Erie Canal

“ In conclusion it may be stated that the Erie Canal was a great stimulus to the growth of population and the increase in valuation of property along the entire [Pg 176] waterway of the Hudson and Erie Canal. The greatest activity, however, was felt west of the head waters of the Mohawk along the canal proper. This concentration of population tended to turn the attention of the people away from rural pursuits and resulted in their congregation in cities where they developed a commercial life. ”

“ By 1849, the canal system was completed, which permitted the free passage of inland vessels from the upper lakes to Montreal, and it was anticipated that the greater part of the movement of immigration and freight to and from Upper Canada and the western states, would be upon Canadian waterways. Merchandise could be carried from lake Erie to Quebec at less cost than from Buffalo by the Erie Canal to New York. But in spite of these facts, trade on the Erie Canal increased largely and steadily, while the trade on the Canadian water routes increased but slowly. ”

“ No work in America before its time began to compare in magnitude with grubbing that sixty-foot aisle from Lake Erie to the Hudson and the digging of a forty-foot canal in its center.
Since necessity is the mother of invention, it is not strange that here in the New York woods should have been perfected some strange machinery—great tugging monsters which should bodily haul down immense trees with a crash and pluck out green stumps with single groan. ”

“ By this series of 333 cannon-shots the report went down to New York and came back to Albany in fifty-eight minutes. When the first barges from Buffalo reached New York they were escorted through the harbor by a grand marine procession, which went to the ocean at Sandy Hook, where Governor Clinton poured in a keg of water brought from Lake Erie. The original Erie Canal cost $7,500,000, but it was afterwards enlarged and deepened, and further enlargements are still being made. It is fifty-six feet wide at the bottom and seventy feet at the surface, with seven feet depth of water. ”

“ The large traffic on the Erie Canal, between Lake Erie and the Hudson River, is conducted in barges of 250 tons; the canal has a depth of 7 feet, with a bottom width of 56 feet, and pitched side slopes of 1 to 1·5; and the locks are 110 feet long and 18 feet wide. The Welland and St. Lawrence Canals are on a larger scale, as they provide access to the coast for the large inland lakes of North America, with vessels of 1000 to 1500 tons, and therefore, like the Ghent-Terneuzen Canal, occupy a sort of intermediate position between inland and ship canals. ”

“ It was not until the coming of the Erie Canal, there in the second decade of the nineteenth century, that the route into the heart of New York from tidewater at Albany, was rendered a reasonably safe and (for that day) comfortable affair. With the completion of the Erie Canal, in 1827, there was immediately inaugurated a fleet of packet-boats; extremely swift in their day and generation and famed for many a day thereafter for their comfortable cabins and the excellence of their meals. ”

“ In no case does any state seem to have profited by the experience of any other. New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland each boldly attacked the problem of the improvement of their rivers, the Mohawk, Juniata, and Potomac, without in the least profiting by the experience of the others. It was New York which first broke away from the old ideas, upon which millions of dollars had been squandered, and built her Erie Canal, which soon turned doubt and derision into a vast tumult of applause. Yet it must be remembered that the New York canal had an easy path to follow. ”

“ The canals are the most striking internal improvements in the United States. The Great Erie canal is 360 miles in length, with an average breadth of 40 feet. It connects the great line of lakes with the ocean by the Hudson. Another to connect the Hudson with Lake Champlain is also complete. Above 2,000,000l. have been expended on them; and the annual returns from the tolls alone have already amounted to 120,000l. In the state of Ohio, another canal is in progress, almost equal in magnitude to the Erie canal. ”

“ On the other hand, in a new region never having felt the influence of a commercial route such as the Erie Canal, property within about six miles of the route increases as rapidly and even more rapidly than the population. This increase of property is not confined within the six mile limit, but extends much farther away from the route than it does in an old well-settled region having previously felt the influence of a commercial route. ”

“ Our concern is with a matter of fact, and not with a theory. No ship-owner on the Great Lakes considers it a serious hindrance to navigation for vessels to pass through the lock of the "Soo" Canal; no shipper running 1,000-ton barges through the future Erie Canal will have the least apprehension of danger or destruction; no captain navigating a vessel or boat through the proposed deep waterway from the ocean to the Lakes will hesitate to pass through locks with a proposed lift of over forty feet. ”

“ The new project of New York, therefore, brings back all the old-time dreams of early American promoters—of Washington’s for the Potomac, of Morris’s for the Mohawk, and of Robert Morris’s for the Susquehanna. If modern engineering can make the canalization of one river a success, it can of hundreds of rivers. No sooner was the Erie Canal a success in 1825 than Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and other states began canal building. ”

“ The opportunity offered here in central New York was so favorable, that a people with only half the ambition and ability of New Yorkers would have profited sooner or later by it. Having studied the tremendous tasks undertaken by the Marylanders and Pennsylvanians, it can be understood why the Erie Canal was under consideration at a comparatively early date; the Mohawk offered a gateway through the northern foothills of the Alleghenies, and beyond lay lakes and rivers in the direct route to Lake Erie. ”

“ When the Erie Canal was being built, so poor were the roads leading into the region traversed by the canal, that contractors were compelled to do most of their hauling in winter, when the ground was frozen and sleds could be used on the snow. ”

“ The Great Lakes were the shortest waterway to the Atlantic, and New York dug its Erie Canal which afforded an outlet—pinched and straitened, it is true, but still an outlet—for the cargoes of the lake schooners and the early steamers of the unsalted seas. Even the commonwealths forming the north bank of the Ohio River turned their faces away from the stream that had started them on the pathway to wealth and greatness, and dug canals to Lake Erie, that their wheat, corn, and other products might reach tidewater by the shortest route. ”

