11-gun salute celebrated opening of Assawoman Canal
The booming sounds of cannon fire echoed across the waters of the coastal bays. A dredge, a workhorse vessel that was digging muck from the bottom of Indian River Bay, was hardly a place for a celebratory dinner. The men who headed the work crews who were digging the Assawoman Canal had a reason to celebrate.
On June 25, 1891, the Delaware Gazette and State Journal reported, “We were visited last week by C. McLean, the contractor and Gen. Smith of Wilmington, Del., who has the work in charge, and others. A dinner was served to them on board the dredge at 3 p.m. ... A salute of 11 guns was fired from a cannon of our own manufacture. They seemed to be well pleased with the work.”
In the late 19th century, railroads were the royalty of transportation. Delaware had a train network that carried farm produce to market and big-city goods to small towns scattered across Sussex County.
The farms and communities, such as Ocean View, that lined the western shores of Rehoboth and Indian River bays, however, were poorly served by the railroad lines that ran through Millsboro, Frankford and Selbyville. Rehoboth Beach was connected to the main north-south tracks by a long spur, and this line was convenient for resort visitors, but it did little for the farmers along the coastal bays.
A network of canals, it was believed, that linked towns from Lewes, Delaware to Chincoteague, Virginia, would enable coastal farmers to widen their markets. A vital link in this system of artificial waterways was the Assawoman Canal.
In 1891, Captain Robert Dasey of Frankford, a member of the Delaware General Assembly and a proponent of the canal, provided an update on the work done on the waterway.
The Delaware Gazette and State Journal reported on May 7, 1891, “that in about two weeks, the canal will be completed so far as to be navigable for craft drawing four feet of water from Rehoboth Bay to Isle of Wight Bay and that a little steamboat now lying in Rehoboth Bay will make the initial through trip down to Chincoteague. There is a stretch of about 600 feet yet to dredge through to this depth. The canal will hereafter be widened and deepened but this will complete the work on the lower end of it for the present.”
The newspaper also reported that with the opening of the canal, ocean water was able to flow more easily through the Indian River Inlet and move southward through the canal to Little Assawoman Bay, which made the coastal bays more salty.
With the opening of the canal, small boats and barges were able to move through the coastal bays with ease, but the economic boom failed to materialize.
In the early years of the 20th century, however, Bethany Beach was established as an oceanfront resort. A paved coastal road connecting the new town to Rehoboth to the north and Fenwick Island to the south was decades in the future, and reaching Bethany Beach was quite a chore.
A significant number of vacationers from western Pennsylvania built summer homes at the new resort. To reach Bethany Beach, they took a long train ride to Rehoboth, where they boarded a small steamboat to travel southward across the coastal bays.
After a secondary canal from the Assawoman canal to the center of Bethany Beach was dug, vacationers could steam directly into the center of the resort, where pond known as “The Loop” discharged passengers. The Assawoman canal and the small auxiliary waterway into Bethany Beach proved invaluable in sustaining the resort, and the network of artificial waterways was worthy of an 11-gun salute.
Principal sources
Delaware Gazette and State Journal, June 25, 1891.
Delaware Gazette and State Journal, May 7. 1891
Carter, Dick. The History of Sussex County. Rehoboth Beach: Community News Corporation, 1976, p. 45.
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This article originally appeared on Salisbury Daily Times: 11-gun salute celebrated opening of Assawoman Canal
