Kevin Brandt has been superintendent of C&O Canal National Historical Park since February. He lives in Frederick with his wife and 17-year-old daughter.
What is your background? How did you become superintendent of this park?
I was born in Iowa but I grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and went to Ohio State and studied landscape architecture at the time the national Park Service was the biggest employer of landscape architects in the nation. Started out in Denver Colorado doing planning for various national parks all over the country. Ended up working at the Chattahoochee River national recreation area in Atlanta, Ga. as a planner, and just loved being in the park as opposed to a central office like I was in Colorado. … One thing led to another and was looking at jobs in New Orleans and here outside of Washington and thought, ‘Wow wouldn’t it be neat to work near Washington and work on a canal,’ and of course my boss Doug Faris at the time said, ‘You know we’ve got the Great Falls Tavern in the park’ and I thought ‘Wow, what a great park, they’ve got a tavern in the park’ Little did I know that it wasn’t a working tavern.
I’d worked here as about 8 years as [former superintendent Doug Faris’] deputy before he retired, and was fortunate enough to get the superintendency here, which is a real thrill for me. … I’ve probably worked in 12 or 15 national parks, everything from Bryce Canyon to Yellowstone, Chattahoochee River in Atlanta, and frankly I couldn’t think of a more challenging, more interesting, more rich and diverse park that the C&O Canal.
What do you think makes this park special?
The fact that there are still people in these communities that can say, “My great grandfather was a canal boat captain,” or “My cousin or my uncle two or three generations back used to work at the mill that provided the flour that was shipped on the C&O canal.” Or like with the Fletchers down here, who have been doing their thing on the canal for over 140 years.
Right now where we’re sitting, we’re sitting in the middle of the Potomac gorge and it’s one of the biologically diverse areas in the United States, because of the way the Potomac River cuts through these multiple environments.
Are there any particular anecdotes from your experience here at the park that stand out?
One of the folks that we work with closely did some genealogical work and was able to trace her family’s history back to canal families, and actually found a photograph where she can see her great-grandmother standing on a canal boat. And just seeing her recognize that there is some facial resemblance there and to think about what that person’s life was like going up and down the canal, as a mother. How do you keep the kids from jumping off the canal boat or falling off the canal boat? Actually they would have a ring on the top of the cabin, and they’d tie a rope through that ring, around the waist of the kids. It was long enough they could fall off the boat but not long enough that they would end up in the water.
How important are the park’s interpretative programs? What do you have planned for them, and what is the future for the Canal Clipper?
We’re going to be doing some things with our interpretative program that are more self-guided, probably with more waysides so that whether you’re biking or walking on the towpath … you can learn about the history of the canal and the things that happened in a particular spot. So we want to do that because of the three million people that come into the park, a fairly small percentage of them actually get into a visitors center.
But we also want to make sure that the kinds of experiences you have by riding a canal boat and going through a lock aren’t lost. And while we’re exploring every option for replacing a canal boat, you know it’s probably going to be a couple of years, best case, before we can do that. But that to me is so fundamental to telling the story, because where else can you go to go through an original 19th century lock?
I don’t yet know where the money’s going to come from but we’re certainly very interested in having a new canal clipper on the canal. In fact, we’ve thought about trying to get a replica of a Packet boat built, because other than historic photographs, there’s probably no one around that’s seen a real life packet boat on here. So it would have seating on the main deck like it does now, but on the roof level, there would be another level of seating up there. And historically these boats would have come from Georgetown out to here every day.
What is the budget picture for the park?
In a lot of ways, its no different than you or I. Neither of us probably has enough money to buy the car or the clothes or the house or whatever that we would like. And certainly if someone doubled or tripled or quintupled our budget, we’d manage to spend it on stuff that we think is important. But the fact that we don’t have all the money that we’d maybe like doesn’t mean that we don’t have things we can do. We still have a budget that’s about $8 million, and that’s a lot of money. And with that we keep this building open, we have rangers who still are operating the canal boat in Georgetown.
Yeah, we’d like to do more. We’ve got great ideas. And that’s where the whole notion of partnershipping comes in. We have a wonderful partnership with the Friends of the Great Falls Tavern here in this building. … Down at lock house 8 the Potomac Conservancy has a partnership with us and they’re restoring that lock house.
Did you meet the strategic goals set forth in the park’s management plan to be achieved by Sept. 30 of this year?
Well, the short answer is we’ve met all of our goals. I guess the question that everybody asks is how come you didn’t more? Well, we didn’t do more because we either didn’t have the time or the people to do more. In terms of preserving our historic structures, this year we got a grant of $150,000 from the Save America’s Treasures program, so we’re doing more restoration work on eight more lock houses. We had some work done on eradicating some exotic species in the park. … Do we have more? Sure, we’ve got more lock houses, we’ve got more English Ivy. But you can’t do everything in a day.
What are the biggest challenges for the next couple of years?
It’s with anybody who owns an old house. It’s just keeping up with all the old stuff in the park. Things wear out after 170 years and you’ve got to fix them. So we’re doing that. We’re going to have a couple of really big projects here in the Great Falls area. … We’ve got money that will protect this building, and we’re going to do some landscaping work outside that will make the outside of the building look more like it did during say the 1880s, which I think will be really interesting. And that will probably start summer of 05. And then maybe spring of 06, probably 18 months from now, we’re going to start a big project that will repave the entrance road, and they’re going to repair the shoulders, so that we’ve got 3-foot shoulders for people that want to bike and walk up and down the entrance road. And then we’ll have 11-foot travel lanes
All the parking area out here will be repaired, the curb will be repaired. And the parking area that’s closest to the building, we’re going to look at modifying that and restoring the landscaping there.
What about the repairs at Old Anglers and other sites to eliminate the odors from the Potomac Interceptor sewer line? Does it frustrate you that most people attribute the smell to the canal?
It’s a foul smell and we’ll certainly be very happy and grateful when that project is done. But there are two benefits for the park. One is that there shouldn’t be any more sewer smells, and two, at Angler’s and Fletcher’s we’re going to get new public restrooms with flush toilets. And about that time we’re going to come in and improve the parking areas there so it’s somewhat more organized and things are cleaned up a little bit.
When I first moved here, 8 or 9 years ago, I thought it was the canal [that smelled]. The first time I drove down Clara Barton Parkway and got down near Chain Bridge, there’s a vent there right at Chain Bridge. I thought oh my God I can’t believe I’m working at this stink pot. It was embarrassing. I asked Doug Faris when I got back to the office and he said it was the sewer line. I was like, “what sewer line?” and then I learned the real history.
What’s one thing you wish every visitor to the park knew coming in here?
I suspect that a lot of people who come here and live nearby the park don’t know that it’s a national park. This is a significant part of our American heritage, and yes we jog here, we bike here, we run here and are probably all unwinding from our work day and de-stressing and what not.
And then there’s this whole other side of the canal. You know the history. The vision that George Washington had for this country is right there in front of us. That’s what he envisioned is some way of linking the coastal areas, the Chesapeake Bay, with the inland waterways. And while it didn’t go all the way to Pittsburgh and connect up with the Ohio River, it didn’t need to because the railroads came along, but it was all part of that momentum that developed this country to what it is today.
Anything you’d like to see visitors do more or do less?
Well, there’s a lot of people that come here and maybe haven’t been to other areas of the park. But the park is 185 miles long. And so whether they’re here at Great Falls, Anglers, Carderock, but you know Seneca or Brunswick, Williamsport, Cumberland the PawPaw tunnel. To walk through a tunnel that’s over 3000 feet long is a pretty interesting experience. And to think that back in the 1840s they were digging a tunnel through 3000 feet.