Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 13).djvu/123

 promise cost the rail road heavily. It was to subscribe for 2,500 shares of Canal Company stock ($266,000) and the canal company built the road through the territory in dispute (the Point of Rocks). The Rail Road Company completed the road to the Maryland shore of the Potomac opposite Harper's Ferry in 1834, it being opened December 1. Here, however, it was to pause, for the compromise signed by the two companies demanded that the rail road should not be built up the Potomac until the canal should have been completed to Cumberland—if that was done within the time named in the charter (1840).

Though at all times master of the situation, the Canal Company found its task tremendously heavy; the weather, varying prices of labor and necessaries, combined with great physical obstacles, rendered the undertaking one in which patience was as necessary as capital. Both were many times exhausted. We have seen that contracts were first let in 1828. By the president's report to the legislature in January, 1831, we find that forty-eight miles were