of July 1838. Lee Montgomery, a Methodist minister who had experience from building the canal tunnel for the Union Canal was awarded the contract on March 15, 1836. Construction on the tunnel began in 1836. Unfortunately for Montgomery, the Irish workers were not skilled at tunnel work, so he obtained English masons, English and Welsh miners, and some "Dutch" [i.e. German] labourers. More unfortunately, this caused ethnic tensions which exploded into violence in 1837 and 1838, specifically between the Irish and everyone else; rioters destroyed the tavern at Oldtown, burned shanties, and the like. There were more riots in 1839 at Little Orleans. Montgomery succeeded in boring the tunnel through on June 5, 1840, at a point from the south portal, but did not finish it. Due to construction and financial problems, no work was done from 1841 to 1847. In 1848, a subcontract was let to McCulloch and Day to finish the tunnel. The tunnel was opened for traffic (and essentially completed) in 1850, but the brick liner was not finished until after the tunnel was opened. The construction costs were $616,478.65, much more than had originally been budgeted. In 1872, a semaphore signal was installed at the west end of the tunnel to control traffic. Boatmen and the tunnel Boatmen could usually tell if another boat was in the tunnel because the water level would be down about . The loaded boat going downstream had the right of way, but that was not often honored, and there were occasional fistfights between rival boatmen over the right of way. The tunnel was so narrow that nobody could pass between the mules and the side of the tunnel. There are records of passengers playing music (to hear the echo) or singing in the tunnel to keep up their courage. The tunnel today Today the Paw Paw Tunnel can be easily explored with a flashlight, as the towpath is still intact. Trekkers can return via the tunnel, or hike back over the Tunnel Hill Trail. This passes interpretive markers about the German and Irish workers who lived along the path during the tunnel's construction. A rockslide in January 2013 closed the trail east of the tunnel for four months, so the tunnel could not be reached from the east side. It reopened on April 17, 2013. A visitor on 26-Nov-2021 found the east end closed again. The NPS started a two-phase