Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast,
Where I read random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.
I'm your host,
Benjamin Boster,
And today's episode is from a Wikipedia article titled Erie Canal.
The Erie Canal is a historic canal in upstate New York that runs east-west between the Hudson River and Lake Erie.
Completed in 1855,
The canal was the first navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes,
Vastly reducing the costs of transporting people and goods across the Appalachians.
The Erie Canal accelerated the settlement of the Great Lakes region,
The westward expansion of the United States,
And the economic ascendancy of New York State.
It has been called the nation's first superhighway.
A canal from the Hudson River to the Great Lakes was first proposed in the 1780s,
But a formal survey was not conducted until 1808.
The New York State Legislature authorized construction in 1817.
Political opponents of the canal,
Referencing its lead supporter,
New York Governor DeWitt Clinton,
Denigrated the project as Clinton's Folly and Clinton's Big Ditch.
Nonetheless,
The canal saw quick success upon opening on October 26,
1825,
With toll revenue covering the state's construction debt within the first year of operation.
The westward connection gave New York City a strong advantage over all other U.
S.
Ports and brought major growth to canal cities such as Albany,
Utica,
Syracuse,
Rochester,
And Buffalo.
The construction of the Erie Canal was a landmark civil engineering achievement in the early history of the United States.
When built,
The 363-mile canal was the second-longest in the world,
After the Grand Canal in China.
Initially 40 feet wide and 4 feet deep,
The canal was expanded several times,
Most notably from 1905 to 1918,
When the Barge Canal was built and over half the original route was abandoned.
The modern Barge Canal measures 351 miles long,
120 feet wide,
And 12 feet deep.
It has 34 locks,
Including the Waterford Flight,
The steepest locks in the United States.
When leaving the canal,
Boats must also traverse the Black Rock Lock to reach Lake Erie or the Troy Federal Lock to reach the tidal Hudson.
The overall elevation difference is about 565 feet.
The Erie's peak year was 1855,
When 33,
000 commercial shipments took place.
It continued to be competitive with railroads until about 1902,
When tolls were abolished.
Commercial traffic declined heavily in the latter half of the 20th century due to competition from trucking and the 1959 opening of the larger St.
Lawrence Seaway.
The canal's last regularly scheduled hauler,
The Day Peckinpah,
Ended service in 1994.
Today the Erie Canal is mainly used by recreational watercraft.
It connects the three other canals in the New York State Canal System,
The Champlain,
Oswego,
And Cayuga Seneca.
Some long-distance boaters take the Erie as part of the Great Loop.
The canal has also become a tourist attraction in its own right.
Several parks and museums are dedicated to its history.
The New York State Canalway Trail is a popular cycling path that follows the canal across the state.
In 2000,
Congress designated the Erie Canal National Heritage Corridor to protect and promote the system.
The waterway today referred to as the Erie Canal is quite different from the 19th century Erie Canal.
More than half of the original Erie Canal was destroyed or abandoned during construction of the New York State Barge Canal in the early 20th century.
The sections of the original route remaining in use were widened significantly,
Mostly west of Syracuse,
With bridges rebuilt and locks replaced.
It was called the Barge Canal at the time,
But that name fell into disuse with the disappearance of commercial traffic and the increase of recreational travel in the later 20th century.
Before railroads,
Water transport was the most cost-effective way to ship bulk goods.
A mule can only carry about 250 pounds,
But can draw a barge weighing as much as 60,
000 pounds along a towpath.
In total,
A canal could cut transport costs by about 95%.
In the early years of the United States,
Transportation of goods between the coastal ports and the interior was slow and difficult.
Close to the seacoast,
Rivers provided easy inland transport up to the fall line,
Since floating vessels encounter much less friction than land vehicles.
However,
The Appalachian Mountains were a great obstacle to further transportation or settlement stretching 1,
500 miles from Maine to Alabama,
With just five places where mule trains or wagon roads could be routed.
