SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (38 page)

“Sure. I worked today.”

“For what, ten minutes?”

He frowned and cocked his head. “No. For
more than ten minutes.”

“Is the Rottweiler stuff on track?”

“I got done what I needed to get done.”
That’s almost true, he thought.

Nicky sighed as her expression melted into
one of resignation. “The wedding is less than two months away.
Doesn’t it make sense to try to get the project done before then?
So you won’t have to think about it on our honeymoon? And so you
can start fresh when we get back?”

He nodded as she spoke but raised his
fingers when she finished. “The pace of the project is really
determined by Rottweiler. I should have phase two done by early
October, but who knows how long it will take them to review it and
sign off. And then we’re supposed to have a couple of brainstorming
sessions about phase three.”

Nicky walked back to the kitchen shaking her
head. “It just sounds like this will drag out indefinitely. And
you’ll spend the next two years huddled over your desk in the
basement.”

“God forbid!” he said, stifling a laugh.
“But there’s always that risk.”

Chapter 31
Archives

Friday, August 30, 1996

On Friday morning Vin was working on his
last consulting task of the week: developing a suggestion-rating
feature for Rottweiler’s website. As he considered the user
interface, he realized the requirements weren’t fully specified.
Could anyone post a rating? If not, what sort of credentials were
needed? While e-mailing a series of questions to his project
manager, he felt a combination of disappointment and liberation. It
was how he’d felt in grade school when a Friday of exams was
canceled because the furnace broke. You knew you’d have to take the
exams later, but for now you had the rest of the day and the
weekend off.

After sending his message, he uploaded his
project to the Rottweiler server. Through no fault of his own, he
reminded himself, there was no more work worth doing today – and it
wasn’t even ten yet. He climbed the stairs, poured what was left of
the breakfast coffee, and leaned into the living-room couch with
Vieira’s book.

Instead of continuing with the chapter about
Cumberland, he returned to the Edwards Ferry page that referenced
Emmert Reed. Something about the words penciled in the margin had
been nagging him. The arrow implied that the phrase “and his albino
mule?” should be inserted between the words “Emmert ‘M-Street’
Reed” and “tended lock 25”. The phrase was posed as a question and
the question gnawed at him now. Why would a locktender have an
albino mule? Or any mule? Along the canal, mules were primarily
used to pull boats.

In his note to Charlie Pennyfield, Lee
Fisher had said the place was “well knowed by Emmert Reed’s albino
mule.” Lee was a young man when he wrote the message, and young men
didn’t generally tend locks. They worked on canal boats. So if Lee
was a boater, he would have passed through Edwards Ferry twice on
each circuit between Cumberland and Georgetown. He would have had
many opportunities to meet Emmert Reed and his memorable mule.

But Lee’s note implied that Charlie would
also know Emmert Reed and his mule, and Charlie stayed put at
Pennyfield Lock throughout the boating season… while Emmert was
ensconced twelve miles upstream at Edwards Ferry. So when would
Charlie encounter Emmert and his mule?

Vieira mentioned that Emmert sold smoked
pork and turtle meat to passing boaters. But Vieira also wrote:
“Reed’s nickname reportedly derived from his affinity as a younger
man for the Georgetown taverns at the terminus of the canal.” As a
younger man… M-Street Reed frequenting the saloons in Georgetown.
From reading the Hahn and Kytle books last fall, Vin already knew
who else visited those saloons: boaters, at the end of their runs
to Cumberland and Georgetown, while waiting for their boats to be
loaded or unloaded by the Canal Company.

Now it made more sense. The books had
mentioned that many locktenders were former boatmen. Maybe, before
he’d taken over Lock 25 at Edwards Ferry, Emmert “M-Street” Reed
had captained a canal boat. If Reed had boated as a younger man,
his albino mule would be known by locktenders and other boatmen.
How many albino mules could there be along the canal? Maybe Lee
Fisher started boating as a young boy, when Reed’s albino mule was
still plying the towpath. Charlie Pennyfield would have seen the
mule as well, unlike someone with less experience on the canal. So
perhaps Lee was trying to make sure his message could only be
understood by a canal veteran like Charlie.

