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Today, if it\u2019s remembered at all, the Erie Canal is best known as the subject of a folk song, \u201cLow Bridge Everybody Down\u201d or \u201cFifteen Miles on the Erie Canal.\u201d<\/p>\n
But, according to the Erie Canal National Heritage Corridor organization created by Congress in 2000 to promote and protect the system, the Erie Canal, built between 1817 and 1825 and spanning 363 miles between the New York State cities of Albany and Buffalo on Lake Erie, was the longest artificial waterway and greatest public works project of its time.<\/p>\n
It transformed New York City into the young nation\u2019s principal seaport and opened the interior of North America to settlement and industrialization.<\/p>\n
And it spurred proposals for further canals including one involving representatives from Butler County.<\/p>\n
Eriecanal.org says the construction of a canal to offer a cheap and safe way to carry produce to market was proposed as early as 1768. However, those early proposals would have connected the Hudson River with Lake Ontario near Oswego. It was not until 1808 that the state legislature funded a survey for a canal that would connect to Lake Erie.<\/p>\n
DeWitt Clinton, a former New York State legislator, U.S. Senator, mayor of New York City and member of the commission that oversaw the initial surveys for a cross-state canal, spearheaded the political effort to build the canal.<\/p>\n
According to Matthew Smith, visiting assistant professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1815 there were only 100 miles of canals in the United States. In 1817, after Congress turned down New York State\u2019s request for funds to build the canal, the state turned to state taxes and public debt sales to fund construction.<\/p>\n
On July 4, 1817, the construction of the canal began. In those early days, it was often sarcastically referred to as \u201cClinton’s Big Ditch.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Erie Canal National Heritage Corridor notes that although its builders borrowed and adapted techniques from earlier European canals, the Americans \u201capplied them with audacity on an unprecedented scale.\u201d<\/p>\n
Originally, 4 feet deep and 40 feet wide, the Erie Canal cut through fields, forests, rocky cliffs and swamps; crossed rivers on aqueducts; and overcame hills with lift locks. The project engineers and contractors had little canal-building experience, so the massive project served as the nation\u2019s first practical school of civil engineering, according to the corridor group.<\/p>\n
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A photo showing the Erie Canal at Little Falls. Library of Congress photo<\/p>\n
\n Library of Congress; P&P\n <\/p>\n
Some laborers on the canal were Irish immigrants, but most were U.S.-born. For eight years of wet, heat and cold, they felled trees and excavated, mostly by hand and animal power. The workers devised equipment to uproot trees and pull stumps and developed hydraulic cement that hardened under water. They blasted rocks with hand drills and black powder.<\/p>\n
Eriecanal.org noted two years after construction began, the first section of the canal, between Rome and Utica, saw the beginning of commercial traffic. Use of the canal expanded as other sections were completed. When finally completed on Oct. 26, 1825, it was the engineering marvel of its day. It was 363 miles long and included 18 aqueducts to carry the canal over ravines and rivers, and 83 lift locks, with a rise of 568 feet from the Hudson River to Lake Erie.<\/p>\n
The canal floated boats that could carry 30 tons of freight. A ten-foot-wide towpath was built along the bank of the canal for the horses or mules which pulled the boats and their driver, often a young boy (sometimes referred to as a \u201choggee,\u201d for the commands given to the horses or mules: \u201cHo\u201d for stop, and \u201cGee\u201d for go).<\/p>\n
Canal boat passengers traveled in relative comfort from Albany to Buffalo in five days, not the two weeks needed by the crowded stagecoaches of the time. (The \u201c15 miles on the Erie Canal\u201d song lyric refers to the average distance a horse or mule team could pull a boat before having to stop to rest or be swapped out for a fresh team.)<\/p>\n
According to Miami University\u2019s Matthew Smith, despite its naysayers, the Erie Canal paid off \u2014 literally. Within a few years, shipping rates from Lake Erie to New York City fell from $100 per ton to under $9. Annual freight on the canal eclipsed trade along the Mississippi River within a few decades, amounting to $200 million, which would be more than $8 billion today.<\/p>\n
By the 1830s, politicians had stopped ridiculing America\u2019s growing canal system. It was making too much money. The hefty $7 million investment in building the Erie Canal had been fully recouped in toll fees alone.<\/p>\n
Jonathan Levy wrote in his book \u201cAge of American Capitalism,\u201d that with the completion of the canal upstate New York wheat production immediately prospered and cities along the canal grew.<\/p>\n
\u201cRochester with 1,500 inhabitants in 1821 counted 10,000 a decade later. New York City, which had captured the southern cotton transshipment trade, now expanded to include goods from its upstate agricultural hinterlands, became the Empire of Liberty\u2019s undoubted commercial colossus,\u201d Levy wrote.<\/p>\n
In addition, Levy wrote, the Erie Canal created an industrial corridor. Buffalo with easy access to New York iron ore and bituminous coal surpassed Rochester and Albany in industrial might and was home to the state\u2019s largest iron and steel mills.<\/p>\n
