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The Paw Paw Tunnel is a long canal tunnel on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal (C&O) in Allegany County, Maryland. Located near Paw Paw, West Virginia, it was built to bypass the Paw Paw Bends, a stretch of the Potomac River containing five horseshoe-shaped bends. The town, the bends, and the tunnel take their name from the pawpaw trees that grow prolifically along nearby ridges. ==History== At Paw Paw, the canal engineers had a quandary with no easy solutions: follow the river, with its cliffs which would have required crossing over to West Virginia, damming the river to make a slackwater and hacking out from the cliffs on the Maryland side, or making a tunnel. The newly appointed engineer, Charles B. Fisk, managed to convince the board of directors of the tunnel, and the tunnel plan was approved in February 1836, with an expected completion date of July 1838.〔 p. 198〕 Lee Montgomery,〔 a Methodist minister who had experience from building the canal tunnel for the Union Canal〔Hahn, p. 200〕 was awarded the contract on March 15, 1836. Construction on the tunnel began in 1836. Unfortunately for Montgomery, the Irish workers were not skilled at tunnel work, so he obtained English masons, English and Welsh miners, and some "Dutch" (German ) labourers.〔 More unfortunately, this caused racial tensions which exploded into violence in 1837 and 1838, specifically between the Irish and everyone else; destroying the tavern at Oldtown, burning shanties, and the like.〔Hahn, p. 199〕 There were more riots in 1839 at Little Orleans.〔 Montgomery succeeded in boring the tunnel through on June 5, 1840, at a point 1505 feet from the south portal,〔 p. 509〕 but did not finish it.〔 Due to construction and financial problems, there was no work done from 1841 to 1847. In 1848, a subcontract was let to McCulloch and Day to finish the tunnel. The tunnel was opened for traffic (and essentially completed) in 1850, but the brick liner was not finished until after the tunnel was opened. The construction costs were $616,478.65.〔 The project was planned to be completed in two years, but there were many difficulties in the process of construction. The construction company seriously underestimated the difficulty of the job. Violence frequently broke out between various gangs of immigrant laborers of different ethnicities, and wages were often unpaid due to the company's financial problems. The tunnel was finally completed but nearly bankrupted the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company. The lengthy construction and high cost forced the company to end canal construction at Cumberland, Maryland, in 1850, rather than continue on to Pittsburgh as originally planned. Though never one of the longest tunnels in the world, it remains one of the greatest engineering feats of its day. In 1872, a semaphore signal was installed at the west end of the tunnel to control traffic.〔Davies, p. 511〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Paw Paw Tunnel」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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