braddock's Road, later made the first National Road, today's U.S. Route 40. When completed, bulk goods could ship by wagon out of the Pennsylvania and Virginia Alleghenies plateau country down hill to the river port where the canal allowed boats and rafts to float downstream towards Georgetown, a major port of the time on the Potomac River, now an upscale bedroom community and college town within the District of Columbia. The company had been championed by prominent men of both Maryland and Virginia, including George Washington, who was its first president, as well as an investor in the company.Tobias Lear, Washington's personal secretary, was its chairman for a period. Other principals of the company included Thomas Johnson of Maryland.

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