The plan for a canal came up again twenty years after Washington died, and in 1823 a charter was given for building the Chesapeake and Ohio canal. New York had then been six years at work on the Erie canal and would finish it in two years more. If the Virginia and Maryland people had known that most of them would be dead before their canal was half done, and that it would never be really finished, they would not have undertaken it. [Illustration: FIG. 39. CHESAPEAKE AND OHIO CANAL, CUMBERLAND] They did not begin the work until five years later, in 1828. Then a great crowd came together at Georgetown, now a part of Washington, on the Potomac, to see the first earth thrown out. President John Quincy Adams made the principal speech and then took a spade to begin the digging. The spade hit a root and would not go into the soil. The President set down his foot more firmly, but still the spade would not move. At last, determined to succeed, he pulled off his coat for the job. The crowd liked this and cheered loudly, while Mr. Adams accomplished what he had set out to do. On this very day something else was going on at Baltimore, forty miles away. Baltimore was not on the Potomac, but her people did not propose to be left out of the western trade on that account. After much disputing a charter had been granted for building what became one of the most famous, as it is one of the oldest, American railways,--the Baltimore and Ohio. Hence Baltimore had a celebration of her own on this same Fourth of July, 1828. They did not have the President of the United States to help them, but they fared very well. They had great faith in what they were doing, and doubtless would have shouted even louder had they known what a great railroad they were starting and what a hard time the canal people would have. There was only one man remaining of all the patriots who had signed the Declaration of Independence almost fifty years before. This was Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and he was the guest of Baltimore on that day. A prayer was offered, the Declaration was read, and after an officer of the railway company had spoken Mr. Carroll removed the first earth. As if nature would be kind to an old man, no root made his work hard; and the superstitious may say that the President’s toilsome digging over in Georgetown was a bad omen for that enterprise. It is easier to look back than to see into the future.