Around 1807, commercial interests in New York State started agitating for a canal to link the Midwest and the Eastern Seaboard. A transportation corridor to the Great Lakes would open the nation’s interior to global trade and promote the development of an American heartland. Raw materials would come east; people would move west. In Clinton’s hopeful words at the canal’s opening ceremony: “The most fertile and extensive regions of America will avail themselves of its facilities for a market … [and New York City] will, in the course of time, become the granary of the world, the emporium of commerce, the seat of manufactures, the focus of great moneyed operations.”
Easier said than done. America had few civil engineers. Equipment was crude. William Otis wouldn’t patent his industrial steam shovel until 1839, and Alfred Nobel’s dynamite wouldn’t appear until 1866. Muscle would build the canal. Construction began in 1817, and soon Benjamin Wright, a prominent surveyor, became chief engineer. Clinton’s doubters were correct that the engineering challenges were unprecedented. Wright’s roughly 9,000 laborers channeled nobly through impossible rock formations. Sometimes they’d crack the stone with gunpowder, a volatile and deadly option; other times, they would use a drill bit invented for the task. To dig the canal trench—4 feet deep, 40 feet wide, running 363 miles from Albany to Buffalo—the men used picks and shovels. There were intense risks: Malaria, mysterious illnesses and grisly construction accidents disabled hundreds of workers, killing many.
Some workers found the territory irredeemably harsh: “The land is a desolate wilderness,” William Thomas, a Welshman who had come to work on the canal in 1818, wrote to his family back home. “I beg all of my old neighbors not to think of coming here.”
The greatest challenge was elevation: Lake Erie, the canal’s western terminus, is more than 570 feet above sea level. The Hudson River at Waterford, New York, the eastern terminus, is a mere 16.5 feet in elevation. Given rises and dips along the way, the engineers knew the canal couldn’t be a continuous river. It would have to be arranged in a series of waterways, each occupying its own elevation, with those strips connected by locks—great concrete bathtubs, designs for which Wright and other engineers copied from the finest English and French canal builders of the day: A boat floats in, the doors close, and piped water flows into or out of the sealed chamber, raising or lowering the water level so the vessel can float on to the next stretch. Once complete, it would be one of the longest canals in the world.