River Gipping
During 1791, when the Trustees were negotiating with John Rennie, they had asked him to assess an extension of the navigation from Stowmarket to the River Lark at Bury St Edmunds, but this was not pursued. With the navigation thriving, there were two proposals for canals from Ipswich to Eye, Suffolk in 1819. A meeting was held in January at Eye, which was chaired by Charles Cornwallis, 2nd Marquess Cornwallis. It considered two reports, one proposed by the civil engineer William Cubitt, which involved a tunnel through the hills at Mendlesham, with the estimated cost exceeding £100,000, and another, for a canal over the hills, costing £80,000. Both were thought to be too expensive to implement, but a third proposal emerged, for an extension from the River Gipping at Needham Market, which would follow the valley of a tributary through Creeting St Mary to Earl Stonham, where a basin would be built beside the turnpike road (now the A140 road). This would enable waggons to make a round trip from Eye in a single day, rather than the two days that a trip to Ipswich took. The scheme was estimated to cost £12,000, and shares in it were offered at the meeting. Although many were taken up, the scheme did not advance any further.
Gunpowder River
The Big Gunpowder, long, begins in the extreme southern part of Pennsylvania's York County. From there, the Gunpowder flows in a generally southeast direction through the length of Baltimore County past the Perry Hall Mansion and the site of its former plantation until it reaches Joppatowne where it is joined by the Little Gunpowder and the Bird River, becoming simply the "Gunpowder River" once it passes the Amtrak train bridge that runs from Chase to Joppa. Joppa was an important deep-water seaport and rival to the port of Baltimore in colonial American times, until sedimentation of the Gunpowder River caused by upstream development made its harbor inaccessible to large ships.