On July 4, 1817, workers break ground on the Erie Canal at Rome, New York. The canal, completed in 1825, links the eastern seaboard with the Midwest and transforms New York into a major economic and cultural hub.
The earliest proposals for the Erie Canal came from a destitute flour merchant named Jesse Hawley. In 1806, he wrote a series of essays proposing a great east-west canal, which would create a reliable route for trading between the east coast and the interior of the country. He wrote from an unusual place: debtor's prison, where he was incarcerated for debts incurred in his trading business. He published his essays in a local newspaper, the Genessee Messenger, and signed them "Hercules."
New York City mayor DeWitt Clinton took note of Hawley's essays and enthusiastically adopted the canal project. As mayor, and later as the governor of New York State, Clinton lobbied tirelessly to build the canal. Not everyone was convinced, however. Detractors referred to the canal as "Clinton's ditch." In 1809, Thomas Jefferson commented that "making a canal of 350 miles through the wilderness" was "little short of madness." In the face of this skepticism, workers broke ground on the canal on July 4, 1817.
The canal was a massive engineering challenge. Workers built the canal almost entirely by hand; the project was completed before the invention of dynamite or the steam shovel. Nine thousand laborers used picks, axes and gunpowder to carve through the rock. On the fly, they devised tools like stump pullers and a hydraulic cement that hardened underwater. The construction team included engineers with experience of the most advanced canal systems in England and France, but this was a project on an unprecedented scale. Once completed, the canal ran 363 miles long, 40 feet wide and four feet deep. It also included 83 lift locks, needed to traverse the 600 feet of elevation change from the Hudson River to Lake Erie—the most significant elevation change in the smallest distance of any lock in the world.
Governor Clinton celebrated the opening of the Canal on October 26, 1825, aboard the Seneca Chief. He traveled down the canal to the Hudson River, and from there sailed to New York City. He ceremonially poured a bucket of water from Lake Erie into the New York Harbor, joining the two in a "wedding of the waters."
The Erie Canal became a swift economic success. Although it cost New York State $7 million to build, tolls from the waterway covered the costs of its construction within nine years. Commerce from the canal transformed New York into the financial capital of the country. New York City became the nation's most populous city and busiest port, eclipsing the ports of New Orleans, Philadelphia and Baltimore. Sleepy villages and towns along the path of the canal grew into vibrant cities and industrial centers: Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester and others. The canal opened new markets for farmers and merchants in the Midwest, and it created a new route for immigrants and settlers to travel.
The canal corridor served as a "psychic highway" as well as a physical one. Many of the defining cultural and religious movements of the nineteenth century have roots to the Erie Canal region. Mormons, Spiritualists and Adventists worshipped there; suffragists organized for women's right to vote; and abolitionists railed against slavery and maintained stops on the underground railroad.
Traffic on the Erie Canal eventually declined as the nation's rail network expanded. The St. Lawrence Seaway, opened in 1959, further diminished the commercial importance of the canal. Today, the Erie Canal is a National Heritage Corridor, operated by the National Park Service.
