Two Hundred Years on the Erie Canal, 1825-2025

**A young adult driving a team of mules on the Erie Canal at Lyons, New York, 1910. / Courtesy New York State Archives, Public Domain**

It connected the port of New York City on the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes.

Introduction

In estimating the benefits of those immense public works, that will change the internal relations of a great country, and create a new era in the history of her trade, agriculture and manufactures, much must be left for time and experience to reveal… – New York Corresponding Association for the Promotion of Internal Improvements, 1821

The Erie Canal is one of the most famous man-made bodies of water in the world. Designed, financed, built, operated, and maintained by the people of New York, the canal was one of the largest public works projects ever attempted anywhere in the world when the first shovel of earth was turned near Rome, New York, on July 4, 1817. Men with talent and vision (but little training in engineering) charted the 363-mile course of the canal between Albany and Buffalo. They designed stone aqueducts to carry boats across rivers and locks to lift them over New York’s varied terrain. Thousands of laborers dug the ditch itself and built massive reservoirs to ensure the canal was constantly supplied with water. When it was completed in 1825, the Erie Canal connected the port of New York City on the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes, dramatically transforming trade, industry, and communication in the region and across the country.

The Erie Canal was so successful that it was enlarged three times to accommodate more traffic and increasingly larger vessels. Great cities and commerce grew along the Erie Canal. Diverse people traveled east and west across its length, some spreading powerful ideas for social change. In the mid-twentieth century, canal traffic began to decline, and the famous waterway momentarily faded from public use, only to reemerge today as a vehicle for heritage tourism, recreation, and education.

Why New York?

Access to the Interior

This is a redraft of the Castello Plan, one of the earliest city maps of lower Manhattan, New York, originally drafted by Jacques Cortelyou around 1660. / Courtesy The New York Public Library, Public Domain

Until the construction of the Erie Canal, New Orleans had nearly exclusive access to trade with the rich interior of North America because of its location on the Mississippi River. Beginning in the seventeenth century during French, Dutch, and then British competition for the fur trade in North America, people realized that New York City, with its deep and protected harbor and access to the interior via the Hudson River, was strategically situated for trade with Europe. As early as 1724, Cadwallader Colden, surveyor general and later colonial governor of the Province of New York, prepared a report for the governor describing the natural “water courses and carrying places” (portages) between Albany and Montreal, Canada, and between Albany and Cataraqui Lake, now known as Lake Ontario.

It took another one hundred years before the New York Corresponding Association for the Promotion of Internal Improvements was organized to advance support for building a canal across New York State—a project they envisioned as the starting point for a cross-country navigation system of waterways bridging Lake Erie with the Atlantic Ocean, the Mississippi River, and the western states of Michigan and Illinois.

Water Is Life

This relief map indicates the territories of the Six Nations or Haudenosaunee people who inhabited the geographic area that is today the State of New York. / Courtesy University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee via Recollection Wisconsin, Public Domain

Human migration and settlement patterns in New York State have been consistently influenced by geography. The Erie Canal, and subsequent rail lines and highways, followed the earliest migration and trade routes of the people of Six Nations (Haudenosaunee) in territory that is now the State of New York. From earliest pre-contact settlements to present day communities, most people have always lived along the “L” shaped curve, from Greenwich Village at New York Harbor up to Albany, then westward towards Syracuse and on to Buffalo at Lake Erie. The myriad rivers and lakes along this route avoid the Northeast Appalachian ranges of the Hudson Highlands, the Taconics, the Catskills or the Adirondacks.

Controlling access to the water routes in New York was a critical aspect of ongoing land and trade disputes between various native and European groups from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries: between the Haudenosaunee and the Algonquin peoples; the French and the British; the Americans and the British. Continuing through the War of 1812, conflicts centered on controlling the use of major waterways, from the Atlantic Ocean at the port of New York to the Great Lakes at Buffalo Harbor and Irondequoit Bay.

Avoiding the Mountains

his 1909 postcard shows Henry Hudson and his crew sailing their ship, the Half Moon, on the river that would later bear his name in September 1609. / Courtesy Hudson River Valley Institute via Southeastern New York Library Resources Council and Empire State Digital Network, Public Domain

Following the American Revolution, the new nation nearly doubled in size after the 1783 Treaty of Paris was signed with Britain. However, the Eastern seaboard states remained separated from the interior of the country by the imposing Appalachian mountain range. Canals had been attempted elsewhere, but the elevations were too great to allow for a viable canal anywhere except New York. The only place where it was physically possible to build a canal to the Great Lakes without going over mountains was north through the Hudson Valley and west through the Mohawk Valley of New York.

The Hudson River provided a highly navigable waterway to the interior of New York as Henry Hudson discovered when he sailed up the river in 1609 in search of a passage to the Orient. Though the rapids of the Mohawk River prevented him from going further west, his discovery of the river later bearing his name would encourage other Dutch and then English to establish settlements along this broad waterway. The profitable fur trade and the opening of western territories in the Great Lakes region continued to spur innovative thinking and discussion about an overland route across New York.

