The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal runs 184.5 miles from Washington D.C. to Cumberland, Maryland — a nineteenth-century engineering project that became one of the most historically layered trails in the country. For Lawrence Justin Mills, a filmmaker and cyclist based in Silver Spring, Maryland, the C&O Canal is both a local landmark and a way of thinking.
Justin has cycled sections of the canal trail repeatedly, and his relationship to it reflects something central to how he approaches all of his interests: the route itself is never really the point. What the route contains — the histories, the changes in landscape, the communities that formed around it — that is where the real material lives.
Why the C&O Canal
Built in the early 1800s and operational until 1924, the C&O Canal was once a working commercial waterway. It connected the agricultural interior of Maryland and Virginia to the port at Georgetown, moving coal, grain, and timber downriver on flat-bottomed boats pulled by mules. Today the National Park Service maintains it as a historic trail, and cyclists, hikers, and historians use it year-round.
For Justin Mills, the appeal is the layering. You can ride the same stretch of trail ten times and notice something different each time — a lockkeeper’s house, an old loading area, the way the Potomac rises and falls through the seasons. It is the kind of landscape that rewards attention, which makes it exactly the sort of place a documentary filmmaker gravitates toward.
Cycling as a Practice
Justin approaches cycling the way he approaches filmmaking — with patience and without a fixed conclusion. Long rides on the canal trail are part of how he thinks through projects, processes experiences, and stays connected to the physical landscape of his region. Maryland and the broader Washington D.C. area have a density of history that is easy to overlook when you’re moving through it by car. On a bicycle, you slow down enough to see it.
The habit of looking slowly — at a landscape, at a subject on camera, at a historical event — is one of the through lines in Lawrence Justin Mills’s work across filmmaking, travel, and personal interest. The C&O Canal is a place where that habit has room to develop.
Lawrence Justin Mills: Silver Spring to Cumberland
Based in Silver Spring, Maryland, Justin Mills has convenient access to the Georgetown end of the canal trail, making it a natural part of his outdoor life. His documentary projects — including The Path of the Shadows — are informed by this same attention to place and history that draws him back to the trail. Whether he’s interviewing Holocaust survivors or riding along the Potomac, the underlying question is the same: what does this place or this person carry that deserves to be recorded?
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