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View of the Aqua-duct Bridge at Rochester, NY where the Erie Canal crosses the Genesee River. Library of Congress photo<\/p>\n
\n Library of Congress\n <\/p>\n
The effects of canals on trade were very apparent to citizens of Butler County. A May 13, 1826, article from the Butler Sentinel newspaper preserved at the Butler County Historical Society notes a canal convention was organized in New Castle on May 3, 1826, \u201cfor the purpose of recommending the most suitable means for the construction of a canal, commencing at the Portage summit level of the Ohio Canal intersecting the Pennsylvania Canal at the most eligible point.\u201d<\/p>\n
The convention featured delegates from two counties in Ohio as well as from Pittsburgh, Beaver County, Mercer County and two delegates, William Ayres and Jacob Mechling. Ayres was also chosen as the chairman of the committee that called this canal convention.<\/p>\n
According to the Butler Historical Society research, the convention\u2019s proposal was to construct a canal to connect three river valleys to each other and then the Erie Canal via the Ohio River. The three river valleys were the Portage watershed for Ohio and the Mahoning and Big Beaver rivers in Pennsylvania.<\/p>\n
Construction, if approved, was to begin at the Portage watershed. After connecting Portage to the Big Beaver, construction would connect the Big Beaver River to the Mahoning River. The final step of the proposal was to bring the canal into the Ohio River via Pittsburgh, connecting them all to the Erie Canal this way.<\/p>\n
The historical society said this proposal did not go through as planned as the beginning of the Pennsylvania and Ohio canal\u2019s beginning point moved to Akron, Ohio, a city 138 miles away from Portage.<\/p>\n
Ultimately, the convention\u2019s findings were approved to be presented to Congress at the end of convention, one of many canal proposals to be presented that year. The historical society has no conclusion as to how this proposal went. But the historical society noted research seems to point to railroads as the preferred method of transiting goods and materials through Butler County as the railroads rose to prominence beginning in the1850s.<\/p>\n
And the Erie Canal didn\u2019t just move goods and people, Smith noted, it moved ideas<\/p>\n
Smith wrote, \u201cLike many Americans during the Industrial Revolution, New Yorkers struggled to find stability, purpose and community. The Erie Canal channeled new ideas and religious movements, including the Second Great Awakening, a nationwide movement of Christian evangelism and social reform, partly in reaction to the upheavals of a changing economy.<\/p>\n
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A canalboat makes its way through a lock on the Erie Canal. Library of Congress photo<\/p>\n
\n Library of Congress\n <\/p>\n
\u201cThough the movement began at the turn of the century, it flourished in the hinterlands along the Erie Canal, which became known as the \u2018Burned-Over District.\u2019 \u201cRevivalists like Charles Grandison Finney \u2014 America\u2019s most famous preacher at the time \u2014 found a lively reception along this \u2018psychic highway,\u2019as one author later dubbed upstate New York.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome denominations, like the Methodists, grew dramatically. But the \u2018Burned-Over District\u2019 also gave birth to new churches after the canal\u2019s creation. Joseph Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints, often known as Mormons, in Fayette, N.Y., in 1830. The teachings of William Miller, who lived near the Vermont border, spread west along the canal route \u2014 the roots of the Seventh-day Adventist Church,\u201d noted Smith<\/p>\n
As for the purely physical traffic along the Erie Canal, it reached its peak in 1855 when 33,000 commercial shipments took place. It continued to remain competitive with railroads until the turn of the 20th Century. By the middle of the 20th Century canal traffic declined due to competition from trucking on the newly opened Interstate Highway System and the 1959 opening of the larger St. Lawrence Seaway.<\/p>\n
Today the canal is mostly used by recreational vessels between May and November. Each winter, water is drained from parts of the canal for maintenance. The canal has become a tourist attraction with the New York State Canalway a popular cycling path that follows the canal across the state.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today, if it\u2019s remembered at all, the Erie Canal is best known as the subject of a folk…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":110164,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[3035,3027,3022,3042,3048,3051,1610,3030,3028,31,3029,3034,3025,136,138,137,3047,3041,3024,3045,3033,3023,3036,182,3049,3039,139,3026,28,3040,39,3031,3044,3043,3032,3050,3038,3037,3046],"class_list":["post-110163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-erie","tag-bruin","tag-butler","tag-butler-eagle","tag-cabot","tag-callery","tag-cherry-valley","tag-community-news","tag-connoquenessing","tag-cranberry","tag-crime","tag-east-butler","tag-eau-claire","tag-education-news","tag-erie","tag-erie-headlines","tag-erie-news","tag-evans-city","tag-fairview","tag-government-news","tag-harmony","tag-harrisville","tag-high-school-sports-news","tag-karns-city","tag-local-news","tag-mars","tag-mount-chesnut","tag-news","tag-obituaries","tag-pennsylvania","tag-petrolia","tag-political-news","tag-portersville","tag-sarver","tag-saxonburg","tag-slippery-rock","tag-valencia","tag-west-liberty","tag-west-sunbury","tag-zelienople"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}