Turnpike construction waned not only because of the heavy investment and physical effort required but also because of a new venture—canal construction. Of course, the British had engaged in canal construction and proved its worth since the 1760s. The U. S. government had in fact considered the viability of canals during the debate surrounding the construction of the National Road. However, the serious impediment involving canals was the exorbitant cost when compared with building roads. Turnpikes cost between $5,000 to $10,000 per mile to construct, and in most cases took only several years to complete. Canals, on the other hand, cost between $8,000 to $25,000 per mile, depending on the terrain, and took a decade or longer to construct. The United States only had about 100 miles of canals in operation in 1816, and most of them were only several miles in length.
Canal construction hit its zenith with the Erie Canal. The idea for such a project arose in the late 1760s with a proposal to connect the Hudson River with Lake Ontario near Oswego, New York. In 1792 the New York state legislature chartered the Western Inland Lock Company to construct such a water route by linking the Mohawk and Oneida Rivers and Oneida Lake. The project faced insurmountable problems in financing and construction, and thus the company constructed only a one-mile bypass around the Little Falls of the Mohawk River. The company’s toll collections barely kept the canal in operation. The work of the company did inspire other political and business officials to expand their vision and push for the construction of a canal that would link the Hudson River and Lake Erie. The most prominent voice for such an endeavor was DeWitt Clinton, former mayor of New York City and a nephew of George Clinton, the governor of New York (see Document 16). In 1808 a survey was conducted to determine the most appropriate route. Work began officially when the then-Governor DeWitt Clinton broke ground on July 4, 1817 near Rome, New York. Few of those in attendance at this ceremony had any idea of the daunting task awaiting those who designed and labored to construct the canal. In the early days of its construction, the canal obtained the not so flattering sobriquet of ‘‘Clinton’s Big Ditch.’’
The Erie Canal was an engineering marvel. It stretched 363 miles from Albany to Buffalo and required innovative construction techniques to overcome swamps, rivers, and hills. The canal was cut to a uniform depth of four feet with a width at the bottom of twenty-eight feet and at the top of seventy feet. The length of canal descended and ascended 675 feet, a hindrance that was overcome through the use of eighty-three locks. This entire feat was accomplished despite the fact that there was no official civil engineering school in the United States. Therefore, the men who presided over the construction basically learned while undertaking the project. Many of these individuals later built other canals, bridges, and railroads and contributed to other related areas such as the creation of water supplies for the nation’s growing cities. In addition, a 3,000-man, mostly immigrant, labor force did the difficult spade work and was paid an average eighty cents per hour for back-breaking ten - to twelve-hour work days. The workers constructed eighteen aqueducts to transport water over rivers and streams and numerous bridges to provide the roads and farms cutoff by the canal access to the wider world.
Work on the Erie Canal ended officially on November 4, 1825. Governor Clinton presided over a ceremony in which he poured water from Lake Erie into New York Harbor. The reduction of transportation costs was immediate. Prior to the Erie Canal, the precarious overland shipment of wheat, corn, and oats from western New York State to New York City cost between three and ten times the value of the crops. In financial terms it had cost between $90 to $125 a ton to ship cargo between Buffalo and New York City. By 1835 the canal alternative had reduced that amount to $4 a ton. As another point of comparison, before 1820 it cost about 20 cents a ton-mile to ship goods from Buffalo to New York. By 1855 the canal had dramatically reduced the cost by more than 90% to just shy of one cent a ton-mile. Boats initially hauled a maximum of thirty tons of freight, moved along by draught animals (horses, mules, or oxen) being led by a person walking along the towpath on the bank of the canal. In the first year of the canal’s operation, an army of 2,000 boats, 9,000 horses, and 8,000 men conducted the business of transporting goods along the route. Passengers seeking a picturesque experience along the canal paid 4 cents per mile for the journey.
Even though the canal reached its potential just as the railway age appeared in America, it continued to enjoy success. As the rush of New England and immigrant farmers flowed westward, the canal provided a cheaper means to send farm products eastward and receive manufactured goods from factories in return. The huge volume of traffic on the canal resulted in two major enlargement projects. The first occurred between the years 1836 and 1872. This expansion widened the original canal to seventy feet, increased its depth to seven feet, reduced the number of locks to seventy-two, and allowed boats to haul 250 tons of cargo. The amount of tonnage moving along the canal increased from 58,000 tons in 1836 to 1.6 million tons on the eve of the Civil War to more than 3 million tons in 1868. The second enlargement took place beginning in 1903 and resulted in a canal of 120 to 200 feet in width, twelve to fourteen feet in depth, and meant that boats hauling 3,000 tons of cargo could pass safely along the canal. In addition, beginning in the late 19th century, several canal branches were dug, the tolls along the canal disappeared, steam and diesel powered boats replaced animal power to push and pull traffic along the route, and electricity operated the locks. Even though the Erie Canal’s last commercial traffic ended in 1994, the federal and New York state governments designated millions of dollars to maintain the canal system for recreational purposes.
The Erie Canal provided a great boost to the canal building enterprises in the United States. In 1826 more than one hundred canal projects were underway. By 1840 the mileage of canals in operation in the United States measured more than the distance from the Atlantic to Pacific Oceans. In the two decades from 1820 to 1840, approximately $125 million in public and private cooperative ventures was spent on canal construction. By 1859 the total tonnage shipped along the nation’s canals totaled nearly 2 billion, in spite of the booming rate of railroad expansion. However, the profitability of the canal projects was never a certainty, and few canals enjoyed the long-term financial success of the Erie Canal. In the long run, however, in addition to revenues, the canal age provided important intangible benefits that added to the economic strength of the nation. The canals stimulated related industries in the areas through which they passed, helped to funnel a booming U. S. population westward, and ensured that the agricultural products of the Midwest found a profitable conduit to the nation’s factory population in the east and the Atlantic port cities for shipment abroad.13
World History
