Clinton's Ditch linked the Atlantic to the upper Great Lakes
Finished in 1825, New York's Erie Canal was the first navigable cut from the Hudson to Lake Erie above Niagara Falls, slashing Midwest freight costs. At 363 miles it was then the world's second-longest canal after China's Grand Canal—mocked beforehand as Clinton's Ditch.
Proposals dated to the 1780s; a formal survey came in 1808, and the legislature authorised work in 1817. Diggers carved a channel initially 40 feet wide and 4 feet deep across upstate farms and forests—a civil-engineering landmark of the early United States. Peak traffic hit in 1855 with 33,000 commercial shipments; railroads pressed hard, tolls ended around 1902, and twentieth-century trucks and the St. Lawrence Seaway later emptied freighters from the ditch.
Today recreational boats dominate, tying into Champlain, Oswego, and Cayuga–Seneca canals within the New York State Canal System; Great Loop voyagers still transit.
Cheap water haulage was the whole case for it. A mule able to carry only about 250 pounds on its back could tow a 60,000-pound barge along a towpath. Grain was the Ohio Valley's main export, yet it rarely paid its way overland to distant cities. The Mohawk River, running through a glacial meltwater channel between the Catskills and the Adirondacks, offered a low route west, and as early as 1702 colonists built the Oneida Carry, a portage road linking Wood Creek to the Mohawk.
Promoters looked to France's Canal du Midi and England's Bridgewater Canal. Gouverneur Morris and Elkanah Watson backed a Mohawk route, which led to lock navigation companies being chartered in 1792, and the bankrupt grain shipper Jesse Hawley pushed the scheme until Governor DeWitt Clinton took it up. Its builders were novices: the country had no civil engineers, and James Geddes and Benjamin Wright, who laid out the line, were judges whose surveying had been done on property boundaries. Soil dug from the channel was heaped on the downhill side to form the towpath.
Source: Erie Canal
