How a Supreme Court docket Justice Helped Create the 185-Mile C&O Canal Path

From the Summer season 2025 concern of Dwelling Chicken journal. Subscribe now.

About 70 years in the past, Supreme Court docket Justice William O. Douglas helped protect an essential leisure and environmental landmark, the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Nationwide Historic Park. And he did so not with a judicial ruling that cited a precedent, however with a letter to the editor of the Washington Publish that invoked “the whistling wings of geese.”

In January 1954, the Publish, in a newspaper editorial, had given its coveted endorsement to a authorities proposal to show an deserted canal web site that stretches from Cumberland, Maryland, to Washington, D.C.—recognized colloquially because the C&O Canal—right into a 60 mph freeway. In its endorsement, headlined “Potomac Parkway,” the Publish tapped into the post-World Warfare II period’s go-go enthusiasm for freeway building, evaluating the undertaking to the “magnificent” Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina: “The aim of such a parkway could be to open up the best scenic asset on this space—the Potomac River—to wider public enjoyment.”

Justice Douglas, an avid birder and naturalist, responded with a letter to the editor that pleaded with the newspaper to take one other look, and challenged the editorial author to stroll the canal with him, writing:

I really feel that in case your editor did, he would return a brand new man and use the ability of your nice editorial web page to assist maintain this sanctuary untouched. … He would see unusual islands and promontories by means of the fantasy of fog; he would uncover the glory there may be within the first flower of spring, the glory there may be even in a blade of grass; the whistling wings of geese would make silence have new values for him. Sure it’s that he may by no means purchase that understanding going 60, and even 25, miles an hour.

Justice Douglas had been nominated to the Supreme Court docket by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939. His 36-year tenure, which ended when he retired in 1975, continues to be the longest of any Supreme Court docket justice. An outsized persona on the bench, Justice Douglas was recognized for his forceful advocacy of civil rights and civil liberties. As a part of the Warren Court docket within the Fifties and ’60s, he was a part of a society-changing bench that invalidated segregation legal guidelines (Brown v. Board of Schooling), prolonged new protections to felony defendants (Brady v. Maryland), and broadened free speech protections (Terminiello v. Chicago). In his dissenting opinion in Dennis v. United States, he championed what he known as “full and free dialogue even of concepts we hate.”

Justice Douglas was additionally a forceful advocate for the surroundings, lending his high-profile standing as a Supreme Court docket choose to efforts outdoors the court docket to protect the North Cascades in Washington State (the place he grew up), the Wind River area in Wyoming, and the Allagash River watershed in Maine. Within the 2022 guide Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Nice Environmental Awakening, historian Douglas Brinkley included Justice Douglas among the many legends of the late-Twentieth-century conservation motion:

Unafraid of conflict-of-interest prices, Douglas turned his Supreme Court docket workplace right into a manner station for elite conservation teams. … With hardly a murmur of criticism within the nationwide press, Douglas’s sustained coverage activism outdoors his chambers is with out precedent. By “climbing and hollering,” as he put it, his “Gandhian protest”—and different demonstrations that adopted—had helped set up greenbelts, nature preserves, and open areas throughout the land.

In his January 19, 1954, letter to the Publish, Justice Douglas challenged the editorial board to return stroll all 185 miles of the towpath from Cumberland to the nation’s capital, “with packs on our backs.” The letter had a direct influence, because the newspaper’s editorial web page editors took him up on his problem, and reporters from nationwide magazines, CBS Radio, the Related Press and the Publish joined in to cowl the eight-day journey.

Repurposing an Out of date Transport Route

The C&O Canal was constructed within the nineteenth century to ship supplies between Washington, D.C., and the Ohio River. The towpath, a mud and stone path that runs alongside the canal, was initially designed for mules to tow canal boats by means of the water.

Groundbreaking came about in 1828, but it surely wasn’t accomplished till the center of the century, and by then the sooner railroads had turn into the dominant mode of transportation. In 1938, the federal  authorities took over the deserted canal. Twelve years later, the Bureau of Public Roads’ Chesapeake & Ohio Canal report back to Congress proposed a 24-foot-wide parkway for vehicle journey alongside the C&O Canal.

Justice Douglas wasn’t the primary to boost an objection. In January 1953, Irston R. Barnes, the president of the Audubon Society of the District of Columbia (now referred to as DC Chicken Alliance), pushed again on the freeway proposal in his weekly Washington Publish column, “The Naturalist.” Barnes proposed that the “canal be restored as a freeway for canoes,” and prompt “the towpath turn into a rustic lane for hikers and cyclists.”

