On October 26, 1825, workers completed the Erie Canal, linking the Great Lakes to the Atlantic. The governor of New York, DeWitt Clinton, took a boat from Buffalo to New York City with a cask of Lake Erie water, pouring it into the harbor in a symbolic “Wedding of the Waters.” A century later, his grandson took a journey in the other direction, “rebalancing” the water in a centennial celebration.
The Erie Canal has held a complicated mix of economic, political, and cultural significance, historian Justin Nordstrom argues. Given the moniker “Clinton’s Ditch” by its detractors, the canal was only four feet deep and forty feet across. “Yet this modest trench,” Nordstrom writes, “had long been hailed as the impetus for state and national economic and political prosperity.”
Workers excavated parts of the route with explosives and built locks and aqueducts along 363 miles of canal. Mules and horses pulled boats along the completed waterway, cutting transit times dramatically.
“Freight rates from upstate New York to the Atlantic dropped by an amazing 90 percent,” Nordstrom writes, “and hauling time was reduced from thirty days to ten.”
The canal connected increasingly specialized regions in the early US, explains historian Roger Ransom. It gave New York City an economic advantage and helped spur urbanization in western New York. Its success inspired a wave of canal building in other states, although the economic benefit of these other canals is dubious in retrospect.
By the time of the centennial celebration in 1926 (a year late), tens of thousands of miles of railroad track crossed the country. But “support for canals had remained strong in New York state,” Nordstrom writes, “even as railroads supplanted the original Erie Canal and the old canal became worn and outmoded.” Some celebrants were building political support for the controversial Barge Canal. Others were trying to find a place in a growing narrative of American exceptionalism.
More to Explore
What Desert Cities Can Teach Us about Water
This national narrative sat in tension with a growing regionalism, seen in the rise of local historians and small museums. Nordstrom finds a different Erie Canal, one more locally rooted, in the novel Rome Haul by Walter Edmonds, which weaves together themes of “individual agency,” folk traditions, and nature. The reader is immersed in “winter’s cold morning mists, the lush green hills near Boonville, open meadows along the towpaths, and autumn’s changing foliage.”
Weekly Newsletter
Not all local communities were happy with the delayed centennial, and not all benefited from the canal, historian Carol Sheriff writes. The natural environment Edmonds described was often destroyed or dramatically altered, and the canal’s expansion meant a particular loss to Indigenous communities like the Haudenosaunee.
New York City mayor Jimmy Walker concluded the 1926 celebrations, saying “this occasion is adjourned for another hundred years.” This year, a replica of the Seneca Chief, which carried Clinton in 1825, set out from Buffalo on the canal. Along the route, celebrants are planting white pines, a symbol of peace to the Haudenosaunee. In NYC, a final tree will be planted—and watered with a barrel filled from towns along the Erie Canal.
Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.
