One lift lock, one keeper on foot, and boats at all hours.

LOCK 44 puts you on the berm at Williamsport, Maryland in 1876, tending a real

lock on the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. Loaded boats come down from Cumberland with

coal, timber, and flour; light boats work back up with store goods. Open the

channel blocks, work the water, pass them through, and make the day's quota.

The lock is the real one — chamber, bypass flume, lockhouse, and towpath laid

out from survey data, period records, and the National Park Service's own

documentation of Lock 44. The boats carry period names and registered numbers.

Mule teams tow on the towpath and get walked past the lock while their boat

rides the water down. At night the keeper carries a lantern, the lamps come up

at the gates, and the summer sky over the ridge shows the real constellations.

**One HTML file. No downloads, no accounts, no external services.**

  How to tend:

- Click a control plate — the keeper walks to it before he works it

- **OPEN / CLOSE CHANNEL BLOCK** — the gates; they only move against matched water

- **FILL LOCK / DRAIN LOCK** — the paddles; both blocks must be shut first

- Pass boats both directions; the day runs from 5 a.m. around the clock

- Keys: G/L gates · F/D paddles · M music · N advances an hour

*Music: "Low Bridge, Everybody Down" (1905, public domain), synthesized in-game.*

*AI-assisted, human-directed and edited.*