Georgetown Waterfront Park

Long before it was ten green acres for walkers and joggers, this stretch of Georgetown waterfront in Washington, D.C. was a working tobacco port and then a flour-milling district powered by the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which opened in 1828. The guide traces mills, a coal yard, and a 1912 flour operation along Water Street, and the decades of coal smoke, mud, and fenced-off ground that followed. It follows the National Park Service and Georgetown residents through a decades-long effort, begun in the late 1970s, to turn the shoreline into parkland.