Securing Land

This map shows the Genesee lands belonging to the Holland Land Company in 1798, as well as the Seneca Nation Reservation and major waterways in Western New York. / Courtesy SUNY Fredonia via Western New York Library Resources Council and Empire State Digital Network, Public Domain

After America established its independence, the federal government needed a system for surveying, measuring, and distributing lands it now owned, and the Land Ordinance of 1785 was approved by the Confederation Congress. In 1802, a syndicate of Dutch investors, known as the Holland Land Company, purchased an enormous tract of land in Western New York, hoping, like many post-revolutionary speculators, to sell their land for a quick profit. However, the company was forced to make substantial investments in roads and canals to attract buyers, including granting over 100,000 acres of their western lands for the canal route. The final tracts were not sold until 1837 after the Erie Canal was completed.

In 1810, Simeon De Witt, the Surveyor General for the State of New York who was responsible for supervising the division of the western part of the state into townships, was also appointed to the Erie Canal Commission. He was joined in 1816 by land surveyor Joseph Ellicott, who was also working for the Holland Land Company. Ellicott, along with his brothers, Andrew and Benjamin, and William Peacock and James Geddes were instrumental in mapping out the best route across the state for the Canal.

Plans and Early Concepts

The Canal Era Begins

This photograph shows a stone lock on the Mohawk River built about 1800 by the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company in Little Falls, Herkimer County, New York. The Western Inland Lock Navigation Company originally constructed locks from timber but, in 1803, began replacing the leaking locks with stone from local quarries. / Courtesy New York State Archives via Empire State Digital Network, Public Doman

Two Inland Lock Navigation Companies, Western and Northern, were chartered by the New York State Legislature in 1792, moving the Erie Canal project closer to becoming reality. Their goal was to open up westward inland transportation routes to the Great Lakes from Schenectady, and particularly to improve transportation for agricultural products from central and upstate New York.

The Western Inland Lock Navigation Company, led by political leader Philip Schuyler, focused on making the Mohawk River more navigable by clearing the riverbed and building a small canal and lock system to bypass the Mohawk River’s falls and rapids.

In a 1796 report to the New York legislature, the directors of the lock navigation companies reported on the progress of their canal construction along the Mohawk River and predicted the impact of continued canal-building for the state:

The Legislature will permit us respectfully to observe, that should assistance be afforded in either shape, the prospect of a speedy reduction of the price of transportation, would doubtless greatly enhance the value of the property of the people of this state, bordering on the western waters, and recently purchased from the natives, and still unsold.

Unfortunately, both companies had great difficulty in getting either government or public support for financing and constructing a canal route of any substance.

New York Visionaries

Gouverneur Morris, born and educated in New York, was a major figure in early American politics. Morris served as a delegate to the Continental Congress and signed the Articles of Confederation and U.S. Constitution (of which he is often credited as having written the preamble). / Courtesy The New York Public Library, Public Domain

History honors DeWitt Clinton as the “Father of the Erie Canal.” But long before he became the Canal’s chief proponent, several others envisioned a direct water route from the Great Lakes to New York’s harbor. An 1879 publication from the Buffalo Historical Society describes Gouverneur Morris in 1777 articulating a future in which “the waters of the great western inland seas would, by the aid of man, break through their barriers and mingle with those of the Hudson.“

Robert Fulton, an American artist and innovator who developed the first commercially successful steamboat (carrying passengers from New York City to Albany, New York), sent George Washington a copy of his publication, A Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation in 1797. The essay outlined his idea for a canal that would connect the port of Philadelphia to the western territories of the country.

In his 1829 Memoir of DeWitt Clinton, David Hosack writes that Washington was already planning a canal in Virginia but had, on his own in 1783, considered that the route through the Mohawk Valley “…would be productive to the union at large, and to [New York] in particular, by cementing the eastern and western territory together.”

Making the Case

This excerpt is from Jesse Hawley’s “An Essay on the Enlargement of the Erie Canal,” 1840. Hawley died suddenly in Cambria, New York in 1842, having lived to see most of his canal predictions come to pass, including the enlargement. / Courtesy University of Chicago via HathiTrust, Public Domain

Possibly the most influential arguments for constructing the Canal were contained in the essays of businessman Jesse Hawley. Hawley, a flour merchant, had gone bankrupt after failing to find a timely way to get his flour to market. Written from debtor’s prison in Ontario County and published in the Genesee Messenger under the pseudonym “Hercules” in 1807 and 1808, Hawley’s essays provided detailed information on the route, costs, and benefits of a man-made canal transporting people and goods across the country. He wrote from his cell in October 1807:

With due deference to the president of the United States, and the committees appointed by the national legislature, who now have the subject under consideration, I will presume to suggest to them, that improvement which would afford the most immediate, and consequently the most extensive advantages which any other in the United States can possibly do. It is the connecting the waters of Lake Erie and those of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers by means of a canal.

Hawley’s writings stand as the earliest well-developed plan for what would become the Erie Canal.

New York Needs Commerce!

Before becoming Governor of New York in 1817 and then again in 1825, DeWitt Clinton was a candidate for the American presidency in the election of 1812, challenging incumbent James Madison. / Courtesy The New York Public Library, Public Domain

Hawley’s essays were gaining public attention just as business and political leaders were considering “internal improvements” to bolster both state and national economies weakened during the American Revolution. In 1808, Assemblyman Joshua Forman was the first to submit legislation in the state government, calling for surveys to examine a water route between Lake Erie and the Hudson River. On March 13, 1810, the State Senate passed a measure establishing a Canal Commission and directing its commissioners to explore and propose a route for a canal connecting the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. Though the War of 1812 would cause a temporary delay in moving the project forward, the conflict itself underscored the need for inland transportation networks to protect American interests.

