Campsite 66

The tallest ground on this site's horizon stands 29.2° above level, to the southwest.

On the March equinox direct sun reaches the pitch at 7:36 am and leaves it at 5:20 pm: 9 h 46 m of it, against 12 h 12 m of daylight on an open horizon.

Where the Potomac takes 5.4 miles to get around the Paw Paw Bends, the canal's engineer, Charles B. Fisk, argued for going through the mountain instead: a 3,118-foot tunnel that makes the route about a mile. The contract went in March 1836 to Lee Montgomery, a Methodist minister who had built a 729-foot tunnel on Pennsylvania's Union Canal, with completion due on 1 July 1838. Two shafts about 210 feet deep let crews dig outward from the middle of the mountain as well as in from the ends. They advanced 10 to 12 feet a week, against a plan of 7 to 8 feet a day per man. Montgomery's crews were mixed: English masons, English and Welsh miners, local German ("Dutch") masons and Irish labourers. Rivalry between the groups and unpaid wages turned violent. The English miners, brought in from the spring of 1837, were harassed; on New Year's Day 1838 about 400 men from the tunnel gang descended on Oldtown, and the militia jailed ten ringleaders; a riot in February 1838 lasted three days; and on 11 August 1839 about 100 armed Irishmen from the tunnel marched on German labourers near Little Orleans. The bore was holed through in 1840, and the canal company collapsed in 1842. The tunnel was lined with brick made on site, four courses thick and six under the shafts; Montgomery's patented brick machine made poor bricks. The lining was finished and the canal opened through the tunnel in October 1850, twelve years late. Excavations at the upstream end, near the Supervisor's House, found the floor of Montgomery's brick kiln, still stained with charcoal, and the stone foundation of a building 70 feet long, probably a workshop and store. The camps where the workers lived have never been found, here or anywhere on the canal. Enslaved people worked on the canal in its early years, but the Park Service says the practice had largely ended before construction reached the Blue Ridge.

The families who farmed these ridges buried their dead close to home, and DNR has located and documented more than thirty cemeteries in the forest. The Brinkman-Rine Cemetery on Oldtown Orleans Road has 40 memorials on Find a Grave, with Brinkman, Rine, McCabe, Roby and Twigg among the names; the last burial is reported as Michael McCabe Sr. in 1974. A Methodist Episcopal church may once have stood nearby. Roby Cemetery, on Carroll Road in Roby Hollow, holds about 125 graves. The oldest dated stone reads 1855 and most are from the 1870s; many are fieldstones with no name or date. Its surveyors thought several families from around Green Ridge Station used it. At St. Patrick's in Little Orleans the graves go back to 1815, many of them unmarked graves of Irish canal workers. In 1994 the Baltimore Sun noted that names on the forest's tombstones, McCabe, McKnight and McKusker among them, were still in the local phone book. DNR asks descendants to visit and to coordinate any maintenance with the forest managers, and volunteers from Allegany County have cleared several of the cemeteries.