Passengers and freight bound for the western parts of the country had to travel overland,
A journey made more difficult by the rough condition of the roads.
In 1800,
It typically took two and a half weeks to travel overland from New York to Cleveland,
Ohio,
And four weeks to Detroit.
The principal exportable product of the Ohio Valley was grain,
Which was a high-volume,
Low-priced commodity,
Bolstered by supplies from the coast.
Frequently,
It was not worth the cost of transporting it to faraway population centers.
This was a factor leading to farmers in the West turning their grains into whiskey for easier transport and higher sales,
And later the Whiskey Rebellion.
In the 18th and early 19th centuries,
It became clear to coastal residents that the city or state that succeeded in developing a cheap,
Reliable route to the West would enjoy economic success,
And the port at the seaward end of such a route would see business increase greatly.
In time,
Projects were devised in Virginia,
Maryland,
Pennsylvania,
And relatively deep into the coastal states.
The Mohawk River,
A tributary of the Hudson River,
Rises near Lake Ontario and runs in a glacial meltwater channel just north of the Catskill Range of the Appalachian Mountains,
Separating them from the geologically distinct Adirondacks to the north.
The Mohawk and Hudson Valleys form the only cut across the Appalachians north of Alabama.
A navigable canal through the Mohawk Valley would allow an almost complete water route from New York City in the south to Lake Ontario and Lake Erie in the west.
Via the canal and these lakes,
Other Great Lakes,
And to a lesser degree related rivers,
A large part of the continent's interior and many settlements would be made well connected to the eastern seaboard.
Among the first attempts made by European colonists to improve upon the future state's navigable waterways was the construction in 1702 of the Wood Creek Cary,
Or Oneida Cary,
A short portage road connecting Wood Creek to the Mohawk River near modern-day Rome,
New York.
However,
The first documented instance of the idea of a canal to tie the east coast to the new western settlements via New York's waterways was discussed as early as 1724.
New York provincial official Cadwallader Colden made a passing reference in a report on fur trading to improving the natural waterways of western New York.
Colden and subsequent figures in the history of the Erie Canal and its development would draw inspiration from other great works of the so-called Canal Age,
Including France's Canal de Midi and the Bridgewater Canal in England.
The attempt in the 1780s by George Washington to build a canal from the tidewaters of the Potomac into the fledgling nation's interior was also well known to the planners of the Erie Canal.
Governor Morris and Elkanaw Watson were early proponents of a canal along the Mohawk River.
Their efforts led to the creation of the Western and Northern Inland Lock Navigation Companies in 1792,
Which took the first steps to improve navigation on the Mohawk and construct a canal between the Mohawk and Lake Ontario,
But it was soon discovered that private financing was insufficient.
Christopher Coles,
Who was familiar with the Bridgewater Canal,
Surveyed the Mohawk Valley and made a presentation to the New York State Legislature in 1784,
Proposing a shorter canal from Lake Ontario.
The proposal drew attention and some action,
But was never implemented.
Jesse Hawley had envisioned encouraging the growing of large quantities of grain on the western New York plains,
Then largely unsettled,
For sale on the eastern seaboard.
However,
He went bankrupt trying to ship grain to the coast.
While in Canandaigua Debtors' Prison,
Hawley began pressing for the construction of a canal along the 90-mile Mohawk River Valley,
With support from Joseph Ellicott,
Agent for the Holland Land Company in Batavia.
Ellicott realized that a canal would add value to the land he was selling in the western part of the state.
He later became the first canal commissioner.
New York legislators became interested in the possibility of building a canal across New York in the first decade of the 19th century.
Shipping goods west from Albany was a costly and tedious affair.
There was no railroad yet,
And to cover the distance from Buffalo to New York City by stagecoach took two weeks.
The problem was that the land rises about 600 feet from the Hudson to Lake Erie.
Locks at the time could handle up to 12 feet of lift,
So even with the heftiest cuttings and viaducts,
50 locks would be required along the 360-mile canal.