In 1817, DeWitt Clinton was elected governor of New York, running on a pro-canal platform. In April, the project was approved for funding in the legislature. Clinton’s political fortunes rose and fell with the popularity of the canal project, often referred to as “Clinton’s Big Ditch” or “Clinton’s Folly” by his adversaries. Voted out of office in 1822, he was re-elected as governor in time to preside over the Erie Canal’s opening ceremonies in October 1825.

Building the Canal

In the Canal Business

his photograph shows the Rexford Aqueduct on the Erie Canal in 1900. When completed in 1825, the Erie Canal included eighteen aqueducts to allow canal passage over rocky terrain and rapids like those along the Mohawk River. / Courtesy MiSci Museum of Innovation and Science via Capital District Library Council and Empire State Digital Network, Public Domain

Creating an all-water route into the interior from the Port of New York was a dream for many American entrepreneurs, but with limited financial resources, the project proved too large for even the largest private company.

To build and operate a canal all the way across the wilderness, the State of New York would have to get into the canal business. There were physical challenges specific to each section of the route. In the east, avoiding the rapids, waterfalls, and flooding of the Mohawk River required a canal running parallel to the river with several lift locks. For the middle section, the Canal would be dug through swampland, necessitating the drainage of large tracts of land and strong reinforcement of canal banks. In the west, the challenge was to lift the Canal over the Niagara Escarpment at Lockport and then cut through solid rock for the final section.

When the Erie Canal was completed, it was already inadequate to the demands that would be placed on it. Over a century, the state would continue to be involved as the Canal was enlarged, rerouted, straightened, and deepened to accommodate ever-larger boats.

The Canal’s “Engineers”

Despite the fact that over 500,000 bushels of Canvass White’s cement was used in the Canal’s construction, White was not paid by the government agencies or private companies that had used his invention. They offered little more than thanks for his work.

At the beginning of the Erie Canal project, there were no professional civilian engineers in the United States. Men who served as engineers while building the Erie Canal were surveyors, lawyers, and teachers who self-trained for the job. Canvass White was sent to England to study the canals there, and it was largely from his copious drawings and notes that the Americans gained knowledge. White also developed his own version of hydraulic cement, greatly improving the strength of the canal locks.

Canal work commenced at the middle section on July 4, 1817, and was initially divided into three operations: one under the direction of James Geddes (a judge and surveyor from Onondaga County), another under Benjamin Wright (also a judge and surveyor, appointed Chief Engineer), and the third under Charles Brodhead. Because of its relatively even terrain, starting at the middle section made sense. In 1817, Americans had the technology to dig a ditch but had not yet mastered the skills required to build lift locks and aqueducts. Construction crews and engineers relied on what came to be known as “Yankee ingenuity”—essentially, inventing ways to build a canal as they worked.

Canal Labor

This photograph shows men working on the Erie Canal, with horses and buildings in the background, in Scotia, New York. Many canal workers initially used simple tools to accomplish tasks of digging the 363-mile ditch. / Courtesy Schenectady County Historical Society via Capital District Library Council and Empire State Digital Network, Public Domain

The Canal Commissioners decided to contract out work on the Erie Canal in sections, each averaging about three miles. Contracting out, a somewhat new practice for the time, actually created greater popular support for the canal project because it stimulated local economies. Money was not readily available at this time, so men living near the canal route were eager to obtain contracts to bolster family incomes. In 1818-1819, when work was underway on the section of the canal between Utica and the Seneca River, two to three thousand men and as many as seven hundred horses were at work on the excavation.

Wages averaged fifty cents to a dollar a day as men were paid by the cubic yard of dirt they removed, with higher rates available for rocky terrain. With their meager wages, workers also had to account for expenses such as lodging, food, and tools.

The harsh camp life was made even worse for men working the middle section where, from Salinas to Seneca Lake, the area was basically a marshy bog that became infested with mosquitos in the summer heat. Workers were also vulnerable to injury from landslides and explosions from blasting away rock, as well as the frequent brawls that broke out at work and in the camps.

New Tools and Designs

In 1794 the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company established a rudimentary canal at Little Falls in order to overcome the treacherous geography prohibiting boat travel. / Courtesy The New York Public Library, Public Domain

The Erie Canal was designed to avoid natural bodies of water, creating instead a series of ditches connected by stone locks and aqueducts to carry boats across rivers. These choices also allowed for a considerably longer navigation season most years. Maintaining appropriate water levels in the 363-mile man-made canal was of paramount importance. Too much water would threaten the stability of the banks, and too little would impact the amount of cargo the canal boats could transport. The intricate balance and operation of locks, culverts, aqueducts, stop gates, and waste weirs were critical to the success of the Erie Canal.

Approximately three thousand individuals worked on the Erie Canal at any one time. The work was crude and hard with most men digging the four-foot-deep and forty-foot-wide ditch with only shovels and pickaxes. Until the advent of “Brainard’s barrow,” known today as a wheelbarrow, dirt was hauled away on small rectangular carts that were awkward and inefficient. Before the stump puller, plow, and scraper were introduced, clearing the densely forested areas was arduous and slow. With the stump puller, for example, the rate of tree stump removal jumped from four per day to forty per day.