Hopeful that he had unraveled a portion of
the knot, Vin felt a flush of accomplishment. But his optimism
deflated as he considered the ramifications of his reasoning. If
Reed ran a canal boat with a team that included an albino mule, the
entire canal would be “well knowed” by the mule! Lee’s message said
the joined sycamores were at the edge of a clearing. But that
clearing could be anywhere. The canal was 184 miles long!

Wait, he reminded himself. Think through it.
Lee’s note said he might be buried along with the others “because
of what happened today at Swains Lock.” So the truth was probably
no more than a day’s walk away. Swains was at mile 16.7, Georgetown
at mile 0, and Edwards Ferry at mile 31. That was the most
promising terrain for his search.

Back to Emmert Reed. If I consider him a
boatman rather than a locktender, what does that mean? Most boat
captains came from the upper regions of the canal – Cumberland,
Hancock, Williamsport, Sharpsburg. A few came from nearer towns,
like Brunswick or Frederick. So even if Reed ended up tending lock
at Edwards Ferry, it wasn’t surprising that Thomas F. Reed in
nearby Poolesville told Vin that he had never heard of him. There
weren’t that many locks, and old M-Street probably took the first
locktending position he was offered. At least Edwards Ferry wasn’t
in the middle of nowhere, as some locks were.

If Vin could find out where M-Street was
from, maybe he could find a relative who still lived there. Of the
books he’d reviewed, only Vieira’s book even mentioned Reed. But
there must be some kind of surviving records from the Canal
Company. Vin knew that during the last decades of the C&O, the
Company owned all the boats and all the coal they carried. The boat
captains might own their own mules and some of the boat rigging,
but they were essentially hired hands. So maybe there were some
employment records gathering dust somewhere that he could review.
Something that would tell him where Reed lived during his boating
days, or provide some other insight. Something that could steer him
toward a particular place.

He set Vieira’s book on the table and headed
for the entryway, plucking his car keys from the ceramic bowl on
the table. He couldn’t remember the author’s name but was sure he’d
recognize the book when he saw it again. He passed his desk and
monitor without a glance and left through the door to the garage.
Five minutes later he pulled into the Potomac Library lot.

The book was by Walter S. Sanderlin.
The
Great National Project: A History of the Chesapeake and Ohio
Canal
. Published in 1946. The other books Vin had found were
authored by well-read canal enthusiasts and included insights from
interviews and personal observations. But Sanderlin had taught
history at the University of Maryland. His book preceded the others
by a generation and read like a dissertation. And its bibliography
was meticulous. Vin found the lead he’d hoped for on page 298.

The most important sources for the entire history of
the canal and its predecessors are the private records of the canal
company and the Potomac Company… With a few exceptions the records
are complete, and are deposited in the Department of Interior
Archives of the National Archives.

He checked the Sanderlin book out and drove
home. The National Archives were in D.C., somewhere down on the
mall, right? Along with all the museums? He and Nicky had spent a
Sunday morning on the mall a few weeks after they moved to Potomac.
Everything was free, so they’d popped in and out of the American
Museum of Natural History, both wings of the National Gallery, the
Air and Space Museum, the Hirshhorn… They had a tourist’s map of
the mall somewhere. He found it tucked into the living room
bookcase. The National Archives building was near the center of the
map, facing the mall from the north side of Constitution Avenue.
The clock in the kitchen read ten minutes to noon. He slipped the
map into the Sanderlin book and headed back out to the car.

***

The clerk at the research counter in Room
203 at the National Archives asked for Vin’s last name, examined
his temporary ID badge, and turned to a row of wheeled carts behind
the counter. The carts held gray document boxes, each of which was
tagged with a copy of the document-pull slip, held on by rubber
bands. The clerk selected two boxes and brought them back to the
counter. After reviewing the indices in the Finding Aids Room, Vin
had submitted his request to the Archives staffer less than an hour
ago, and now his documents had been pulled and boxed. He signed the
check-out sheet and carried the boxes to an empty desk.

