The Erie Canal

In the early 1800s hauling goods overland by ox-drawn wagon was slow and expensive. Improved roads and steamboats were beginning a transportation revolution, and states and localities began connecting rivers and streams with canals. In New York, DeWitt Clinton — a former state legislator, U.S. senator, and mayor of New York City — became the canal’s most persistent and effective champion.

Clinton served on the commission that made the first surveys for a canal across the state and then led the political effort that made it a reality. New York State built the canal, and it would repay its cost of more than $7 million within about ten years.

Construction began at Rome, New York, in 1817. Few Americans had any experience building canals, so the project became the nation’s first practical school of civil engineering. Laborers — mostly American-born, some Irish immigrants — worked for eight years through heat, mud, and freezing cold, earning 80 cents to a dollar a day, clearing forests and digging mile after mile largely with hand tools and animal power. They invented stump-pulling machines, developed a hydraulic cement that hardened underwater, and blasted rock with hand drills and black powder. At Lockport they cut a staircase of five locks through the solid rock of the Niagara Escarpment. The canal crossed rivers on aqueducts and climbed hills through 83 locks. It opened along its full length in 1825.

Packet boats carried passengers from Albany to Buffalo in five days, less than half the stagecoach time, and freight costs fell by 90 percent compared with ox-drawn wagons. Midwestern grain, lumber, and minerals flowed east to Albany and down the Hudson to New York City, while manufactured goods and settlers flowed west. The canal paid for itself in about ten years. Towns along its route — Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo — boomed so fast that it was called the “Mother of Cities,” and their populations quadrupled between 1830 and 1850.

The canal’s success set off a canal-building boom in other states and secured New York City’s place as the nation’s busiest port, largest city, and center of commerce and finance. It carried more westbound immigrants than any other canal over the Appalachians, and along its corridor ideas traveled too: abolitionism, women’s rights utopian experiments, and new religious movements flourished there. Enlarged three times, the canal system has operated continuously since 1825, longer than any other built transportation system in North America; its old towpath is now a 365-mile bike trail.