In estimating the benefits of those immense public works, that will change the internal relations of a great country, and create a new era in the history of her trade, agriculture and manufactures, much must be left for time and experience to reveal…
— New York Corresponding Association for the Promotion of Internal Improvements, 1821
The Erie Canal is one of the most famous man-made bodies of water in the world. Designed, financed, built, operated, and maintained by the people of New York, the canal was one of the largest public works projects ever attempted anywhere in the world when the first shovel of earth was turned near Rome, New York, on July 4, 1817. Men with talent and vision (but little training in engineering) charted the 363-mile course of the canal between Albany and Buffalo. They designed stone aqueducts to carry boats across rivers and locks to lift them over New York’s varied terrain. Thousands of laborers dug the ditch itself and built massive reservoirs to ensure the canal was constantly supplied with water. When it was completed in 1825, the Erie Canal connected the port of New York City on the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes, dramatically transforming trade, industry, and communication in the region and across the country.
The Erie Canal was so successful that it was enlarged three times to accommodate more traffic and increasingly larger vessels. Great cities and commerce grew along the Erie Canal. Diverse people traveled east and west across its length, some spreading powerful ideas for social change. In the mid-twentieth century, canal traffic began to decline, and the famous waterway momentarily faded from public use, only to reemerge today as a vehicle for heritage tourism, recreation, and education.
Access to the Interior
Until the construction of the Erie Canal, New Orleans had nearly exclusive access to trade with the rich interior of North America because of its location on the Mississippi River. Beginning in the seventeenth century during French, Dutch, and then British competition for the fur trade in North America, people realized that New York City, with its deep and protected harbor and access to the interior via the Hudson River, was strategically situated for trade with Europe. As early as 1724, Cadwallader Colden, surveyor general and later colonial governor of the Province of New York, prepared a report for the governor describing the natural "water courses and carrying places" (portages) between Albany and Montreal, Canada, and between Albany and Cataraqui Lake, now known as Lake Ontario. It took another one hundred years before the New York Corresponding Association for the Promotion of Internal Improvements was organized to advance support for building a canal across New York State—a project they envisioned as the starting point for a cross-country navigation system of waterways bridging Lake Erie with the Atlantic Ocean, the Mississippi River, and the western states of Michigan and Illinois.