From his desk he surveyed the room. The
walls were gray brick masonry and a row of oversized windows looked
out past Pennsylvania Avenue toward the columned façade of the
National Portrait Gallery. Rustic wagon-wheel chandeliers hung from
the high coffered ceiling, which had recessed wooden panels painted
in a geometric pattern of warm colors.

He opened the hinged top of the first box to
find a ledger bound in black leather, its title embossed in gold on
the spine:
Reports of the Trustees of the Chesapeake and Ohio
Canal Company
. Dates were written in longhand on its title
page: March 3, 1890 – December 31, 1904. He leafed through sturdy
pages covered in elegant script. Most of the entries were minutes
of the meetings of the trustees for the Canal Company, who were
appointed when the company went into receivership after the
catastrophic flood of 1889 suspended canal operations for over a
year. There were summaries of reports provided by various engineers
on the cost of restoring different portions of the canal and
reports on the status of petitions by assorted canal creditors. He
closed the ledger and laid it aside.

From the second gray box came two more
ledgers:
The Chesapeake and Ohio Transportation Company and
Canal Towage Company, Minutes of the Board of Overseers
. The
first one was dated January 30, 1894. It contained a company
charter and a series of agreements between the trustees of the
bankrupt Canal Company and the newly-established Transportation
Company, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the B&O Railroad. Vin
remembered reading that when the Canal Company went into
receivership, the B&O Railroad had been its largest bondholder.
The B&O was determined that the canal and its rights of way not
be sold to its competitor, the Western Maryland Railway Company. So
the B&O created the Transportation Company, which paid the
Canal Company to maintain the canal for commercial use. In exchange
for the token profit guaranteed by these payments, the Canal
Company trustees agreed not to sell the canal.

The meeting minutes in the ledger for the
Canal Towage Company were more interesting, since they provided
data on the operations of the canal during its last two decades.
The purpose of the Canal Towage Company was to standardize and
streamline the process of shipping coal down the canal. Because it
was created in 1902 by agreement between the Consolidation Coal
Company and the canal trustees, the Canal Towage Company was also
under the aegis of the B&O Railroad. Consolidation Coal was a
B&O subsidiary that owned and operated coal mines in western
Maryland. Coal was transported from the mines to the head of the
canal in Cumberland via another B&O subsidiary, the Cumberland
and Pennsylvania Railroad. So from its resurrection after the 1899
flood until its demise in 1924, the C&O Canal served as little
more than a link in the distribution chain that delivered
B&O-owned coal to Washington, D.C.

Vin skimmed the issues discussed in the
minutes, looking for lists and tables. He found them in the
appendices. Financial statements for the years 1902 through 1922.
Statements documenting the coal tonnage carried and the tolls paid
each year. Annual statements of spending for the construction and
repair of canal boats, listed by boat number. And the pages he’d
been hoping to find – the annual fleet rosters from 1903 through
1922, listing the captains operating on the canal and the boats to
which they had been assigned.

The rosters were ordered by boat number, and
Vin skimmed quickly through the list of boats and captains for the
1903 season without finding the name he was looking for. He turned
to the roster for 1904 and found the following entry partway down
the page:

32 Emmert Reed Harpers Ferry Road, Sharpsburg,
Maryland

Flipping through the subsequent rosters
confirmed that Reed had captained boat 32 from 1904 through 1912.
Each entry listed the same address; Vin penciled it down along with
the boat number on the provided scrap paper. He paged through the
rest of the appendices, closed the ledger, and slipped it back into
its document box. After returning the boxes and signing out of the
room, he walked downstairs to the lobby, returned his badge, and
signed out of the building.

His visit to the National Archives had
required stepping through a gauntlet of checkpoints but taken less
than two hours from start to finish. And look what was offered! A
chance to sift at his own pace through original documents that were
well-preserved and a hundred years old. It was a benefit of moving
to the D.C. area that he’d never considered before.