How a Supreme Court Justice Helped Create the 185-Mile C&O Canal Trail

From the Summer 2025 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.

About 70 years ago, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas helped preserve an important recreational and environmental landmark, the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park. And he did so not with a judicial ruling that cited a precedent, but with a letter to the editor of the Washington Post that invoked “the whistling wings of ducks.”

In January 1954, the Post, in a newspaper editorial, had given its coveted endorsement to a government proposal to turn an abandoned canal site that stretches from Cumberland, Maryland, to Washington, D.C.—known colloquially as the C&O Canal—into a 60 mph highway. In its endorsement, headlined “Potomac Parkway,” the Post tapped into the post-World War II era’s go-go enthusiasm for highway construction, comparing the project to the “magnificent” Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina: “The purpose of such a parkway would be to open up the greatest scenic asset in this area—the Potomac River—to wider public enjoyment.”

Justice Douglas, an avid birder and naturalist, responded with a letter to the editor that pleaded with the newspaper to take another look, and challenged the editorial writer to walk the canal with him, writing:

I feel that if your editor did, he would return a new man and use the power of your great editorial page to help keep this sanctuary untouched. … He would see strange islands and promontories through the fantasy of fog; he would discover the glory there is in the first flower of spring, the glory there is even in a blade of grass; the whistling wings of ducks would make silence have new values for him. Certain it is that he could never acquire that understanding going 60, or even 25, miles an hour.

Justice Douglas had been nominated to the Supreme Court by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939. His 36-year tenure, which ended when he retired in 1975, is still the longest of any Supreme Court justice. An outsized personality on the bench, Justice Douglas was known for his forceful advocacy of civil rights and civil liberties. As part of the Warren Court in the 1950s and ’60s, he was part of a society-changing bench that invalidated segregation laws (Brown v. Board of Education), extended new protections to criminal defendants (Brady v. Maryland), and broadened free speech protections (Terminiello v. Chicago). In his dissenting opinion in Dennis v. United States, he championed what he called “full and free discussion even of ideas we hate.”

Justice Douglas was also a forceful advocate for the environment, lending his high-profile status as a Supreme Court judge to efforts outside the court to preserve the North Cascades in Washington State (where he grew up), the Wind River region in Wyoming, and the Allagash River watershed in Maine. In the 2022 book Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening, historian Douglas Brinkley included Justice Douglas among the legends of the late-20th-century conservation movement:

Unafraid of conflict-of-interest charges, Douglas turned his Supreme Court office into a way station for elite conservation groups. … With hardly a murmur of criticism in the national press, Douglas’s sustained policy activism outside his chambers is without precedent. By “hiking and hollering,” as he put it, his “Gandhian protest”—and other demonstrations that followed—had helped establish greenbelts, nature preserves, and open spaces across the land.

In his January 19, 1954, letter to the Post, Justice Douglas challenged the editorial board to come walk all 185 miles of the towpath from Cumberland to the nation’s capital, “with packs on our backs.” The letter had an immediate impact, as the newspaper’s editorial page editors took him up on his challenge, and reporters from national magazines, CBS Radio, the Associated Press and the Post joined in to cover the eight-day trip.

Repurposing an Obsolete Transport Route

The C&O Canal was built in the 19th century to ship materials between Washington, D.C., and the Ohio River. The towpath, a dirt and stone trail that runs alongside the canal, was originally designed for mules to tow canal boats through the water.

Groundbreaking took place in 1828, but it wasn’t completed until the middle of the century, and by then the faster railroads had become the dominant mode of transportation. In 1938, the federal  government took over the abandoned canal. Twelve years later, the Bureau of Public Roads’ Chesapeake & Ohio Canal report to Congress proposed a 24-foot-wide parkway for automobile travel along the C&O Canal.

Justice Douglas wasn’t the first to raise an objection. In January 1953, Irston R. Barnes, the president of the Audubon Society of the District of Columbia (now known as DC Bird Alliance), pushed back on the highway proposal in his weekly Washington Post column, “The Naturalist.” Barnes proposed that the “canal be restored as a highway for canoes,” and suggested “the towpath become a country lane for hikers and cyclists.”