It was Justice Douglas, nonetheless, who had the standing to concern a high-profile public problem. Not solely was he a robust Supreme Court docket choose, however he was a member of each the Sierra Membership and the Wilderness Society. He cherished the outside a lot that in 1949, Soviet Union radio accused him of spying when he was noticed climbing the border space between the usS.R. and Iran. When the Supreme Court docket dominated in 1972 that the Sierra Membership didn’t have standing to sue to stop the Walt Disney group from constructing a $35 million resort on public land in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain vary, Douglas urged, in a well-known dissent, “the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their very own preservation.” Fifty years later, federal appeals court docket Choose M. Margaret McKeown wrote in her 2022 biography of Justice Douglas that the revolutionary dissent “introduced residence the significance of opening the courts to environmental disputes and arguably remodeled the way in which environmental organizations see their mission—as standing for the timber.”

Immediately, the Sierra Membership offers out its William O. Douglas Award to acknowledge individuals who make excellent use of authorized and judicial processes to attain environmental targets.

“The Blister Brigade”

On March 20, 1954, Justice Douglas and about three dozen different hikers began off from the Cumberland trailhead. The group included Publish editorial web page editor Robert Estabrook and affiliate editor Merlo Pusey, in addition to notable environmentalists similar to Sigurd Olson, director of the Nationwide Parks Affiliation, and Olaus Murie, president of the Wilderness Society. The following day’s version of the Washington Publish ran an enormous photograph of Justice Douglas, Barnes (the D.C. Audubon chapter president), and James Eaton (described within the caption as a “veteran canal man”) above the fold on the entrance web page. Within the photograph, which was headlined “On the Path with Justice Douglas,” the justice is grinning and sporting a digital camera and what seems to be a pair of binoculars slung round his neck.

“By means of a gauntlet of woodchuck holes, tanglewood, and cameramen, the Justice William O. Douglas-Washington Publish climbing occasion trudged 22 miles down the C&O Canal towpath to this under-mountain passage immediately,” wrote Publish Nation Life Editor Aubrey Graves in a narrative datelined Paw Paw Tunnel, Maryland.

That first day turned out to be a birders’ bonanza. Barnes recognized many birdcalls for the occasion, and CBS Radio correspondent Lewis W. Shollenberger recorded for his viewers “the conversations of a titmouse, a Carolina Wren, a treeful of grackles, quite a few geese, crows, and a Crimson-winged Blackbird,” Graves reported, “in addition to the sound of the outdated mule bells.”

The group pushed on, overlaying 189 miles in eight days in complete, though solely Justice Douglas and eight members hiked your complete manner; 40 others did elements of it (together with Pusey, the Publish affiliate editor, who walked 140 miles). The AP dubbed the hikers “the blister brigade.” However they didn’t precisely tough it. They slept in non-public lodges, and the Potomac Appalachian Path Membership dealt with their meals and schlepped their gear.

As Douglas’s delegation approached Washington on March 27, supporters began becoming a member of in, together with some in canoes down on the canal’s water, sporting indicators that learn, “save the canal” and “much less automobiles—extra canoes!” For the final 5 miles, Douglas, with some poison ivy on his face, and his fellow hikers rode alongside a mule-drawn Nationwide Park Service sightseeing barge.

A welcoming occasion of hundreds of cheering individuals awaited the group within the D.C. neighborhood of Georgetown— and by then, Douglas had largely gained over the Washington Publish editors. In a brand new editorial just some days later, the Publish wrote that “quite a few blisters and torn tendons later,” the newspaper now believed it made sense for the parkway plan to be drastically scaled again to guard wildlife habitat. That helped construct political momentum to protect the C&O Canal and towpath.

Seven years later, in his remaining month in workplace, President Dwight D. Eisenhower designated the C&O Canal and towpath a nationwide monument. In 1971, President Richard Nixon signed a regulation making it a nationwide historic park (simply months after Nixon tried, unsuccessfully, to get Justice Douglas impeached, in collaboration with Home Minority Chief Rep. Gerald Ford).

On account of Douglas’s advocacy, the C&O Canal Nationwide Historic Park endures as a ribbon of chook habitat winding alongside the Potomac River from the extremely developed metro D.C. space to the Appalachian ridges and valleys within the panhandle of Maryland. Birders have taken be aware, submitting greater than 50,000 eBird checklists from the marshes, grasslands, open water, and forests alongside the canal—which embrace data of 316 chook species from Blackpoll Warblers to Black-legged Kittiwakes.

And the canal continues to be a lot as Douglas described in his letter to the Publish seven a long time in the past: “A refuge, a spot of retreat, a protracted stretch of quiet and peace on the capital’s again door—a wilderness space the place we will commune with God and with nature, a spot not but marred by the roar of wheels and the sound of horns.” Because of Justice Douglas, it by no means can be.