American History Hit - The Erie Canal

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

Completed in 1825, the Erie Canal was the first navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. Alice Shay tells Don how ‘the Nation’s First Superhighway’ accelerated the westward expansion of the United States, carrying goods, people, wealth and prosperity along it. Until the railroad came along, able to carry a lot more, a lot faster, rendering the canal obsolete. Though it remains used and loved by many still today.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Joseph Knight. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you’d like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Fifteen yells on the Erie Canal. Edward Meeker sings the Erie Canal song back in 1913. It's a traditional tune, millions of American schoolchildren still learn and sing and will always remember. The song recalls the days when teams of mules drew boats laden with grain and goods, the length of the canal from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, connecting the east with the fertile vastness of the American Midwest. For decades after its opening in 1821,

the Erie Canal fostered prosperous settlements along its route through upstate New York. That is until the Industrial Revolution roared onward and cheaper, more efficient railroads finally made the canal obsolete. Greetings, I'm Don Wildman. Hello, and this is American History Hit. Thanks for joining us. History is more often than not a long and gradual series of developments. a record of events over time, moving through multiple iterations and stages. Rare is that historic phenomenon that changes everything in one fell swoop. The Erie Canal is one of those rare phenomena.

First proposed in the early 1800s, then constructed from 1817 to 1825, the canal stretched 363 miles across upstate New York from Albany and the Hudson River to Buffalo and Lake Erie. And when it was completed, it became so successful and well-used that revenues collected paid off the entire construction debt in less than 10 years. The Erie Canal moved cargo at significantly lower costs than land freight and in a fraction of the time. And over the years, it spurred the development of so many settlements along its course. It came to be called the mother of cities. The canal was as revolutionary as the railroad that would come later, and which eventually put the canal out of business.

but not before it had utterly transformed the economies of New York, the Midwest, and for that matter, the nation. It set New York City on its path to becoming a booming world-dominating metropolis. Not bad for a 40-foot-wide dirt trench that measured only four feet deep, but then the best ideas are usually the simplest ones. And here to explain the past, present, and future of this great human achievement is urban planner Alice Shea, a principal with the worldwide design and engineering, engineering consultancy, Burrow Happold, who has for a number of years managed the reimagined the Canal's project. Alice Shea, welcome to American History Hit. Great to be here with you, Don. I love stories like the Erie Canal. Everyone's heard of it, has some vague notion of its significance.

We all learned the song at Camp. But this general familiarity belies the complexity of it all, the massive transformative impact the Erie Canal had on American society. It really changed everything, But how so? When I started on the Erie Canal project, the reimagined the Canal's effort, I had heard of it. I knew the song, but I didn't really know that it even still existed. And, oh, it does. It is actually in the New York State Constitution to maintain the shipping corridor even to this day. And it made New York City the mercantile capital that it is.

So back in the 1800s, shipping was really difficult to do. You had to go from across the ocean, get to the major ports, transfer, and, it was a very slow transport overland. And so there was a kind of competition to figure out the best inland waterway you could take up. There was a competition around D.C. and the Potomac through Baltimore as well. And New York ended up being the winner of this competition. So you basically go over to New York City, transfer from big ocean-faring vessels to smaller ones, go up the Hudson, and near Albany, there is the one major break in the Appalachian Mountain Range. And so the engineers at the time created this very complex set of locks, designing the technology as they went along, to get over the second biggest waterfall in the eastern seaboard at Cohoes, and then built this long trench, this kind of prism that was, as you said, 40 feet wide, four feet deep, so you could travel across New York State and get to the Great Lakes, then get to the Mississippi River, thus opening up the full country to trade.

It is an amazing broad plan, and that's kind of what has come down the ages to us. But like I said in the introduction, it belies the steps that had to be taken to get there. There's so many remarkable stories within this big story. That's what we're going to get into here. We're so accustomed to the economic success story that we forget what a controversy it was at the time. I mean, DeWitt Clinton, a giant of New York politics in the day, he's the governor who presides over the construction of the canal. as I said before, 1817, 1825. And he gets a lot of heat for this. It's called DeWitts Ditch, which I love now. I mean, you can only imagine the journalism in the day was no-holds-barred,

and they would have had a field day with this. When he first heard of the idea, he was mayor of New York City prior to that, and he would have understood how this could have helped New York City especially. How much would this have fed into that upstate, downstate thing with New York? I mean, it must have bred a lot of controversy and resentment. There was definitely a big challenge in getting this through. The Congress at the time, even George Washington was involved and said, this is a ridiculous idea. But ultimately, DeWitt Clinton was right, and it paid itself back very, very quickly, was built in seven years. And actually, the upstate downstate story is really interesting because, yes, it was on one hand a competition of where we're putting our investments.

