Dismissed by critics as 'Clinton's Folly' after its chief backer, New York Governor DeWitt Clinton, the canal would take eight years to complete using only manual labor, mules, and rudimentary engineering. Its 1825 completion transformed New York City into America's preeminent port, slashed shipping costs between the Midwest and the East Coast by over 90 percent, and accelerated westward settlement of the United States.
No American engineer had ever built a canal of this scale, and the United States had no formal schools of civil engineering in 1817. The men who designed the Erie Canal—judges, surveyors, and self-taught amateurs like Benjamin Wright and James Geddes—essentially invented American civil engineering on the job, figuring out lock mechanisms, aqueducts, and grading through trial and error as they moved westward across the state.
The canal required cutting through forests, blasting limestone ridges, and building 83 locks to manage a rise of nearly 600 feet in elevation between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. Laborers, many of them Irish immigrants, worked with hand tools in malaria-ridden swamps for a dollar or less a day.
When finished in 1825, the canal was hailed as the eighth wonder of the world. It cut freight costs from Buffalo to New York City from around $100 a ton to roughly $10, opened the Great Lakes basin to commercial farming, and helped New York City overtake Philadelphia and Boston as the nation's dominant commercial hub—an economic transformation few had imagined possible from a muddy ditch dug by hand.
Key people: DeWitt Clinton