Commerce on the Canal

Economic Growth

This 1825 illustration depicts canal boats on the North River in New York. The Dutch called what we know today as the Hudson River the “North River” and the Delaware River the “South River.” / Courtesy The New York Public Library, Public Domain

The economic impact of the Erie Canal was immediate and stunning. The Erie Canal was the major force in a market revolution that brought about modern capitalism in America. It dramatically changed the way people worked and lived, and the way business was conducted. The costs to ship goods and materials between New York and the Midwest decreased tenfold, and the volume of materials that could be shipped via canal (rather than by land) nearly tripled. New York City went from being the seventh largest port in America in the 1790s to the largest port in 1830. Commercial investments, spurred by the realization of enormous profits from trade, were now replacing land investments in New York.

Aggressive merchants, led by former New York State legislator William Butler Ogden, pushed for the opening of a trade route from New York to Chicago, capitalizing on the success of the Canal and opening the west to exponential economic growth. The financial investment in the Erie Canal was realized in 1834, less than ten years after the grand opening, when revenues from canal tolls exceeded eight million dollars, erasing the original construction debt.

Farming and Agriculture

This illustration shows R.B. Wing & Sons, a shipping supplies company established in Albany, New York in 1845. The boom in boat transportation (over 13,000 boats traveled the Erie Canal in its first year of operation) gave rise to many new jobs and occupations associated with moving people and goods along the Erie Canal. / Courtesy Albany Institute of History & Art via Capital District Library Council and Empire State Digital Network, Public Domain

Farming for profit began to replace some subsistence farming as many took advantage of the large tracts of available land out west that now had a reliable transportation system linking their goods to the growing factories and markets along the eastern seaboard. The East began to rely more and more on the West for agricultural products, both for consumption and for export to Europe. As a result of this east-west trade activity, small ports along the Erie Canal grew into viable commercial centers. And some, like Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo, became boom towns. The City of Rochester became known as the “Flour Capital of the World” when it emerged as the largest producer of flour in the US in 1838.

With the increased volume of operations, farmers no longer controlled all aspects of moving their goods to market; various jobs they were once able to do themselves were being contracted out to keep up with the pace of demand. Whole classes of “middleman” occupations were on the rise: warehousers, distributors, craters, brokers, wholesalers, insurers, bankers, shippers, exporters, forwarding agents, and other servicers related to the movement of goods began appearing in cities and towns along the Canal and the ports of the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean.

Industrial Development

This photograph depicts the Solvay Process Industrial Plant in Solvay, New York. This plant was located on the Erie Canal, and this image shows lumber awaiting processing piled up on the Canal’s side. The rich natural resources of New York, including salt, lumber, and water were harnessed for many industrial purposes. / Courtesy Liverpool Public Library via Central New York Library Resources Council and Empire State Digital Network, Public Domain

There was also tremendous growth in non-agricultural industries such as lumbering and quarrying, as the Canal made the rich natural resources of the interior more accessible. The Erie Canal helped facilitate access to coal reserves in Pennsylvania, reducing American dependence on imported coal (mainly from Britain). Commercial logging commenced in the 1830s with the opening of the Erie Canal and is still a mainstay industry for both the US and Canada. In all of these industries, the increase in the volume of trade encouraged the rise of corporations through which people pooled their capital for larger investments and returns.

Ironically, the Canal’s tremendous success led to the rise of its ultimate competitor: the railroad. The Canal indirectly encouraged the creation of, and investment in railroads by enhancing access to iron, steel, and coal. Unable to keep up with the volume of commerce, the feeder canals were eventually supplanted by small railroad companies. In 1853, the consolidation of the several smaller railroads led to the creation of the New York Central Railroad that would dominate passenger travel and commerce until after World War I.

Canal-Driven Innovations

This 1900 photograph shows a man operating the experimental “electric mule,” created to replace actual mules and horses in the towing of barges and boats on the Erie Canal. / Courtesy Schenectady County Historical Society via Capital District Library Council and Empire State Digital NetworkPublic Domain

The Erie Canal significantly increased the amount of tonnage of virtually any and every commodity that could be shipped, giving rise to many innovations in productivity and efficiency. For example, as the demand for salt from the salt springs around Syracuse increased, the supply of wood to fuel the boiling of brine rapidly diminished. Fields of solar ovens were built to use the heat of the sun to evaporate the water from the brine. That nineteenth-century salt operation remains to this day one of the largest solar energy projects in the history of the world.

The iron truss bridge, first developed by Squire Whipple for crossing the Erie Canal was later adapted for the railroads. As Midwestern grain was offloaded at Buffalo, the need arose to store the vast quantities of grain to be shipped. The grain elevator, invented by Joseph Dart in Buffalo, resolved the need for large storage containers to hold the ever-growing shipments of raw materials (flour, coal, etc.) from the West, and its use persisted after the height of the Erie Canal’s popularity as a means of transporting goods. Other innovations such as the “Electric Mule” were not as successful.