But on the other hand, some even to this day say that Erie Basin in Red Hook, which is in Brooklyn and New York City, is actually the first stop of the Erie Canal. The New York State Canal Conference that happens every year has recently been in New York City to kind of celebrate that continuity because of the city politics and the state politics, that competition continues to this day. And also with the New York State Constitution saying that the Erie Canal needs to be maintained, and open for commercial shipping and navigation, even now. You know, the technologies that built the Erie Canal are from the early 20th century and some of them even prior to the 19th century. And so it costs above $100 million a year to maintain this system. And you think about that quantity of public funds that could be going to other purposes. So it is even to this day a question of public good. But when it was originally built, it proved to be the diet.

The spark that really lit the mercantile and waterborne trade. You know, you see the historic photos of New York City and all of the peers. That was only possible that magnitude of trade because we were able to have New York the hub that traded into the full rest of the country. Let's talk about the route. You mentioned it already. The whole reason for this particular place, the reason New York wins this competition, is the topographical opportunity that the Mohawk River Valley provides. Even long before this, obviously in Native American times, this particular zone, this route would have been a very popular one because it cut through the mountains. And there are very few places where you can do that efficiently all along the eastern seaboard. The Appalachian Mountains in those days would have been a real difficult obstacle to get through. So anybody going west had to take just a few different corridors. I'm thinking of a Cumberland gap down south. And the Mohawk River is that version of it up in the northeast. But it's also the only water passage because the Mohawk River, allowed that to happen. And in those days, you're talking about wilderness. You know, this is

1800. There's nothing to go through in those woods up there. So water is the only way to move stuff around. So the Mohawk River was that obvious course. So that's the logical starting place. How is the design of the eventual canal perceived? I mean, do they have any model for this in the country at the time? Oh, the canal was completely new. You know, it's really interesting to look at the historical maps over time. All of the cities across upstate New York in that region, they are embedded right next to the canal. There was nothing, and it really spurred on the growth of those major cities, from Albany to Syracuse, to Rochester, to Buffalo. And they were major hubs of industry all through the mid-20th century. And that was spurred on because of this trade.

It's very interesting because the canal, in addition to spurring trade, it spurred manufacturing and industrial innovations as well, both from the construction of the canal itself, the technologies that were created to do the digging, it was actually before the era of dynamite. Most of the canal is in low ground adjacent to the Mohawk River or adjacent to other rivers. And so it's easier to dig. But there's areas where they're going through mountainous passes where you have locks. The idea of this kind of large industrial lock, that was invented for the canal. And there's actually a series of engineering schools that are situated right along the canal. There is Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which is originally called the Erie Canal School of Engineering.

It's in Troy and Albany. And it's located next to the flight of five, which goes through Cohos and Waterford, which is a series of five massive locks. And the hydrologic technology that allowed this was invented at that school at the time. The engineering story is fascinating to me, not least of which is the fact that there are no engineers. There's no hydraulic engineers. I don't even know what you're. call them. The engineers that would do this kind of thing are only in Europe. So God forbid, we bring them over at that time. This has to be homegrown. This is an American project. And so these two guys who are Benjamin Wright, James Gettys, these guys are lawyers. They're not even engineers. They're lawyers who might know something about surveying land because they argue land

disputes. And they send off their underling, Canvas White, who is a kid, over to England to study an apprentice, I guess, and learn about locks, because there's a lot of canals in England at the time. What's interesting to me historically is to predate. This is the precedent for the railroad system, basically. And then after that, the superhighway system, everything in America can be backdated to something. And so the canals are the early form of this

in terms of creating a faster transportation and cheaper means of moving freight. So England's ahead of us in that regard. So he sends over this guy to figure this out. And he comes back. And like you said, they start training people and figuring it out and inventing things to do this in their own way. One of the amazing things that they had to do is the idea of hydraulic cement.

