The Potomac Company's achievement was not just to be an early example, but of being significant also in size and scope of the project, which involved taming a mountain stream fed river with icing conditions and unpredictable freshets (floods).

The Potomac Company built five skirting canals around the major falls of the Potomac opening the river to commercial bulk goods traffic from the Chesapeake Bay mouth to Cumberland, Maryland in the Cumberland Narrows notch leading west across the Alleghenies, where it intersected Nemacolin's Trail near Braddock's Road, later made the first National Road, today's U.S. Route 40.

When completed, bulk goods could ship by wagon out of the Pennsylvania and Virginia Alleghenies plateau country downhill to the river port where the canal allowed boats and rafts to float downstream towards Georgetown, a significant port of the time on the Potomac River, now an upscale bedroom community and college town within the District of Columbia.

As energetic men all along the Atlantic Plain now took up the problem of improving the inland rivers, they faced a storm of criticism and ridicule that would have daunted any but such as Washington and Johnson of Virginia or White and Hazard of Pennsylvania or Morris and Watson of New York.

The larger endeavor, connecting coastal communities with the blossoming trans-Allegheny settlements, was championed by Benjamin Franklin and other Founding Fathers, and became a pet project for the nation's first president, George Washington, who had experience on West Virginia and Western Pennsylvania from his days as frontier surveyor and militia officer and saw these regions ultimately fail due to insufficient capitalization, an unstable American economy, a lack of sufficient investors, a lack of government aid from a poor and young federal government, and conflicts between states.

Its apparent failure, on the other hand, can be understood as a project which gave way to a superior technology, as railways came along and grew up before the slow subscription system of stocks common to the day attracted sufficient funding.

In the day, men of means and many such officials of the early Federalist U.S. government were very conscious of the desirable effects of building transportation infrastructure to link the near west and tie it to the eastern seaboard.

The rare exception in the era receiving federal public works monies was over a decade later and deemed far less risky, the Cumberland Turnpike conversion into a migration wagon road and the first National Highway, later to become US 40.

A major engineering feat of the time, the Potomack Canal permitted boats to navigate around Great Falls, where the Potomac River drops a treacherous 75 feet through the unnavigable Mather Gorge.

As early as 1749 many leaders in Maryland and Virginia had been interested in making the Potomac River into a major transportation route to the trans-Appalachian West.

A lack of technology, a severe shortage of labor, conflicts with foreign and colonial powers, and internal rivalries would prevent the project from being started until the 1780s, thirty years later.

In 1784, a year after the Treaty of Paris was signed, George Washington and Horatio Gates traveled to Annapolis to seek the state's assent to the project.

These meetings would continue and have a major impact on national development as the navigations on the Potomac were in regular use supporting coal from Cumberland to Georgetown until 1929; in 1908 the Inland Waterways Commission notes the following significance: The earliest movement toward developing the inland waterways of the country began when, under the influence of George Washington, Virginia and Maryland appointed commissioners primarily to consider the navigation and improvement of the Potomac; they met in 1785 in Alexandria and adjourned to Mount Vernon, where they planned for extension, pursuant to which they reassembled with representatives of other States in Annapolis in 1786; again finding the task a growing one, a further conference was arranged in Philadelphia in 1787, with delegates from all the States.

The decline in public confidence in the project led to a more difficult economic position because the Potomac Company relied on individually buying shares for funds.