ENGINEERING THE ERIE: INNOVATION, INVENTION & INSPIRATION
SETTING THE STAGE
The Appalachian Mountains, extending from the St Lawrence Valley into Alabama, form a virtual wall between the coastal regions and the heartland of the country, the only natural break occurring at the intersection of the Hudson and Mohawk River valleys. This route, long known to Native Americans and foreign traders, had been fought over by every population that settled in the Northern colonies and provided the only viable way to "Go West". In the early part of the 19th century, a commonly held opinion was that this physical barrier could encourage the Northwest Territory to form its own independent government or increasingly develop economic ties to Canada. The War of 1812 underscored the need to join this vast land to the established states in the East.
Immigrants and coastal farmers looking for flat, fertile farmland in the Northwest Territory as well as freight traveling to the settlements were subjected to a costly and lengthy journey. After traveling up the Hudson River via steam boat, travelers were transferred to a wagon at Albany to avoid the falls at the mouth of the Mohawk River. At Schenectady they would board a flat-bottomed bateau and pole , often forcibly, through shallow depths and across sandbars to Little Falls, where portage had to be made. Once back on the Mohawk, water travel still being cheaper than overland, the journey would proceed unless the Mohawk had seasonally become too shallow for navigation, requiring another wagon passage to complete the trip to Lake Ontario. Passengers then embarked on a lake boat to cross Lake Ontario and yet another wagon trip around Niagara Falls to Buffalo where they could board another steam boat for the final passage across Lake Erie. Whew! Yet this was the only practical overland route to the West!
Grain and other produce from American's fertile heartland was being traded to Canada for far lower shipping cost than to the population centers in the East. Indeed, farmers in central New York State were reluctant to produce surplus crops because the cost and methods of getting those goods to market were prohibitive. Freight that did reach the East Coast was shipped down the Mississippi to New Orleans, then under French control, where it was transferred to ocean-going vessels for shipment to ports in the North. This trip, consisting of nearly 3,000 miles, was far more economic than the present, thought direct, overland / waterway route.
Early supporters of the canal concept recognized the economic and geopolitical necessity for it, but as the vision grew into a project, opposition was fierce. Thomas Jefferson, a man of legendary inventiveness, told representatives from New York State that such a canal was not possible for at least a century, when in reality he may have favored Federal involvement in the struggling Potomac Canal project that would assure Virginia status in emerging interstate commerce. It was clear that this project could only move forward as a state-funded proposal requiring the support of the legislature as well as the populace.
New York City political figures inexplicably opposed the canal although the expectation was that the increase in trade between New York City and the interior of America would promote economic growth in what was then a second-rate port along the Atlantic coast. Other prominent opinions favored the canal but wanted it to follow the then-current route into Lake Ontario, a measure seen as possibly promoting Canadian interests. Suppliers along the current route viewed the canal as a threat to their various enterprises providing services to those that made the cumbersome and lengthy trip West. Farmers in the southern tier of New York State resented the possibility of their taxes being applied to an expenditure from which they felt they would never benefit. Moreover, people could not imagine the successful completion of so long a canal across so many obstacles, with so little native skill.
If it weren't for the vision of a single individual, DeWitt Clinton, it is doubtful that the canal would have been built or having been begun, ever completed or done so in a fairly economic and timely manner. Clinton's entire career as governor of New York State rested on the success of the canal. It was his faith and consummate public relations skills that maintained the enthusiasm of the general population who had finally petitioned the divided state legislature in favor of the project.
Since the principal financial centers of Philadelphia and Boston had little interest in participating in a project they deemed beneficial to New York State alone, the financing effort began and remained in lower New York City by the old Dutch wall, the beginning of a financial district later known as Wall Street. Traditional moneyed investors were financially and philosophically tied to more mainstream institutions so that financing the canal, by default, was undertaken by ordinary citizens and organizations not usually offered participation in investment schemes. The success of the canal along with the profit it returned to its investors added to the commercial expansion the canal brought to New York City.
BUILDING THE CANAL
Viewing the decaying remains of the original Erie Canal, a present day observer is not confronted with an artifact that conveys the profound significance this single accomplishment had on the development of the new United States. The Parthenon, the Roman aqueducts, the Great Wall of China all imbue an immediate sense of architectural awe and engineering accomplishment evoking an instantaneous awareness that these structures shaped the history of the societies that built them and the world ever since. Not so for the Erie.
As with so many of our venerable institutions, the wrecker's ball or abandonment to the reclamation of Mother Nature, has left scant evidence of the critical conduit that so importantly united the two halves of our young nation, dissecting New York State at its midsection. Even where the original canal, or the upgrade begun 10 years later, remains intact, as is the section between Rome and Syracuse used as a feeder canal to the current New York State Barge Canal, it just looks like a big ditch, not a symbol of American ingenuity and stalwart persistence.