Canal Culture

Canal in Song

This song, “The Meeting of the Waters of Hudson & Erie,” (1825) was sung at the grand opening celebration of the Erie Canal. It praised American ingenuity and coming together for a common purpose. / Courtesy New York State Library via Empire State Digital Network, Public Domain

The Erie Canal was the information superhighway of its day. A song written in New York City could be performed in Buffalo a week later. The first official song about the Canal was “Meeting of the Waters,” composed by Samuel Woodworth. It commemorates the completion and opening celebration of the Erie Canal and is dedicated to DeWitt Clinton. However, the more common entertainment on the Canal was music that could be performed on small portable instruments. Folk songs from the lumber woods and sailing ships were sometimes reworked to reflect life on the Canal. Humor was at the center of these tunes, often exaggerating the dangers of canal travel.

There are many Erie Canal songs, but one popular song can be credited with making the Erie Canal world famous. “Low Bridge Everybody Down (or Fifteen Years on the Erie Canal),” was composed sometime between 1905 and 1912 by Thomas S. Allen, a songwriter for hire. F. B. Haviland Publishing Company copyrighted the song in manuscript form in 1912 and as sheet music in 1913. The release of the song near the end of the “towpath era” on the enlarged Erie Canal may help to explain both its popularity and its content.

Travelogues

This is the title page illustration from Marco Paul’s Voyages & Travels, Erie Canal. Published in 1852, Jacob Abbott’s book was a classic example of nineteenth-century juvenile literature, which taught young people a range of topics from economics to geography to culture and moral character, within an adventure framework. / Courtesy Harvard University via HathiTrust, Public Domain

Although it is a fictional account of an adventure on the Erie Canal, Marco Paul’s Voyages and Travels, Erie Canal by Jacob Abbott is a well-written mid-nineteenth century juvenile adventure publication. The author’s intent was to write stories to entertain young readers but to also communicate about the Canal:

. . . as extensive and varied information as possible, in respect to the geography, the scenery, the customs and the institutions of this country, as they present themselves to the observation of the little traveler . . .

Non-fictional accounts of travel on the Canal are plentiful as well, including less than complimentary narratives such as that of Mrs. Frances Trollope (mother of author Anthony Trollope) who wrote, “I can hardly imagine any motive of conscience powerful enough to induce me again to imprison myself in a canal boat under ordinary circumstances.”

Her description of Lockport indicates not everyone found the fast pace of innovation and industry along the Canal appealing:

Lockport is, beyond all comparison, the strangest looking place I ever beheld. As fast as a dozen trees were cut down, a factory was raised up. It looks as if the demons of machinery, having invaded the peaceful realms of nature, have fixed on Lockport as the battleground on which they should strive for mastery . . .

Excursions

This illustration of the Canastota Bee Building shows an excursion boat with passengers in the foreground. Excursion boats could carry people along the length of the Canal or might be used for day trips to the next town. / Courtesy Canastota Public Library via Central New York Library Resources Council and Empire State Digital Network, Public Domain

Packet boats on the Erie Canal were uniquely designed for passenger canal travel. These boats could be anywhere from sixty- to eighty-feet long and fourteen feet wide. The main cabin room was a lounge, kitchen, and dining room by day, and a divided sleeping room (men and women slept separately) at night. The average cost for passenger travel was four cents per mile, including meals and sleeping accommodations. They were pulled by horses walking along the towpath and compact, almost like nineteenth century RVs, carrying passengers both east and west.

People traveled the Erie Canal by packet boat for tourism as well as for business. These boats were relatively plush for their time, featuring good food and sometimes live entertainment. During the day, passengers could sit outside on the deck or on the roof of the boats, though rooftop riders sometimes needed to look out for low bridges. Noteworthy passengers included Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Dickens. Once the short railroad lines were consolidated, passengers favored the faster trains for cross-state travel, but packet boats continued to take passengers on local excursions.

Folklore

“Canawlers” (or “canallers”)—people who lived and worked along the Erie Canal—had a peculiar language and lifestyle unique to the region around the canal route. Canal folklore and language was primarily associated with Irish immigrants and other workers and identified with rowdy behavior, transient lifestyles, and a perceived bond with maritime industry. Canal towns sprang up with nautical names like Lockport, Middleport, Spencerport, and Fairport. Terms like hoggee, runners, jigger boss, trippers, shanty, squeezer, and hoodledasher were used by those who made a living from work dependent on the Erie Canal.

The folklore of the Erie Canal focused on legendary characters and their feats, much like folklore associated with the railroads lionized John Henry or Huck Finn embodied Mark Twain’s Mississippi River. There was a tale of Joshua the Frog, who could pull tree stumps and haul lumber where farmers and their workhorses could not. Pirates were reported to maraud the canal waters, commandeering packet and line boats, and America’s first daredevil, Sam Patch, began his career by jumping from great heights into waters along the Erie Canal, including Niagara Falls and the Genesee River.

Moving People and Ideas

Immigration

This document is a receipt for the payment of passage on the Erie Canal for five people, purchased in Albany, New York in 1837. The cost of passage described as “2 over and 3 under” may pertain to age or to whether or not they were sleeping below in the cabin or on deck. / Courtesy The Erie Canal Museum via Central New York Library Resources Council and Empire State Digital Network, Public Domain

The French Revolution in 1792, along with the Federalist anti-alien policies, created a sharp decline in immigration to America. But following Napoleon’s defeat, the subsequent turmoil in Europe and the installation of a more tolerant administration in Washington, DC caused immigrants to once again stream into America. The Erie Canal was both a source of work for immigrants as well as a passage to western lands.