Such a canal would be expensive to build,
Even with modern technology.
In 1800,
The expense was barely imaginable.
President Thomas Jefferson called it little short of madness and rejected it.
Eventually,
Hawley interested New York Governor DeWitt Clinton in the project.
There was much opposition,
And the project was ridiculed as Clinton's Folly and Clinton's Ditch.
In 1870,
Though,
Clinton received approval from the legislature for $7 million for construction.
The original canal was 363 miles long,
From Albany on the Hudson to Buffalo on Lake Erie.
The channel was cut 40 feet wide and 4 feet deep,
With removed soil piled on the downhill side to form a walkway known as a towpath.
Its construction through limestone and mountains proved a daunting task.
To move earth,
Animals pulled a slip scraper,
Similar to a bulldozer.
The sides of the canal were lined with stone set in clay,
And the bottom was also lined with clay.
The canal was built by Irish laborers and German stonemasons.
All labor on the canal depended upon human and animal power or the force of water.
Engineering techniques developed during its construction included the building of aqueducts to redirect water.
One aqueduct was 950 feet long to span 800 feet of river.
As the canal progressed,
The crews and engineers working on the project developed expertise and became a skilled labor force.
The men who planned and oversaw construction were novices as surveyors and as engineers.
There were no civil engineers in the United States.
James Geddes and Benjamin Wright,
Who laid out the route,
Were judges whose experience in surveying was in settling boundary disputes.
Geddes had only used a surveying instrument for a few hours before his work on the canal.
Canvas White was a 27-year-old amateur engineer who persuaded Clinton to let him go to Britain at his own expense to study the canal system there.
Nathan Roberts was a mathematics teacher and land speculator.
Yet these men carried the Erie Canal up the Niagara Escarpment at Lockport,
Maneuvered it onto a towering embankment to cross over Irondequoit Creek,
Spanned the Genesee River on an awesome aqueduct,
And carved a route for it out of solid rock between Little Falls and Schenectady.
And all of those venturesome designs worked precisely as planned.
Construction began on July 4,
1817 at Rome,
New York.
The first 15 miles from Rome to Utica opened in 1819.
At that rate,
The canal would not be finished for 30 years.
The main delays were caused by felling trees to clear a path through virgin forest and moving excavated soil which took longer than expected.
But the builders devised ways to solve these problems.
To fell a tree,
They threw rope over the top branches and winched it down.
They pulled out the stumps with an innovative stump puller.
Two huge wheels were mounted loose on the ends of an axle.
A third wheel,
Slightly smaller than the others,
Was fixed to the center of the axle.
A chain was wrapped around the axle and hooked to the stump.
A rope was wrapped around the center wheel and hooked to a team of oxen.
The mechanical advantage torque obtained ripped the stumps out of the soil.
Soil to be moved was shoveled into large wheelbarrows that were dumped into mule-pulled carts.
Using a scraper and a plow,
A three-man team with oxen,
Horses,
And mules could build a mile in a year.
The remaining problem was finding labor.
Increased immigration helped fill the need.
Many of the laborers working on the canal were Irish,
Who had recently come to the United States as a group of about 5,
000.
Construction continued at an increased rate as new workers arrived.
When the canal reached Montezuma Marsh at the outlets of Cayuga Lake west of Syracuse,
It was rumored that over 1,
000 workers died of swamp fever,
Malaria,
And construction was temporarily stopped.
However,
Recent research has revealed that the death toll was likely much lower,
As no contemporary reports mention significant worker mortality,
And mass graves from the period have never been found in the area.
Work continued on the downhill side towards the Hudson,
And the crews worked on the section across the swampland when it froze in winter.
The middle section from Utica to Salina,
Syracuse,
Was completed in 1820,
And traffic on that section started up immediately.
Expansion to the east and west proceeded simultaneously,
And the whole eastern section,
250 miles from Brockport to Albany,
Opened on September 10,
1823 to great fanfare.