“ They make cheese and paper, and on either hand precipitous crags rise five hundred feet 342 above them. The pass is very narrow, compressing the Erie Canal and the New York Central and West Shore Railways closely upon the river; in fact, the canal passage has been blasted out of the solid granite on the southern river-bank. Here can be readily studied the crystalline rocks of the Laurentian formation, which are described as "part of the oldest dry land on the face of the globe." ”

“ The engineers of the Cumberland Road, now nearing the Ohio River, had enjoyed the advantage of many precedents and examples; but the Commissioners of the Erie Canal had been able to study only such crude examples of canal-building as America then afforded. Never on any continent had such an inaccessible region been pierced by such a highway. ”

“ It would never give satisfaction since trade would always ignore artificial and seek natural routes. The attempting of such comparatively useless projects would discourage worthy schemes, relax the bonds of Union, and depress the national character. But though these Westerners thus misjudged the possibilities of the Erie Canal, we must doff our hats to them for their foresight in suggesting that, instead of aiding the Erie Canal, the nation ought to build canals at Niagara Falls and Panama! ”

“ They serve an important purpose in nearly level countries where Nature has placed no navigable river. Although canal boats usually move slowly, yet they can carry goods cheaper than railroads can. The Erie Canal, in connection with the Great Lakes and the Hudson River, makes it possible for us to go all the way by water from the heart of the continent to New York City. ”

“ The Erie canal and branches between Bridgwater and Erie was built between 1833 and 1844 at a cost of about 61⁄2 million dollars, and abandoned in 1871, and the Western Division of the Pennsylvania Canal, between Johnstown and Pittsburg, a distance of 104 miles, commenced in 1830, and constructed at a cost of about 31⁄4 million dollars, was abandoned in 1863. In almost every instance the reason assigned for abandonment has been the same—that the traffic has been insufficient to meet the working expenses of the canal. ”

“ The usefulness of the Concord [353] coach is not limited to the western nor the northern portion of our continent; in South America it flourishes, banishing all rivals.
Canal travel and transportation were proposed at the close of provincial days, and a few short canals were built. Benjamin Franklin was early awake to their practicability and value. Among the stock-owners of the Dismal Swamp Canal was George Washington, and he was equally interested in the Potomac Canal.
The Erie Canal, first proposed to the New York legislature in 1768, was completed in 1825. ”

“ Let the locks of the Erie Canal be enlarged as proposed, and [Pg 651] the ship canal from the Illinois river to Chicago constructed; but in justice to Pennsylvania and Maryland, as vastly important for commerce and revenue, and as a war measure for the cheap construction of iron-clad gunboats in the great coal and iron region, and the defence of the lakes, the Chesapeake, the Delaware, the Albemarle, and of the capital of the Union, let this canal be enlarged also. ”

“ My father was induced by emigration agents in New York to take the Erie Canal by way of Buffalo and Lake Erie to Cleveland, and thence down the canal to Beaver—a journey which then lasted three weeks, [Pg 30] and is made to-day by rail in ten hours. There was no railway communication then with Pittsburgh, nor indeed with any western town. The Erie Railway was under construction and we saw gangs of men at work upon it as we traveled. Nothing comes amiss to youth, and I look back upon my three weeks as a passenger upon the canal-boat with unalloyed pleasure. ”

“ We are so fully persuaded of the superiority of the Erie canal, that although we should greatly regret so useless an expenditure of public money as making a canal round the cataract of Niagara, yet we should not apprehend any danger from the competition of Montreal, if the former were established. ”

“ Thomas at its head, backed, in 1828, by four millions of dollars, beginning to build a rail road from Baltimore to the Potomac Valley, up the valley to Cumberland, and across the mountains to the Ohio River. It was evident at the start that the rivalry would be tremendously bitter; that the two companies would give rise to factions which would harm and decry each other in every way possible. The canal idea was, comparatively, very new, and the Erie Canal being successfully prosecuted from the Hudson to the Lakes had created immense enthusiasm. ”

“ Figures do not prove anything. If the Erie Canal and the Mississippi River traffic had increased, doubled, trebled, or quadrupled in the past years, instead of actually dwindling by tonnage figures, it would prove nothing as against the tremendous tonnage hauled by the trunk line railroads. ”

“ The canal would, it was believed, be the ruin of Schenectady; as the terminus of the old overland portage of sixteen miles from Albany, the town had grown in size and wealth; a large part of all the freight from the south that passed up the Mohawk came by wagon to Schenectady and was there loaded on boats. The village was, on one hand, a Mecca for wagon lines and wagons, and on the other the terminus of Mohawk shipping. The Erie Canal overturned everything. A waterway was now opened straight through to [Pg 145] Albany ”

“ The subject of fast and safe transportation of freight has become so commonplace in our day of railways that it is with difficulty that we catch any true idea of the economic importance to our forefathers of the invention and general use of such an ordinary thing as a good wagon. The meaning of the successful opening of a great canal, such as the Erie Canal, can hardly be understood unless one has known nothing of the problem of transportation save as represented by the pack-saddle and "Conestoga" wagon. ”

“ The consequence is that these self-same States have grown so rapidly and so much in wealth that it behooves our people to realize the importance of the Erie Canal to the manufacturing industries, and the farming element of the State. ”

“ Erie Canal on the Right and Aqueduct over the Mohawk River, New York.
Trade between the East and the West began to grow rapidly. Vast quantities of manufactured goods were moved easily from the East to the West, and supplies of food were shipped in the opposite direction. Prices began to fall because the cost of carrying goods was so much less. It cost ten dollars before the canal was dug to carry a barrel of flour from Buffalo to Albany ”