C&O Canal Cumberland Visitor Center

Construction on the C&O Canal began in 1828, the same era that gave birth to the railroad in Baltimore, and the two technologies raced each other westward through the Potomac valley. The canal was a marvel of hand labor, its route lifted over the changing terrain by a long series of lift locks and carried across streams on stone aqueducts, all dug and built by crews of laborers, many of them immigrants.

The canal reached Cumberland in 1850, and here, against the barrier of the Alleghenies, its builders stopped. The dream of pushing on to the Ohio River was abandoned as too costly, especially with the railroad already crossing the mountains. For nearly a century, though, the finished canal carried boats loaded mostly with coal from the western Maryland fields down to the tidewater, a slow, mule-drawn commerce that shaped the towns along its banks.

The visitor center makes its home in the grand Western Maryland Railway Station, a handsome early twentieth-century building that speaks to the age when railroads reigned. That the story of the canal is now told from inside a railroad station is a neat irony, since it was the railroad that ultimately eclipsed the waterway it ran alongside.

Inside, exhibits trace the life of the canal, from its construction and the laborers who dug it to the boat families who lived and worked aboard the barges, and the eventual decline of canal commerce. It is the best place to understand the whole waterway before setting out along it, and the restored station itself is worth a look as a piece of Cumberland's architectural heritage.

The most enduring legacy of the C&O Canal is its towpath, the level path along which mules once hauled the boats, which now runs nearly the full length of the old canal from Washington, D.C., to Cumberland as a national park trail. Hikers and cyclists travel it for a day or for its entire length, passing locks, lockhouses, aqueducts, and long stretches of quiet river and forest.

Cumberland is where the towpath ends, and where an even longer journey can begin. The Great Allegheny Passage, a rail-trail built on former railroad grades, starts here and continues on toward Pittsburgh, so that a rider can, in principle, travel by trail all the way from the nation's capital across the mountains. That makes the visitor center a true crossroads for long-distance travelers.

Cumberland grew up as a gateway to the West, a place where roads, canal, and railroads all funneled through the natural gap the Potomac cut in the mountains. Its downtown retains handsome nineteenth-century buildings, a pedestrian mall, churches, and the tunnels of old Fort Cumberland beneath the streets, all within a short walk of the station.

The city also shares its historic station with the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad, whose excursion trains climb into the Alleghenies from the same platform, so a visit can combine canal history on foot with a mountain train ride. Surrounded by ridges, forests, and the winding Potomac, Cumberland makes a rich base for exploring the highlands of western Maryland.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.