The Champlain Canal,
A separate but connected 64-mile north-south route from Waterfleet on the Hudson to Lake Champlain,
Opened on the same date.
After Montezuma Marsh,
The next difficulties were crossing Nerondicoit Creek and the Genesee River near Rochester.
The former ultimately required building the 1,
320-foot-long Great Embankment to carry the canal at a height of 76 feet above the level of the creek,
Which ran through a 245-foot culvert underneath.
The canal crossed the river on a stone aqueduct 802 feet long and 17 feet wide,
Supported by 11 arches.
In 1823,
Construction reached the Niagara Escarpment,
An 80-foot-high wall of hard dolomitic limestone.
The route had followed the channel of a creek that had cut a ravine steeply down the escarpment.
The construction and operation of two sets of five locks along a three-mile corridor soon gave rise to the community of Lockport.
The 12-foot lift locks had a total lift of 60 feet,
Exiting into a deeply cut channel.
The final leg had to be cut 30 feet deep through another limestone mass,
The Onondaga Ridge.
Much of that section was blasted with black powder,
And the inexperience of the crews often led to accidents and sometimes to rocks falling on nearby homes.
Two villages competed to be the terminus,
Black Rock on the Niagara River and Buffalo at the eastern tip of Lake Erie.
Buffalo expended great energy to widen and deepen Buffalo Creek to make it navigable and to create a harbor at its mouth.
Buffalo won over Black Rock and grew into a large city,
Eventually encompassing its former rival.
In 1824,
Before the canal was completed,
A detailed pocket guide for the tourist and traveler along the line of the canals and the interior commerce of the state of New York was published for the benefit of travelers and land speculators.
The entire canal was officially completed on October 26,
1825.
The event was marked by a statewide grand celebration,
Culminating in a series of cannon shots along the length of the canal in the Hudson,
A 90-minute cannonade from Buffalo to New York City.
A flotilla of boats,
Led by Governor DeWitt Clinton aboard Seneca Chief,
Sailed from Buffalo to New York City over ten days.
Clinton then ceremonially poured Lake Erie water into New York Harbor to mark the wetting of the waters.
On its return trip,
Seneca Chief brought back a keg of Atlantic Ocean water,
Which was poured into Lake Erie by Buffalo's Judge Samuel Wilkison,
Who would later become mayor.
The Erie Canal was thus completed in eight years,
At a total length of 353 miles,
And cost $7.
143 million,
Equivalent to $192 million in 2023.
It was acclaimed as an engineering marvel that united the country and helped New York City develop as an international trade center.
Problems developed,
But were quickly solved.
Leaks developed along the entire length of the canal,
But these were sealed using cement that hardened underwater,
Hydraulic cement.
Erosion on the clay bottom proved to be a problem,
And the speed was limited to four miles per hour.
Additional feeder canals soon extended the Erie Canal into a system.
These included the Cayuga-Seneca Canal south to the Finger Lakes,
The Oswego Canal from Three Rivers north to Lake Ontario at Oswego,
And the Champlain Canal from Troy north to Lake Champlain.
From 1883 to 1877,
The Short Crooked Lake Canal connected Keuka Lake and Seneca Lake.
The Chemung Canal connected the south end of Seneca Lake to Elmira in 1833,
And was an important route for Pennsylvania coal and timber into the canal system.
The Shenango and Chemung Canals linked the Erie with the Susquehanna River system.
The Black River Canal connected the Black River to the Erie Canal at Rome,
And remained in operation until the 1920s.
The Genesee Valley Canal was rung along the Genesee River to connect with the Allegheny River at Olene,
But the Allegheny section,
Which would have connected to the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers,
Was never built.
The Genesee Valley Canal was later abandoned and became the route of the Genesee Valley Canal Railroad.
The original design planned for an annual tonnage of 1.
5 million tons,
But this was exceeded immediately.
An ambitious program to improve the canal began in 1834.
