John Quincy Adams
This is something that I’ve always wondered and was surprised by what I found out. Well the first 4th of July parade wasn’t on a street as they are today.
It really was a parade of boats on the Potomac River in Washington, DC. President John Quincy Adams and a group of American and foreign dignitaries boarded a steamboat and led a procession of barges and other boats up the river to the site today known as The Tidal Basin. They then transferred to smaller boats, floated up the old Washington Canal to the place that had been selected for the new Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. President Adams did the groundbreaking there for the waterway canal to cut straight through the heart of Washington DC between the Capitol building and Washington Monument.
