U.S. Technology: History

Lesson 4: Transportation Revolution

Canals

Canal building is an art that is older than the United States; in fact it is an ancient art. Cowan states on page 99 that “The Romans had built artificial watercourses; so had the Venetians in the Renaissance and the Dutch in the seventeenth century.” It was an art that was well-known by the time the U.S was coming into its own as a country.

Canals seem like an easy thing to build. One should simply be able to dig a trough wide enough to allow barges to pass through, line it with something that will hold water, build a few dams, and build a double dam (lock) wherever elevations in the land required the raising or lowering of the barges. Piece of cake right? Well, maybe not!

The advantages of canals were many; they could bypass rough patches of rivers, tie two rivers together, connect lakes and rivers, and make it possible to navigate between a river or lake and the ocean.

The disadvantages were also many. The route for a canal was not always straight forward or easy to clear, the locks had to be constructed in the right places, the construction had to be paid for, and one had to find an experienced canal construction crew. Often times people decided the disadvantages of canal building outweighed the advantages.

Even with these disadvantages, there were canals being built in the early decades of the United States. These included the Santee Canal, the Middlesex Canal, and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.

The biggest would be the Erie Canal. In the 1790’s, many promoters and legislators argued that western New York could be opened for commerce if a canal was constructed along the route of streams, rivers and lakes that the Iroquois had traveled for years. It was a daunting proposition as it would be 363 miles long.

It has been said by historian Etling Morison that the construction of the Erie Canal was “the first-and quite possibly the best - school of engineering in the country.” There were 4,000 men working at the peak of the construction of the Erie Canal. Most of these men had little or no experience in building anything of this magnitude; what they did not know, they learned on the job.

They built the canal in record time! The middle section of the canal consisted of six locks and was seventy-five miles long. It was built in two years, opening in 1819. Within a year of its opening, it was full of traffic and the resulting revenue was used to finance the rest of the canal.

From what you know of the Erie Canal, what do you think it's real significance is?

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