I mean, this existed over in London, but to get that hydraulic cement over here. And by this, I mean cement you can pour and it can harden in the water. This is a fundamental part of creating a lasting canal. They didn't have that here in America. So they had to invent their own mixture using crushed up limestone from local sources. and they figured it out. That's what's amazing about this to me, is that there is a can-do mentality

about creating something that in very short order becomes a huge historical achievement. That's amazing. That's a big, big headline in this story. The canal has a lot of technological innovations. Even its form and function and root itself was adapted to evolve to technologies at the time. We talk about three general periods of the canal's history.

There was the first, which was the 40-foot width, four-foot depth, and it was entirely man-dug, the entire prism of the canal. And that's when you were actually pulling the canal boats by mule. So this was before the steam engine even existed. About 20 years later, the steam engine had been invented, and you could move much faster, and you didn't need all of the animals. You had to take care of. And the hoagie boys, who were the ones who would take care of the mules and pull them along. and you can actually have steamships go down the route. And so the canal was widened by another eight feet to carry those steamships.

And then in 1918, the canal was actually expanded even more to compete with the railroad system. And so that was the period at which they said to keep up with the railroads, which ran so quickly, we need to make the canal shipping much faster and to actually enable ocean-faring vessels to be able to come up and come across. And so that's where we were expanding to 80 feet, 100 feet wide. And in this era, they introduced much larger style of locks. They introduced movable dams, which is a Viennese dam technology, where you're actually canolizing the Mohawk River. So instead of having a small canal running adjacent to the Mohawk River,

actually canalizing, turning that natural river so you can moderate the depth of the water with these large movable dams and allow much larger, ocean-faring vessels to come up and cross the entire east-west corridor over to Lake Geary. I'll be back with more from Alice Shea and American History Hit after this short break. Airplanes, spacesuits, condoms, coffee, plastic surgery, warships. Over on the patented podcast by History Hit, we bring you the fascinating stories of history's most impactful inventions and the people who claim these ideas as their own. We uncover exceptional stories behind everything. We uncover exceptional stories behind everyday objects.

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I just think that's a bit sad. I think it's a worthwhile thing to do. And the thing that really makes it worthwhile is the fact that you could make it go on forever. So subscribe to Patented from History Hit on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to catch new episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. There are several stages, so to speak, several versions of the Erie Canal really over time. It begins, as we're charmingly sort of speaking of hand-dug. There's like 50,000 Irish labourers primarily.

who were involved in digging the original canal, which is indeed 40 feet across, four feet deep, and that's what the song sings about, the mules pulling the boats, those are the charming era of good feelings time. Then we move into, it's so successful that they have to expand it and they have to change it.

And that's when technology comes into play and they can use hydraulic engineering eventually to move these locks more efficiently. Bigger boats can go on there. They dig an entirely different canal. Is that right? So there's actually three hydrologic systems. across the canal, there's the western portion, which does not actually go alongside a natural river.

So that's Buffalo to about Pittsburgh, just east of Rochester. And that actually has the original form of the canal, the same route, but it was widened to carry steamships. But that is all dug, even to today. You go out there and you feel like you're back in the 1800s. It's so charming. The canal town still face right up against the canal. And then there's a lot. the area in the middle, which is just north of the Finger Lakes. So that hydrologic corridor has quite a few wetlands. It has lakes. It's a much more flat area. Very marshy. It was a lot of challenging process of digging and keeping the hard edges there. That area actually goes through Oneida Lake. And so they canalyzed or enabled the lake itself to be part of the canal

system in that 1918 version where they're making it big enough to allow ocean-faring vessels. And then the Mohawk was the most complex form in terms of hydrology and hydrologic engineering. Because prior, you can actually go through and you see the little hints in certain locations of the original Doug Canal, which lies directly parallel to the canal in low-lying ground, but not directly adjacent to the river in the low-lying ground that was easy to dig. And then in 1918, the New York State Barge Canal was the new name, more kind of competing with the railroad system. That is when they canalyze the Mohawk River, put in those large movable dams so they could moderate the water depth in that natural water body. But yes, it evolved so dramatically because they were trying to compete with the railroad.