Many of the immigrants coming to the country were peasants with few skills, and a number became part of the massive labor force required to construct the Erie Canal. Other travelers from both Europe and from the east coast of the United States were farmers seeking fertile lands out west. The amazingly low cost of transportation by Canal inspired families, and sometimes entire communities, to travel west for cheap land. As early as 1825, just after the opening of the Canal, about three hundred passengers per week were arriving in Detroit via passage from the Canal to the Great Lakes. The total population of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan grew from about 800,000 in 1820 to over four million in 1880.

The Burned-Over District

Despite the implausibility of claims made by Hydesville, New York natives Margaretta, Kate, and Leah Fox that they could communicate with the dead, they are associated with the beginnings of modern Spiritualism. / Courtesy Hett Art Gallery and Museum at Camp Chesterfield via IUPUI University Library and Indiana Memory, Public Domain

The Canal brought all kinds of people to upstate New York. Many of them were young, looking to capitalize on a growing national economy, and ready for a new spiritual revival. During the Second Great Awakening, evangelical religious fervor swept the country, especially the Northeast and Midwest, and new ideas and beliefs spread via the Erie Canal. New religious and utopian movements such as the Oneida Community, the Spiritualists, the Shakers and the Mormons, moved westward along the canal route, rapidly descending on port towns and then moving on. This fast-moving wave of spirituality and religious zeal, which converted so many so quickly, prompted observers to refer to the Genesee Valley as the “Burned-Over District.”

In particular, the Baptist and Methodist faiths gained large numbers of converts and new denominations emerged. Joseph Smith discovered the Mormon faith just outside of Palmyra. The Fox Sisters founded Spiritualism near Rochester. Evangelist Charles Grandison Finney held a massive religious revival in Rochester, New York, lasting several months, from September 1830 to March 1831. People used the Canal to travel from as far away as 100 miles to hear him speak.

The movement for the prohibition of alcohol also grew in popularity during the late nineteenth century, and long before national prohibition many canalside communities, such as Port Byron, voted to go “dry” and ban alcohol. Temperance grew out of the conviction that alcohol was promoting crime along the Canal and the movement found crossover support among abolitionists and women’s rights groups as well.

Abolitionism

Not as well known as Frederick Douglass, Austin Steward also wrote an autobiography titled, Twenty-two years a slave, and forty years a freeman; embracing a correspondence of several years, while president of Wilberforce Colony, London, Canada West. He resided in Rochester, New York after escaping enslavement. / Courtesy The New York Public Library, Public Domain

Upstate New York was a center of abolition activity during the canal era and anti-slavery ideas spread from port to port. The Canal was completed in 1825, and two years later, New York state officially abolished slavery. Many freedom seekers followed the canal path on their way to Canada and others settled in towns and cities along the Canal. Some of the great leaders of the movement lived a short distance from the Erie Canal, including Stephen and Harriet Myers in Albany, Harriet Tubman in Oswego, Jermain Loguen in Syracuse, William Wells Brown in Buffalo, and Frederick Douglass, who published his abolitionist newspaper, The North Star in Rochester, New York.

Activists organized anti-slavery societies throughout New York, and in October 1835, the first convention of the New York Anti-Slavery Society took place in Utica, not far from the Erie Canal. Several prominent figures in New York’s abolitionist movement had businesses that were tied to the success of the Erie Canal, including Lyman Spalding of Lockport, Isaac and Amy Post of Rochester, and Gerrit Smith of Utica and New York City.

Women’s Rights

While advocating for the rights of women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton (left) met Susan B. Anthony (right) in 1851, and in 1869 they organized the National Woman Suffrage Association. / Courtesy National Portrait Gallery via Smithsonian Institution, Public Domain

Social reform movements, particularly the abolition and temperance movements, gave women a greater sense of empowerment through their participation. They began investing time and resources in charitable institutions, and from there, took on more public roles that moved them away from the domestic sphere. Many women abolitionists also became advocates for the rights of women.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were two of America’s most important leaders in the nineteenth-century quest for women’s rights. Both women had been active in the antislavery and temperance movements before building a mass movement for women’s rights. Although neither lived to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote, Stanton and Anthony built the foundation for women’s suffrage in the twentieth century. The first convention for women’s rights took place in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York within several miles of the Erie Canal, with 200 women in attendance. An even larger group attended a follow-up conference in Rochester several weeks later.

Transformation and Criticism

New American Consumers

This 1879 map of Cohoes, New York shows the Erie Canal (center) and feeder Champlain Canal (lower) and lists the many businesses that prospered because of access to canal transport. Courtesy of Boston Public Library via Digital Commonwealth, Public Domain

Just as the Erie Canal greatly reduced the cost of transporting goods across the country, it also fostered an increase in prices for raw commodities being produced in the west. For example, between 1825 and 1835 prices for flour sold by farmers in Cincinnati nearly doubled, while prices for corn were nearly tripled. The Erie Canal was possibly the single greatest generator of American market expansion and consumer demand in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Increasing production of American agriculture and manufactured goods was not an accidental byproduct of the Erie Canal. Businesses and government leaders, desirous of decreasing American dependence on foreign goods, viewed the Canal as one catalyst for raising levels of domestic production. The increased availability of finished goods and the related rise of wealth and consumer demand triggered major changes in Americans’ lifestyles. People now had access to a greater variety of essentials (foodstuffs, clothing, tools and farming implements, building supplies) as well as access to luxury goods including pre-made clothing from Cohoes and Troy, cast iron stoves from Albany, and decorative home furnishings from New York City’s cabinetmaker Duncan Phyfe. All of these were promoted through the emerging advertising industry.

