A Bill To amend the act entitled ''An act to incorporate the Alexandria Canal Company,'' approved on the twenty-sixth day of May, eighteen hundred and thirty.
Introduced March 27, 1844
Latest action (Mar 27, 1844): Read, and committed to a Committee of the Whole House to-morrow. Mr. A. Stewart, from the Committee for the District of Columbia, reported the following bill: A Bill To amend the act entitled ''An act to incorporate the Alexandria Canal Company,'' approved on the twenty-sixth day of May, eighteen hundred and thirty.
Plain-Language Summary (cached)
This bill would make changes to an earlier law from 1830 that established the Alexandria Canal Company, a corporation created to build and operate a canal connecting Alexandria, Virginia to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal system. The original act set out the legal framework for the company, including its structure, powers, and ability to raise money and construct the waterway. Because no official summary or full text of this specific amending bill is available, the precise changes it would make cannot be described in detail. Generally speaking, bills that amend canal company charters from this era typically adjusted things like the company's capitalization limits, the timeline for construction, the composition of its board of directors, or other operational and financial terms set out in the original charter. The Alexandria Canal itself was a real infrastructure project completed in 1843 that allowed goods, particularly coal from western Maryland, to be transported to the port of Alexandria. Amendments to the company's founding legislation were a common part of how Congress managed and updated the terms under which such private corporations operated during the 19th century.