Unfortunately, that was a bit of a folly because you do shipping by water and it takes about a week to get across the 363 miles east. of the canal, but on a railroad, it takes about a day. So, you know, while it is more efficient in terms of energy, time-wise, it's very difficult to compete. And that's when the canal started to decrease in its rate of shipping. It is the way of parsing out how America was really, really advanced is because of transportation. The advances in moving freight, basically, is what creates the economic growth of the United States, which, you know, happens during the Industrial Revolution. So we grow really fast. But it's very specific. eras and so forth. There's a great story that I want to cover here of DeWitt Clinton, that original

governor, that seventh governor of New York. When the canal is finally completed, that first version of the canal, he actually travels the entire length of it and brings with him the water of Lake Erie. Tell me how that goes. Well, they didn't build it just in one direction. They built it in two directions and met at one of those hydrologic barriers where the two watersheds meet. And the location of that is actually in Rome, New York. The canal has all of these wonderful European or classical names, Rome, Palmyra. But Rome happened to be that meeting point between the Oneida Lake watershed and the Oswego Lake watershed and the Mohawk watershed. And so they built the canal meeting there and then they had a ceremony called the Wedding of the Waters, where they opened up

the dug canal between the two and let the waters flow. But he travels all the way to New York. and takes barrels of water down there from Lake Erie and pours them into the water of New York Harbor. I mean, what a journey for this guy to have gone through. It's an extraordinary thing to imagine how quickly it has the impact it has. And one of the regions it affects so strongly is obviously the center of the country, the Midwest. Prior to this, there was a great deal of shipping going on, certainly among themselves out there in the Great Lakes and so forth. But the big challenge was getting all that grain, which was starting to become such a product, out of the middle and onto the East Coast. And the reason is because they can sell that to Europe.

I mean, this becomes in the early part of the 19th century a huge commodity for the United States to sell grain elsewhere. Prior to that, it wasn't being done. And that has enormous impact on New York City especially. So towns all across the Erie Canal, be it Amsterdam, New York or Pittsburgh or Illinois, or Illinois, Leon or Schenectady, this idea of the products that were developed really influencing local settlement. Each of those towns had their own special product that they created. So Amsterdam was the rug capital. There was other cities that were the salt capital or the broom capital, and it was almost towns that were entirely designed to manufacture those specific goods.

And so you could go along the canal, and it was almost as if it was a shopping corridor unto itself. The packet boats would come along and they would go and stop in a certain town, pick up their brooms, go to the next, pick up their salt shipments, and collect along the way. Actually, the Erie Canal was called the Internet of the 1800s because it was this route by which folks would pass along knowledge and pass it down the way. It's really fascinating in terms of the way that information and product design was actually shared. I did a TV piece once about Lockport, which is one of the big stories of the canal. especially later on because it's very modern looking when you get there, when you look at this place, because it was that later version of the canal. There's, I think, five elevations that you have to go up, and there are massive locks there. But what was most surprising to me in doing that story was that there were these tunnel systems dug into the side of the canal,

into the bedrock on either side or at least on one side. And the reason for that was that, I think his name was Holly. I can't remember his full name. Holly's a town nearby, yes. Yeah. This industrialist realized, as did many, many others, that this was a new source of power. This water could be used as a hydraulic power source. Not unlike a water wheel and so forth anywhere with a stream and so forth. Here's this new water coming where it wasn't before. Let's use it. And so they dig these extra tunnels or these side tunnels and that becomes a stream with which they can use to power this thing. And whole factories were built on the side utilizing this new water source, this new source of power. And in normal, amounts of industry occurred because of the canal. It was anything but a passive, stagnant stream of water. Speaking of which, how did they keep it fresh? I always wondered this. Like, why did it not just become a gross stagnant pool of water? Well, even to this day, the amount of water that flows through the canal is moderated. So at the juncture with the Black River that leads to the Buffalo River and Lake Erie, there is one, what they call a guard gate. It's basically a vertical.

infrastructure that opens and closes. And to this day, the Canal Corporation, which is managed by the New York Power Authority to say the connection between hydropower and the water management, they open and close that. And so they could close off the canal and stop the water all the way over to Lake Oneida, because that is managed waterway. The water flows are open and closed to allow that kind of steady stream of water flow. And actually, there's other benefits. You know, the hydropower is one example, also providing water for irrigation for all of the farms in Western New York is another amplifying benefit that the canal has been positioned to do and support the kind of apple farming and other types of agriculture that happened out in Western New York and the Finger Lakes.