Surely, every American Student has heard of the Erie Canal and been exposed to a few salient facts, but very few texts or historical treatises offer more than a few paragraphs, or, at best, as few pages on an event that had monumental impact on the economic, political, and even psychological development of our country. With few exceptions, only those individuals (canal aficionados) and institutions (principally universities in mid-state New York) with a direct tie to the canal and the regions through which it runs, seem to have published detailed accounts of those events surrounding its inception, construction and ultimate contribution. While the libraries, museums and stores located along the canal route offer books written for a broad, if often regional, audience, much of the more scholarly material lies entombed in the New York State Library, Albany's version of the Library of Congress. If our home state of Connecticut is any example of the national availability of information, there basically isn't any.
Without an exception, those few authors agree that the Erie Canal was the greatest public works project by a free society at the time of its completion. Not only was it the longest canal in the world, its construction encountered obstacles never before encountered in civil engineering. Moving earth, exploding rock, damming rivers, crossing streams, even altering the elevation of the water course, seem like pedestrian accomplishments to those in an age where the most phenomenal civil engineering accomplishments go barely noticed compared to the engineering of genes and pinhead-sized micro-circuitry. It was done with sweat, pick and shovel, and the brand of optimistic vision that has shaped American achievement ever since.
Not a single engineer from the chief engineer of the entire project to resident engineer of a section to a lock engineer had any training beyond surveying. Foreign engineers approached to lead the project showed no interest and probably could not have applied a great deal of their knowledge to the unique conditions encountered in building the Erie. Nevertheless, as soon as the initial funds had been appropriated, a determined group set upon constructing a canal, something not one participant knew anything about. They began in the midsection where the conditions were relatively flat and the digging easy. The plan was to build east and west simultaneously, opening sections as they were completed.
Many doubted whether anyone could construct such a lengthy canal with the primitive leveling instruments of the day, so James Geddes and Benjamin Wright, the two principal engineers ran a test beginning at points 100 miles apart and found they were off only an inch and one-half at the juncture. Other engineering challenges were miles away and the prevailing attitude was that solutions would be found when solutions were needed. A far cry from contemporary feasibility studies, pilot programs and computer projections.
Contracts were given out to local farmers and businessmen for sections as small as 1/4 mile. A flat rate was paid for the distance to be covered with a premium paid for environmental impediments like difficult terrain, rock or swamp. the contractor supplied the tools and labor along with living facilities for the workers. It was at this grassroots level that the initial ingenuity inspired by the canal took place.
A canal can't be dug until the land has been cleared, and the canal's path traversed deep, dense forests with formidable hardwoods up to 20' in diameter. A devise was fashioned which allowed a single man to fell forty trees a day and pull up most of the roots in the process. A continuous worm gear was attached to a roller and crank placed 100' or more from the tree. By attaching a cable to the top of the tree and winding it up on a drum, the tree toppled.
On previously cleared land, some unsung genius fashioned a gigantic contraption for pulling out stumps. Two 16' wheels on a 30' axle were rolled over the stump and chocked in place. A 14' wheel on the same axle was wound repeatedly with rope creating an eight-fold gain in power and hitched to a draft team. A chain secured to the trunk was also attached to the axle. When the axle rotated, out came the stump, roots and all! Seven men and two horses extracted 30-40 stumps per day.
European canals and the initial American attempts had been dug using spade and wheelbarrow - slow backbreaking work. During the first 6 months of the construction of the Erie, it was discovered that the use of draft animals pulling a plow and then a scraper was far more efficient and had the added benefit of tamping down the embankments by the constant passage of men and animals. A later innovation added a blade to the plow which severed roots below the surface. Three men and a team of draft animals could excavate a mile - over 26,600 cubic yards of earth - per season using this method.
Other unknown innovators were responsible for a lightweight dumping wheelbarrow made out of a single piece of bent wood, a sharp-edged shovel, scoops for digging in marshlands, and other implements that increased efficiency with decreased heavy labor. A locally-discovered muck affectionately referred to as blue mud of the meadow was found superior to the material used in Europe to line canals preventing seepage. None of these discoveries were every patented, nor mass-produced, but give evidence of the spirit with which even lesser laborers met the challenge of the Erie. Indeed, Governor Clinton received thousands of letters from citizens of every status offering suggestions for building the canal.