Education and Government

Stephen Van Rensselaer was one of the last direct descendants of the Dutch patroons, the first Europeans to settle in New York. Van Rensselaer saw the economic advantages of technological and scientific knowledge in planning the Erie Canal. / Courtesy The New York Public Library, Public Domain

From the beginning, the geological features of the canal route had been a subject of deep interest. For example, Stephen Van Rensselaer created a geological profile of the canal route in 1824, the same year he established the Rensselaer School “for the purpose of instructing persons … in the application of science to the common purposes of life.”

During the mid-nineteenth century Enlargement, many engineers and designers were trained by newly-formed engineering programs at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy and Union College in Schenectady. More than thirty Union College graduates were active in the Erie Canal Enlargement. Today, these institutions still provide higher education opportunities and provide resources for studies about improving life along the Erie Canal and ways to utilize its resources.

The development and operation of the Erie Canal also transformed the role and perception of government in New York. American embargoes on foreign trade created incentives to grow markets domestically, encouraging construction of a canal for inland transport. Additionally, the establishment and activity of the Canal Board, initially perceived as action on the part of state government to protect individual property rights and interests, changed over time. A more hostile relationship developed between the Board and residents of the state, who now felt as if the government was acting in the interests of businesses rather than individuals.

Resistance

This painting is Genesee Scenery (1847) by Thomas Cole. Cole was one of the leading painters of the Hudson River School, which was named for the New York location in which many of these painters lived and were inspired to depict romantic views of the natural American landscape. / Courtesy Brigham Young University – Harold B. Lee Library via Mountain West Digital Library, Public Domain

Not everyone saw the Erie Canal as a positive change for New York State or the nation. Art and literature reflected a growing disillusionment with the ways commercialization and industrialization were changing the natural landscape and culture of America.

The artists of the Hudson River School, including Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, Asher Brown Durand, and Frederic Edwin Church, were primarily landscape painters who attempted to capture the romance of nature and untamed wilderness that had characterized America before the intrusion of civilization. Their work reflected America’s nineteenth-century focus on the exploration and settlement, and resisted portrayals of booming urban areas, populations, and industries.

This “wilderness” theme was also popular around this time, particularly as depicted in the work of New York native James Fenimore Cooper. His Leatherstocking Tales, a series of adventure novels about pioneer days in upstate New York, look back to a simpler way of life that vanished with population growth, industrial development, and the loss of substantial Native American presence in New York. Cooper’s popular stories painted a picture for readers of New York during a wild and romantic frontier period and continued in his novel The Last of the Mohicans.

Nativism

Events at home and abroad contributed to large numbers of people moving across the country via the Erie Canal. For example, overcrowding and lack of available land in New England motivated New Englanders to relocate westward. Religious persecution in places like Norway greatly increased the number of immigrants coming to America and moving west by way of the Erie Canal. Following the Great Hunger in Ireland, the Canal ports were flooded with Catholic immigrants looking for new homes and opportunities. As cities grew, so did rates of poverty and indigence, prompting the rise of organized charities and new ideas of social welfare.

This influx of different groups, particularly immigrants, following the path of the Canal prompted nativist reaction. Nativists promoted the traditions and Protestant religious beliefs of native-born Americans over the alien customs, languages, and faiths of newcomers and saw immigrants and their cultures as a threat to the American way of life. In particular, they resisted what they perceived as an encroachment of Catholicism. The Nativist movement significantly impacted state politics in New York through social organizations and political groups like the Know-Nothing Party in the mid-nineteenth century.

Legacy

Enlarging the Canal

This photograph shows a large barge in Erie Canal Lock 2 located in Waterford, New York, circa 1940. Lock 2 is located at the junction of the Hudson River and the Erie Canal. Barge canal boats were now not only motorized but much larger and so canal engineers decided to “canalize” the bodies of water that the original Canal had been built to avoid since they could more easily accommodate the larger vessels. /Courtesy Albany Institute of History & Art via Capital District Library Council and Empire State Digital Network Public Domain

Even before the end of the first full navigation season on the Erie Canal, it was obvious there was a need for enlargement. The wait for locks often took hours and the sizes of boats that the Canal could accommodate were severely limited. The first enlargement began in 1836, rerouting parts of the Canal and widening it to seventy feet while deepening it to seven feet. Locks were doubled to allow simultaneous two-way passage and extended in length to enable passage for larger boats. Canal construction abruptly halted in 1842 because of public reaction to a tax for public projects. However, work resumed in 1847 and, by 1862, the Enlarged Erie Canal was completed.

The Barge Canal System, begun in 1907 and completed in 1918, was a result of a report from the Committee on Canals, created by New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt in 1898. The Canal’s width was extended to 125 feet with a minimum depth of twelve feet. The towpath was eliminated because it had become obsolete with the rise of motorized vessels. This time, engineers believed they could tame natural bodies of water, relocating the Canal into lakes and rivers controlled by a sophisticated network of dams and locks and virtually abandoning large sections of the original Canal.

