October 26 - The Erie Canal

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On this day, in 1825, after eight years of construction, the Erie Canal was finally finished, joining the Hudson River to Lake Erie. As early as the 1724, the people of New York saw a need for an easier way to get from New York City to the Great Lakes. Roads at that time were pretty rudimentary, making travelling by horse drawn carriage faster than walking but still time consuming and unpleasant. Boats were much smoother on the joints and potentially much faster (depending on whether the river was flowing towards your destination or not). While the Hudson River, the one that emptied into the Atlantic Ocean there in New York City, allowed for goods to travel deep into the area north of Manhattan, it only went so far and only in that one direction. In order to get goods to the western part of the state (and, by extension, the rest of the country), you had to put them into wagons and go over land. There weren’t any waterways that went in that direction and railroads didn’t exist yet. Wouldn’t it be great, folks began to dream, if ships could sail all the way to the Great Lakes?

Image courtesy eriecanalmuseum.org

The early proposal for building a canal couldn’t get off the ground, but the idea didn’t go away. It was revived in the 1780s and again in 1807 when it began to gain some traction. The following year, land was selected, a survey was done and all that was left to do was systematically wear down the opposition to such a large undertaking. And perhaps the biggest objection to the project was the scale of it. Whether it was the 360 miles that lay between the Hudson and Lake Erie, or the fact that the land rose more than 600 feet in elevation between those two points, the Canal was considered a foolish undertaking based on the engineering requirements alone. If you factored in the fact that the route had to cross the northern reaches of the Appalachian Mountains and would require the removal of tons of limestone (besides all the run of the mill dirt), it’s no wonder that President Jefferson rejected the idea declaring that it was “just short of madness” to even try. The canal’s backers then went to work on New York Governor DeWitt Clinton, who bought into the promise of economic prosperity the endeavor could bring and approved it.

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Construction began on July 4, 1817 in Rome, New York and progressed slowly at first. The United States didn’t have any civil engineers at the time and the men overseeing the project were amateurs at surveying at best. The first 25 miles of canal didn’t open until 1819, a rate of digging that meant the whole 363 miles would take nearly thirty years to complete. Fortunately, the men engaged in the work were learning better ways of doing it as they went along and the pace picked up. With a large influx of immigrants, mostly from Ireland, providing a cheap and ready labor force to go along with the innovations, the final 338 miles, ending at the eastern tip of Lake Erie in Buffalo, only took six more years.

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In spite of frequently being referred to as Clinton’s Folly during the preceding eight years, the economic impact of the Erie Canal was felt almost immediately and would be the main driver behind New York’s dominance of the national scene for years to come. The canal was designed to accommodate 1.5 million tons of freight a year. Within a month of opening, it was clear that number was woefully small. In less than a year, the tolls collected from use of the Canal surpassed the amount of debt of the state of New York incurred in building it. And much to the builder’s surprise, it wasn’t just freight that rode the new waterway. More than 40,000 tourists, businessmen and settlers travelled via the canal just in 1825. Food costs on the east coast dropped and machinery poured into the Midwest. Communities sprang up along the canal’s route as did cottage industries catering specifically to flatboat passengers. Business was booming in every possible way for everyone and anything connected to the Erie Canal.

The first expansion of the Erie Canal started in 1834, just nine years after fully opening. The canal was made almost twice as wide and twice as deep over the next 28 years. At the same time, several feeder canals were added to the waterway, turning it into a bona fide transportation system. One went between the Erie Canal and the Finger Lakes in the south and another connected with Lake Champlain in the north. Even as railroads began being built across the same area in the 1850s, traffic on the Erie Canal still continued at a pace far beyond the originators wildest imaginations.

In 1903, New York announced that it was revamping the whole canal system, largely by building a new one. The public response ranged from questions as to why this was needed to absolute outrage over the project. Most of the outrage came from communities that had prospered from the Erie Canal but were going to be bypassed by the new Barge Canal (it used several natural rivers the planners of the original had avoided on purpose). The state forged ahead anyways and opened the new canal system in 1918, effectively ending the era of the Erie Canal (in spite of the fact that large chunks of it were incorporated in the new route). The Barge Canal still proved popular for moving freight, reaching a total 5.2 million short tons of goods as late as 1951. The push by President Eisenhower to improve America’s roadways and the resulting rise in the trucking industry would be the final nail in the canal’s coffin. It steadily declined in use until the 1970s, when the state stopped making improvements to it all together.

Image courtesy theiconcompanies.com

Parts of the Old Erie Canal (as pre-1918 canal is now called) still exist and can still be used. Many sections have been filled in and become surface streets, like Erie Boulevard in Syracuse, or even subway routes in Rochester. Several small chunks have turned into municipal parks and one 36 mile stretch between Rome and DeWitt is a state park. And who knows? If you live in New York you might even still get something that was shipped on the state’s canal system. It’s mostly used for items too big to transport by rail or road, but as recently as 2012, over 43,000 tons of stuff still moved on it.

Also on this day, in Disney history: Bob Hoskins