It was Justice Douglas, however, who had the standing to issue a high-profile public challenge. Not only was he a powerful Supreme Court judge, but he was a member of both the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. He cherished the outdoors so much that in 1949, Soviet Union radio accused him of spying when he was spotted hiking the border area between the U.S.S.R. and Iran. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that the Sierra Club didn’t have standing to sue to prevent the Walt Disney organization from building a $35 million resort on public land in California’s Sierra Nevada mountain range, Douglas urged, in a famous dissent, “the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.” Fifty years later, federal appeals court Judge M. Margaret McKeown wrote in her 2022 biography of Justice Douglas that the revolutionary dissent “brought home the importance of opening the courts to environmental disputes and arguably transformed the way environmental organizations see their mission—as standing for the trees.”

Today, the Sierra Club gives out its William O. Douglas Award to recognize people who make outstanding use of legal and judicial processes to achieve environmental goals.

“The Blister Brigade”

On March 20, 1954, Justice Douglas and about three dozen other hikers started off from the Cumberland trailhead. The group included Post editorial page editor Robert Estabrook and associate editor Merlo Pusey, as well as notable environmentalists such as Sigurd Olson, director of the National Parks Association, and Olaus Murie, president of the Wilderness Society. The next day’s edition of the Washington Post ran a giant photo of Justice Douglas, Barnes (the D.C. Audubon chapter president), and James Eaton (described in the caption as a “veteran canal man”) above the fold on the front page. In the photo, which was headlined “On the Trail with Justice Douglas,” the justice is grinning and sporting a camera and what appears to be a pair of binoculars slung around his neck.

“Through a gauntlet of woodchuck holes, tanglewood, and cameramen, the Justice William O. Douglas-Washington Post hiking party trudged 22 miles down the C&O Canal towpath to this under-mountain passage today,” wrote Post Country Life Editor Aubrey Graves in a story datelined Paw Paw Tunnel, Maryland.

That first day turned out to be a birders’ bonanza. Barnes identified many birdcalls for the party, and CBS Radio correspondent Lewis W. Shollenberger recorded for his audience “the conversations of a titmouse, a Carolina Wren, a treeful of grackles, numerous ducks, crows, and a Red-winged Blackbird,” Graves reported, “as well as the sound of the old mule bells.”

The group pushed on, covering 189 miles in eight days in total, although only Justice Douglas and eight members hiked the entire way; 40 others did parts of it (including Pusey, the Post associate editor, who walked 140 miles). The AP dubbed the hikers “the blister brigade.” But they didn’t exactly rough it. They slept in private lodges, and the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club handled their meals and schlepped their gear.

As Douglas’s delegation approached Washington on March 27, supporters started joining in, including some in canoes down on the canal’s water, sporting signs that read, “save the canal” and “less cars—more canoes!” For the last five miles, Douglas, with some poison ivy on his face, and his fellow hikers rode along a mule-drawn National Park Service sightseeing barge.

A welcoming party of thousands of cheering people awaited the group in the D.C. neighborhood of Georgetown— and by then, Douglas had mostly won over the Washington Post editors. In a new editorial just a few days later, the Post wrote that “numerous blisters and torn tendons later,” the newspaper now believed it made sense for the parkway plan to be drastically scaled back to protect wildlife habitat. That helped build political momentum to preserve the C&O Canal and towpath.

Seven years later, in his final month in office, President Dwight D. Eisenhower designated the C&O Canal and towpath a national monument. In 1971, President Richard Nixon signed a law making it a national historical park (just months after Nixon tried, unsuccessfully, to get Justice Douglas impeached, in collaboration with House Minority Leader Rep. Gerald Ford).

Due to Douglas’s advocacy, the C&O Canal National Historic Park endures as a ribbon of bird habitat winding along the Potomac River from the highly developed metro D.C. area to the Appalachian ridges and valleys in the panhandle of Maryland. Birders have taken note, submitting more than 50,000 eBird checklists from the marshes, grasslands, open water, and forests along the canal—which include records of 316 bird species from Blackpoll Warblers to Black-legged Kittiwakes.

And the canal is still much as Douglas described in his letter to the Post seven decades ago: “A refuge, a place of retreat, a long stretch of quiet and peace at the capital’s back door—a wilderness area where we can commune with God and with nature, a place not yet marred by the roar of wheels and the sound of horns.” Thanks to Justice Douglas, it never will be.