DeWitt Clinton inaugurates the Erie Canal, opening the section going from Albany to beyond Rochester. It will soon link the Atlantic to Lake Erie and build New York City into an economic powerhouse.
Railroads were experimental, wagon roads mostly unpaved. To reach inland, merchants had to ship upriver from New Orleans. The idea of a canal linking the Hudson River and Great Lakes had been floated as early as 1724, but politics delayed the project. New York’s Governor Clinton finally convinced the legislature in 1817 to construct a 363-mile canal linking lakeside Buffalo with Albany on the Hudson. Built largely by laborers digging soil by hand, it provided employment for thousands.
Forty thousand people attended the opening ceremony. The brightly decorated craft in the river included some of those newfangled steamboats (see here). Local traffic produced profits for the canal almost immediately, spurring completion of the full system. The canal was forty feet wide and four feet deep, passing over eighteen aqueducts and through eighty-three locks to overcome a 568-foot gain in height.
Once completed in 1825, the canal offered freight rates at 10 percent of the cost of shipping by road. Wheat shipments multiplied from 3,640 bushels in 1829 to a million in 1841. Tolls covered the entire cost of construction by 1834. By 1840, New York City’s port shipped more than Boston, Baltimore, and New Orleans combined. Competition from railroads began in the 1840s, but the canal was widened, deepened, and given branches. Only after World War II did it finally succumb to railroads and highways.
Clinton’s prediction that all Manhattan would become “one vast city” was more than fulfilled. Manhattan, Brooklyn, and three other counties merged to create the current New York City in 1898. The Erie Canal had made New York New York.—RA