Stubborn Canoeist Comes to Rescue of Historic Chesapeake & Ohio Canal

Growing up in Washington, D.C.’s Foggy Bottom neighborhood, a child of the Depression years, Richard L. Stanton was drawn to the Potomac River and its decrepit, trash-strewn companion, the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal.

In those days, just a decade after commercial barge traffic ceased on the canal in 1924, Stanton spent his free time along the Georgetown waterfront, begging rides on canoes, whose possibilities had captured his imagination. He dreamed of exploring the river and the 184.5-mile canal northwest to the mountains of Western Maryland, and of some day joining the U.S. Park Service.

Traveling as young man to the source of the Potomac in West Virginia, several hundred miles away, “was the most thrilling thing that I had ever done,” Stanton said. “It changed my life.” Being named superintendent of the C&O; Canal National Historic Park in 1981 capped a Park Service career, begun in 1965, that had included far more illustrious assignments, he said.

8,700 Canoe Miles

Upon his retirement last week, 65-year-old Stanton had logged more than 8,700 miles by canoe on the waterways between Georgetown and the Cumberland, Md., region, journeys that he began recording in meticulous fashion as a boy of 12.

“I’m still a Boy Scout at heart,” said Stanton, a bear of a man who formerly was responsible for land acquisition for parks such as the Cape Cod National Seashore, Fire Island and the Everglades and who directed large Park Service regions in the mid-Atlantic and New England.

A Thoreau-quoting, self-described “bleeding heart environmentalist,” Stanton gained a reputation in the Park Service as a no-nonsense shogun in the tradition of the tightly controlled park domain. But he is also known for working miracles in cooperation: getting the many government agencies of the area to agree on policies for river jurisdiction and attracting a wide variety of volunteer help for the park and the time-weakened canal, which is vulnerable to hurricanes and other disasters.

Stanton is credited by local members of the community-based C&O; Canal Assn. and the federally appointed park advisory commission with finding ways to restore and preserve the canal at a time of major cutbacks in federal spending on parks.

‘Gorgeous’ Condition

In November, 1985, after a summer in which the canal park maintenance workers had manicured it to what Stanton remembers as a “gorgeous” state, raging flood waters undid all the work.

The flood scoured the towpath, weakened walls and eroded the canal bed in 1985--and deposited tons of refrigerators, carpeting, parts of trailers and cars and other debris along the banks of the waterways.

“Everything I had worked for, all the money that I had been scheming to get, went down the river--literally,” Stanton said. “I sat here for hours, my head in my hands, thinking. There wasn’t a very good feeling on the part of the people who had the money.

“The attitude was: ‘How many times are we going to pump money into that canal? Why don’t we just leave it the way it is?’ ”

Stanton, who credits the Boy Scouts for steering him into the right way of life, came up with a plan.

The next spring, he shut down much of his park to recreational campers and banned walkers and bikers from badly damaged sections of the towpath.

Stanton and his representatives rallied 8,700 scouts from the Mid-Atlantic area and other volunteers for a massive cleanup, one that ultimately saved the federal government more than $1 million. Members of Congress, impressed at the effort, approved $5.5 million to carry on the work.

Members Use It

It helped, he acknowledged, that many members hike, run, bike and canoe along the canal.

The towpath’s most prominent jogger was then-Vice President Bush.

Since the summer of 1986, 3,000 to 4,000 volunteers, many of them youngsters, have returned each summer to help haul out the mounds of debris left by the flood and trash carelessly deposited by visitors.

It is an opportunity “to promote the environmental ethic to kids,” Stanton said.

“It’s worth it, even if you have only one troop of scouts, because they go out there and get mad. . . . If we’re to clean up the environment nationally, this is the attitude.”

Stanton today finds the Potomac River Valley vastly more beautiful than when he was a child.

“There used to be shacks all over the canal,” he said. “There was a hodgepodge of people squatting and doing whatever they wanted to do along the canal, stripping the metal off the locks.

”. . .The towpath was mired down; there were areas where people were permanently affixed, with shacks and businesses.”

While floods have badly damaged the clay-bottomed canal over the years, they also served to discourage development along the Potomac, Stanton said, allowing nature to regain a foothold in many areas.

When he was first assigned to the canal area years ago, as a U.S. Park Service land acquisition specialist, farmers were still claiming rights to fence in and use land along the river, long regarded as abandoned railroad property.

Heart of City

“This used to be a place where they’d banish” park superintendents, Stanton said of the C&O;, one of the few parks to start in the heart of a city and stretch out to wilderness.

Now, he said, “This is a sweetheart park; this is one of the great parks in the system, because of the water, because of what it used to be.”

“I cashed in my favors” to be assigned to C&O; headquarters here in Sharpsburg, Stanton said.

Protecting the park from efforts to build boat ramps, hot-dog stands and even highways along the canal right-of-way has been one mandate, he said; another was to get park rangers and other staff members to patrol by boat to keep an eye on the aging aqueducts, 500 miles of stone walls and other historic structures.

During his retirement, he said, he plans to spend more time on the water--especially now that he has acquired his third canoe, a 50-pound Mad River Kevlar tough enough to ride the Potomac’s treacherous rock outcroppings.