Decline and Rebirth

This photograph shows the Erie Canal at Palmyra, New York, in 2008. As canal traffic declined, so did revenue for repairs and maintenance, making the Canal a less than attractive investment for commercial businesses to transport their goods. / Courtesy Brigham Young University – Harold B. Lee Library via Mountain West Digital Library, Public Domain

By the mid-twentieth century, several factors began to change the role and perception of the Canal. Shipping quickly dropped off when the new St. Lawrence Seaway, completed in 1959, allowed ocean-going vessels to travel straight to the Great Lakes. While the Erie Canal continued to carry some bulk cargos on barges, pleasure crafts began to outnumber commercial vessels. Both the Erie Canal and the national railroad system also began to face stiff competition from the postwar federal interstate highway construction program in the 1950s. Just as the Erie Canal had been built in response to national defense needs recognized in the War of 1812, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 intended to address the logistical weaknesses of the national defense acknowledged during World War II. This eventually gave truck transportation the edge over both rail and canal alternatives.

As the 1972 Clean Water Act gained traction, recreational uses of the Canal increased exponentially and it became a magnet for tourists. With the creation of the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, the history of the Canal became an additional and eventually primary attraction.

Erie Canalway Heritage Corridor

It was not until 1999 that the City of Buffalo found the key to a successful waterfront redevelopment campaign: focus on the Erie Canal Heritage Corridor. This is an excerpt from the 2004 master plan for the Erie Canal Harbor project in Buffalo, New York. / Courtesy New York State Library via Empire State Digital Network, Public Domain

An Act of Congress in the year 2000 established the Erie Canalway Heritage Corridor to preserve and ensure public access to historical features along the Erie Canal’s route. The heritage site now includes thirty-four National Historic Landmarks, 800 listings on the National Register of Historic Places, four National Parks, one National Forest, two National Wildlife Refuges, one National Scenic Trail, four National Natural Landmarks, eleven State Wildlife Management Areas, nine New York State Historic Sites, and twenty-four State Parks. Some 1.6 million people visit some part of the Canal each year.

The New York State Canal Corporation, the quasi-government body responsible for the management and development of the Erie Canalway Trail, maintains that over three-quarters of the 365-mile Erie Canal path is usable for bicycling, walking and even cross-country skiing.

Water Is Still Key

This photograph shows the ruins of the Holly Manufacturing Company on the north side of the Erie Canal at Lockport. In the foreground, the power plant discharges on the south side of the locks. / Courtesy Lockport Public Library via Western New York Library Resources Council and Empire State Digital Network, Public Domain

In 2014, the New York State Canal Corporation undertook a study to determine the non-tourism economic benefits of the canal system. It found that commercial shipping is still important, but other new uses, such as agricultural irrigation and municipal/industrial water supply for several types of businesses, are having major impacts on the upstate economy. The Canal is now operated by the New York Power Authority (NYPA), which owns three hydroelectric stations along the Canal, and plans to incorporate the Canal into clean, sustainable hydroelectric generation.

In addition, some communities, particularly in the western and central parts of the state, use the canal system’s reservoirs for public water supplies and irrigation. Industries also still locate near the Canal to use its waters for processing, manufacturing, cooling, cleaning, and in research and development, especially in the eastern and central parts of the state. For example, the Canal continues to be used by the shipping industry to move large pieces of equipment between the Great Lakes and Hudson River that cannot be moved by truck or rail and more than twenty-five golf courses use water from the Canal for irrigation.

Conclusion

his 2005 photograph shows the Barge Canal—which is often referred to as the Erie Canal—at Lyons, New York, about twenty miles east of Palmyra. One of the locks on the canal can be seen at the far left. The canal today is primarily used for recreational purposes. / Courtesy Brigham Young University – Harold B. Lee Library via Mountain West Digital Library, Public Domain

At the eight-year-long bicentennial of the Erie Canal’s construction, the Canal’s historical impact is clear. By delivering immigrants to the vast West, the Erie Canal was a major force in the settlement of the United States. By connecting the resources of the Midwest to the Port of New York and beyond to global markets, the Erie Canal made the country rich. Built as a navigation system for commercial shipping, the Erie Canal attracted businesses along its banks. Today nearly eighty percent of Upstate New York’s population lives within twenty-five miles of the Erie Canal.

The Erie Canal forever changed the way Americans worked and lived. It connected previously disparate regions of the country and carried goods, people, and ideas across those regions. It set a precedent for government intervention in economic development and created the impetus for the very systems that caused its decline, like the railroads and the St. Lawrence Seaway. But most of all, the Erie Canal put New York on the map of American history, making the state the center of the country’s first major transportation system and the model for future infrastructure projects in the states and territories.

This exhibition was curated by Heidi Ziemer and Dan Ward of Western New York Library Resources Council, in partnership with Empire State Digital Network with funding from Humanities New York. Exhibition materials contributed by Empire State Digital Network, The New York Public Library, David Rumsey, Digital Commonwealth, HathiTrust, Illinois Digital Heritage Hub, Indiana Memory, Library of Congress, Minnesota Digital Library, Missouri Hub, Mountain West Digital Library, Recollection Wisconsin, and Smithsonian Institution.

Published by the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), January 2018, under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.