We would be remiss not to mention the fact that this cuts right through Native American land and affects that world enormously. Much like a lot of American infrastructure, the building of it displaced folks from their lands. And to this day, you look at the different names of the lakes in the Finger Lakes region, Lake Kanandaiga, Lake Seneca, Lake Cayuga, they very much reference the Native American, the native tribes that existed along the canal system. Unfortunately, some of them were removed. Some of them were brought into the construction of the canal. We questioned to what extent that was a consensual process. To this day, there's been a lot of work done to make sure that reservations are maintained along the canal system in that

region to support the tribes that continue to be there to this day. The canal system, I think, probably because of this idea of it being the internet of its day, was a place where there was actually a lot of free thinking that happened during the 1800s and 1900s. There was a movement towards free love and new religious philosophies that were spawned there. Actually, the Mormons began in a small town outside of the canal and came up with the vision that was established around that philosophy. Also, the Erie Canal was a significant portion of the Underground Railroad, and Freed Blacks would use this as a way to escape outside of persecution from other locations. So the Erie Canal has this kind of very complex social history in addition to the kind of physical

and engineering design history at Taz. And it sparks tourism in upstate New York. I mean, it lands near Niagara Falls. I love the pictures of these passenger boats that you see, you know, the people were suddenly entranced by that they could take to. canal trip, very slow, lovely thing through the pristine countryside of upstate New York and land at Niagara Falls. It's the reason Niagara Falls became a wedding site. I love the connection with the hydropower story and that the canal has more purposes than shipping alone. And actually the kind of management and governance of the canal to this day has a kind of interesting story because it originally had its own agency under New York State because

when it was this major corridor of shipping, there were tolls and it would pay for itself. After the railroads and then containerization and highways became really the prominent mode of shipping in New York State, it was not paying for itself. You know, costing $100 million in today's dollars, it was not getting those tolls. And so then it was transferred to the Department of Transportation. And it became a kind of political hot potato because the different governors did not want to be using tax dollars to pay for this legacy piece of infrastructure. So then it got put under the Thruway Authority, which collected. tools for the highway that runs parallel along the canal. On one hand, yes, this is great. You're not using tax dollars. You're using this other source of revenue. But then the National Trucking Association

actually came in and said, we don't want our tolls to be used to pay for this waterway. We want it to be paying for improvement of our roadways. They won. And so then it got transferred to the New York Power Authority, which on one hand, you think is a little dissonant, but actually, just as you said, Don, the New York Power Authority actually manages Niagara Falls Power Plant and the sequence of other hydro power facilities across New York City. So they have the hydraulic engineers. They know the hydrology. And so since they came in, they've had big visions for evolving the canal and making sure that it actually has uses that are beneficial to the cities and towns of upstate New York today. And so that's when they launched the Reimagined the Canal's initiative, looking at ways that you can tank this shipping corridor, that no longer ships very much just because of the economy of transportation and actually look to the future and say,

how can this canal be positioned to do economic development, bring tourism, provide irrigation to towns? How can it do environmental restoration? All of those wetlands, particularly in the center of the canal region, were either inundated or depleted of water because of the management of the canal flows. and how can you actually restore all of those habitats? The canal sits at the major North Atlantic flyway where birds do their migrations north and south. And so those wetlands are key to help those bird habitats survive. And then third, how can it help with climate change? How can it mitigate the impacts and allow us adapt to the new future that we know we're going to live with?

There's flooding that happens in the Mohawk River Valley all the time. How can the canal moderate water levels to reduce that flooding? There are ice jams, which is this wild riverine iceberg that can be up to 17 miles long. And when that thing starts to melt and move in the spring, it just crashes into anything in its way. So how can the canal actually moderate the breakup through different infrastructure like ice breakers or using those movable dams to actually chop up or not let those ice jams be as long? There's lots of opportunities. And New York Power Authority took a different tact in creating a vision that I

personally think will help the URI Canal have a new life, have a new adapted future that continues to benefit lots of the cities and towns across the region. That's amazing. It becomes an engine to address all these problems that are still only beginning to haunt us. Amazing tax dollar investment that was made in the 19th century that continues to pay dividends. Thank you, Alice. It's an incredible story. This is when we sing the Erie Canal together. Oh, no, we're not. Don't worry. But I really thank you and I hope to talk to you in the future. Thanks a lot. Alice Shea, folks like you, are finding new ways of making these kinds of sort of legacy projects become present-day use. My big goal is to drive a boat all the way across New York on the canal. It's one of the big

recreational pluses of state New York. I'm really looking forward to that. Thanks a lot. Thanks, Don. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Yet. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time. The podcast includes music from Epidemic Sound.