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Improvement of Transportation (1.3.1)

The four decades preceding the Civil War were a period of considerable growth and change in Elizabeth City. Most of this growth came as improvements to the Dismal Swamp Canal finally made the endeavor a financial and commercial success.

In 1826 the Federal government purchased 600 shares of stock in the Dismal Swamp Canal, acquiring an additional 200 shares in 1829. This infusion of Federal funds enabled the canal company to enlarge the locks and deepen the channel so that larger, more profitable schooners and sloops could be admitted (Brown 1967, 48, 53). A third lottery in Norfolk on February 4, 1829 raised additional funds (Brown 1967, 45). Two years earlier, in 1827, the growing importance of Elizabeth City had been recognized with the relocation of the customs house of the port of Camden to the city (Griffin 1970, 74). As this customs district exercised jurisdiction over shipping arriving at and departing from the eastern Albemarle Sound, its location necessitated captains and merchants to come to Elizabeth City in order to obtain clearance papers. These events furthered Elizabeth City's position as the area's commercial and administrative center and foretold a bright future for the growing city.

The improvements of the canal during the late 1820s resulted in such an increase in traffic that tolls collected more than doubled during the first three years after the canal was reopened, from $13,040 in 1829 to $33,290 in 1832 (Brown 1967, 64). The Dismal Swamp Canal was so successful in attracting commerce to Elizabeth City that in 1830 the editor of the Edenton Gazette complained that, while the canal "may be of incalculable benefit . . . to Virginia, . . . to North Carolina [it was] a blood-sucker at her very vitals." (Edenton Gazette, February 27, 1830). In the eariy 1840s improvements were made which greatly increased the efficiency of the canal. These included new locks at the canal's northern end (at Deep Creek, now part of Chesapeake, Virginia) and a new channel at the southern end south of South Mills. The new channel, which cut in half the time required for a trip from Elizabeth City to Norfolk, greatly improved the profitability of merchants and shippers in both cities, thus encouraging even greater commercial investments (Brown 1967, 71-74).

In 1829 the Virginia and North Carolina Transportation Company, which had been formed as a logical offshoot of the Dismal Swamp Canal Company, acquired several canal boats for use on the region's waterways. The ambitions of the company, and the seemingly unlimited prospects of the canal itself, were reflected by naming these barges and schooners after the rivers in North Carolina and Virginia that emptied into the Albemarle Sound, the very regions which the company intended to serve: the Meherrin, the Elizabeth, the Staunton, the Roanoke, the Dan, the Chowan, the Pasquotank, and the Halifax. During the antebellum period steamboats played an increasingly important role in transportation through the canal. The steamboat Petersburg, purchased in March 1829, met the company's barges in the Pasquotank River and towed them to various ports on the sound and rivers. The successful transport in May 1829 of a barge of cotton from Weldon--a journey that took it down the Roanoke River, across the Albemarle Sound, up the Pasquotank River to Elizabeth City, and through the canal to Norfolk--illustrated the canal's immense potential in bnnging eastern North Carolina produce to Norfolk. The fact that all this traffic passed through Elizabeth City and the Dismal Swamp Canal meant considerable activity and business for the town's merchants, brokers, and laborers (Brown, 1967: 53-55).

In addition to the canal, other modes of transportation added to Elizabeth City's growth and importance. Overland travel during the antebellum period, while far from good and often difficult, nonetheless underwent gradual improvements, making the markets and services of Elizabeth City increasingly accessible to farmers in Pasquotank and Camden counties. Both the Lamb's and Narrows ferries continued to provide access across the Pasquotank River to Camden County. Various lines of stage coaches provided passenger service to Norfolk, Hertford, and Edenton, connecting with vessels in either Elizabeth City, or Edenton for continuation to North Carolina towns south and west of the Albemarle Sound (Butchko, 1989: 13).

Elizabeth City's role as the transfer point for regional commerce, however, was lessened in the 1830s with the completion of the Portsmouth and Weldon Railroad between those two cities in Virginia and North Carolina, respectively (Butchko, 1991: 15). Not only was produce from the upper Roanoke River (known as the Dan River in Virginia) diverted to the railroad at Weldon, but much of the produce of the western Albemarle Sound (the lower Roanoke, the Meherrin, and Chowan rivers) was subsequently shipped up the Chowan River for transferral to the railroad station at what is now Franklin, Virginia. Thus the products of both these regions no longer came through Elizabeth City and the Dismal Swamp Canal. The lure of the railroad as an advanced means of transportation led to the incorporation of the Norfolk and Edenton Rail Road in 1836. This road was to run through Elizabeth City, and would most likely have ushered in an era of unbridled economic development. However, for reasons not understood, it was too ambitious a scheme for the troubled 1830s economy (Laws 1836-37, 232-247; Butchko 1992, 21).

An even greater challenge to Elizabeth City's position as the region's transportation hub was the construction between 1855 and 1859 of the Albemarle-Chesapeake Canal twenty-five miles northeast of the city. The new canal, wholly within Virginia, connected a tributary of Currituck Sound to the same branch of the Elizabeth River to which the Dismal Swamp Canal was connected. This canal was only six miles long and its single lock was twice as long as the largest lock on the Dismal Swamp Canal. The Albemarle-Chesapeake Canal, which opened in January 1859, was able to attract not only traffic that had been too large for the older route, but also vessels interested in a shorter route from the eastern end of Albemarle Sound to Norfolk. Commerce from the Pamlico Sound, New Bern, and Washington bypassed Elizabeth City for he newer and shorter canal (Brown 1967, 75-77). The editor of the Democratic Pioneer, a newspaper published in Elizabeth City from 1850 through 1859, warned that, with this new rival, "The large trade that now centers in Elizabeth City from the hundreds of vessels that yearly pass through the Dismal Swamp Canal, will be, in large measure, carried to other places" (Democratic Pioneer, October 18, 1859).

However, traffic through the Dismal Swamp Canal was still reported as being heavy in October 1860, and before the new canal could become established as a serious competitor, the nation was plunged into war (Griffin 1970, 85). Nonetheless, the economic competitiveness of the older canal, and Elizabeth City's vitality, was threatened; indeed, in a 1878 report to Congress it was stated that the financial difficulties of the Dismal Swamp Canal after the Civil War began with the completion of the rival canal (Brown 1967, 77).