During this massive series of construction projects known as the First Enlargement,
The canal was widened from 40 to 70 feet,
And deepened from 4 to 7 feet.
Locks were widened and or rebuilt in new locations,
And many new navigable aqueducts were constructed.
The canal was straightened and slightly rerouted in some stretches,
Resulting in the abandonment of short segments of the original 1825 canal.
The First Enlargement was completed in 1862,
With further minor enlargements in later decades.
The Mohawk and Hudson Railroad opened in 1837,
Providing a bypass to the slowest part of the canal between Albany and Schenectady.
Other railroads were soon chartered and built to continue the line west to Buffalo,
And in 1842 a continuous line,
Which later became the New York Central Railroad and its Auburn Road in 1853,
Was opened the whole way to Buffalo.
As the railroad served the same general route as the canal,
But provided for faster travel,
Passengers soon switched to it.
However,
As late as 1852,
The canal carried 13 times more freight tonnage than all the railroads in New York State combined.
The New York West Shore and Buffalo Railway was completed in 1884,
As a route running closely parallel to both the canal and the New York Central Railroad.
However,
It went bankrupt and was acquired the next year by the New York Central.
The canal continued to compete well with the railroads through 1902,
When tolls were abolished.
In a November 3,
1903 referendum,
A majority of New Yorkers authorized an expansion of the canal at a cost of $101 million.
In 1905,
Construction of the New York State Barge Canal began,
Which was completed in 1918 at a cost of $96.
7 million.
This new canal replaced much of the original route,
Leaving many abandoned sections,
Most notably between Syracuse and Rome.
New digging and flood control technologies allowed engineers to canalize rivers that the original canal had sought to avoid,
Such as the Mohawk,
Seneca,
And Clyde Rivers and Oneida Lake.
In sections that did not consist of canalized rivers,
Particularly between Rochester and Buffalo,
The original Erie Canal channel was enlarged to 120 feet wide and 12 feet deep.
The expansion allowed barges up to 2,
000 short tons to use the canal.
This expensive project was politically unpopular in parts of the state not served by the canal and failed to save it from becoming obsolete for commercial shipping.
Freight traffic reached a total of 5.
2 million short tons by 1951.
The growth of railroads and highways across the state and the opening of the St.
Lawrence Seaway in 1959 caused commercial traffic on the canal to decline dramatically during the second half of the 20th century.
Since the 1990s,
The canal system has been used primarily by recreational traffic.
In 1992,
The New York State Barge Canal was renamed the New York State Canal System,
Including the Erie,
Cayuga-Seneca,
Oswego,
And Champlain Canals,
And placed under the newly created New York State Canal Corporation,
A subsidiary of the New York State Thruway Authority.
While part of the thruway,
The canal system was operating using money generated by thruway tolls.
In 2017,
The New York State Canal Corporation was transferred from the New York State Thruway to the New York Power Authority.
In 2000,
Congress designated the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor,
Covering 524 miles of navigable water from Lake Champlain to the Capital Region and west to Buffalo.
The area has a population of 2.
7 million.
About 75% of central and western New York's population lives within 25 miles of the Erie Canal.
There were some 42 commercial shipments on the canal in 2008,
Compared to 15 such shipments in 2007,
And more than 33,
000 shipments in 1855,
The canal's peak year.
The new growth in commercial traffic is due to the rising cost of diesel fuel.
Canal barges can carry a short ton of cargo 514 miles on one gallon of diesel fuel,
While a gallon allows a train to haul the same amount of cargo 202 miles,
And a truck 59 miles.
Canal barges can carry loads up to 3,
000 short tons and are used to transport objects that would be too large for road or rail shipment.
In 2012,
The New York State Canal System as a whole was used to ship 42,
000 tons of cargo.
Travel on the canal's middle section,
Particularly in the Mohawk Valley,
Was severely hampered by flooding in late June and early July 2006.
Flood damage to the canal and its facilities was estimated as at least $15 million.
