Potomac Company Payroll Log
Collection
Identifier: GTM-0058
A single payroll log of the Potomac Company ("Potowmack Company"), a company formed to improve the navigation system for the Potomac River, for canal construction workers employed at Little Falls on the Potomac River. Written in tabular format, the document lists 90 individual workers with their occupations, number of days worked, monthly wage rates, rations deducted from wages, and the authorization of the receipt of payment signified by the workers' signatures or mark and the signature of the supervisors. This list includes 16 enslaved laborers and 10 free Black laborers, each denoted with the abbreviation "N" followed by their name. Enslaved people are also identified by their owners' names (who generally signed for their payment) and free Black laborers are identified as "free."
This payroll lists enslaved laborers who were hired out by their slave owners to the Potomac Company for the construction of Little Falls.
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Materials in this collection are in the public domain. Permission to publish or reproduce is not required.
The Potomac Company (variously spelled Patowmac Company and Potowmack Company) was formed on May 30, 1785, after the assemblies of Virginia and Maryland chartered the company with the objective of improving navigation on both sides of the Potomac River. For nearly twenty years, George Washington had advocated for the construction of a system of locks and dams, sluices (channels dug out of the basin of the river), and stillwater canals to open navigation from Georgetown and Cumberland, Maryland, to promote commerce. The construction of bypass canals at Little Falls (two miles upriver from the fall line at Three Sisters and Great Falls) and Great Falls (five miles upriver from Little Falls) represented a significant engineering challenge because of the precipitous drops in the course of the river (respectively 37 feet and 76 feet). In 1802, the Company completed these bypass canals, but the canal never generated income from tolls because the canal did not fulfill its objective of providing easy passage along the Potomac. In 1828, the Potomac Company surrendered its charter to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company in 1828.
A man listed as part of the Little Falls work force,"N. Yellow George," who was enslaved by William Wallace, is probably George Pointer. On September 5, 1829, by then a free man and a supervisory engineer for the Potomac Company, Pointer wrote a letter to the directors of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal that is held at the National Archives and re-printed in the family biography Between Freedom and Equality: The History of an African American Family by Barbara Boyle Torrey and Clara Myrick Green (Georgetown University Press, 2021).
0.1 Cubic Feet (1 folder)
English
The log book was found among the Woodstock College Archives and transferred to the Booth Family Center for Special Collections Manuscripts unit in 2024. It's provenance is unknown.
48" X 15 1/4"
Part of the Georgetown University Manuscripts Repository