The true engineering skill was raising the canal from the Hudson River at one and one-half feet above sea level to Lake Erie at 568 feet above sea level with another 120 feet down in to and up out of a broad plain for a total change of 688 feet. This was to be accomplished with 83 locks averaging an eight foot change in elevation and serviced by innumerable feeder channels, waste weirs, sluices, dams and reservoirs. And, over 300 "occupation" bridges were built to rejoin farms and villages severed by canal construction.
Water had to be readily available to operate the locks and keep canal depth at a fairly exact four, later seven, feet. Uncontrollable waterways had to be avoided altogether and even slow moving streams presented a challenge to cross. Sufficient water had to be brought into the canal to keep it gently moving east and to replace that lost to leakage and evaporation. Excess water from rain and winter runoff had to be channeled out preventing an overflowing canal from breaching the embankment and flooding surrounding farms and villages. The fear of flooding was so great, in fact, that each section of the canal could be isolated lest the entire canal (and a good part of Lake Erie) cascade down on some unsuspecting community.
The need for hydraulic cement became one of the pivotal issues as soon as the actual locks were considered. During all the political machinations that preceded and accompanied the building of the canal, no consideration had been given to whether or not the technology existed to complete it. It was simply begun. Now facing the delays and expense overruns that would be created if the only known hydraulic cement had to be shipped from Europe, one canal engineer, Canvass White, sought a solution.
White had displayed engineering genius early on in the project and had gone to England to observe canal building methods. Upon his return, he learned of a canal contractor who was experimenting with a local limestone know as meagre. He devoted himself to the mining, analyzing, and proper mixing of this superior product - all at his own expense - and is credited with an incalculable contribution to the integrity of construction of the original locks and culverts, to say nothing of the fact that his contribution allowed the canal to be completed at all. White did secure a patent and continued to privately manufacture hydraulic cement.
Of course, the digging itself was the comparably easy and obvious component of the canal . . . at least in the midsection. Both the eastern and western legs, however, presented physical impediments never before overcome in any civil project. Clinton and his supporters continued to enthuse the completion of the entire canal and its timely completion, although with the knowledge and materials available at that very time, neither was realistic.
To the east the engineers faced the plunging waters at Little Falls where locks had previously been constructed at great expense to enhance navigation on the Mohawk River. A consulting engineer advised that hacking through the solid rock surrounding Little Falls and installing locks would take at least three years. Some enterprising canal contractor hired hard-rock miners who taught them how to explode the rock using the very stable blasting powder developed by the newly-immigrated DuPont family. the channel through the rock was completed in three months!
Another difficulty in the section from Little Falls to Albany was one of real estate - there just wasn't any! Squeezing between the rushing Mohawk and adjacent hills, the canal was precariously situated on a narrow ledge above the river or was put in the actual river bed, protected from the swift current by a series of walls and dikes. In addition, the canal had to cross the river twice at points twelve miles apart. This was accomplished with two aqueducts, one 748 feet long supported on 16 piers and the other - the longest on the canal - 1188 feet long on 26 piers. And if this accomplishment, completed in one-third the estimated time, wasn't enough of a marvel, this entire section of the canal was supplied water via a spectacular navigable stone feeder aqueduct.
To the west the canal passed through the Cayuga Marsh with six to twelve inches of standing water. The digging was easy enough but overnight the soggy soil would ooze back into the trench as if no excavation had taken place. Canal engineers devised a method of submerging walls of wood down into the muck supported with stakes driven deep into the clay bottom. As the channel was dug out, the earth was piled outside the temporary walls where it eventually drained dry and formed the towpath and embankment. This rudimentary but practical technique is still employed today.
An aqueduct 60 feet high was initially proposed to cross Irondequoit Creek, but the high winds common in the area dissuaded engineers from this solution. Instead, 900 pilings were sunk through the quicksand upon which a culvert carried the creek for 245 feet through a 70 foot high stone and earth levee carrying the canal. All the soil for this endeavor had to be imported as the native earth was of insufficient texture for construction. For weeks, this section of the canal was drained nightly and a watch posted for fear the embankment would dissolve.
At Rochester, an aqueduct, one of 18 on the canal, was deemed appropriate for crossing the roaring Genesee River. Eleven stone arches with a span of 50 feet each were supported on central piers sunk six inches into the river bedrock and secured to the bottom with bolts and bars of iron. This aqueduct, one of the longest on the canal at 802 feet, is still in use. In today's busy downtown Rochester, however, the aqueduct carries vehicular traffic instead of a canal.
The canal engineers had to deal with the many rivers, streams and creeks that abound throughout Western New York. Many were harnessed to assure a constant supply of water into the canal, but others simply were directly in the path of the canal. When the waterways were sufficiently calm, the canal simply crossed them with the towpath going up and over a bridge. To prevent even a minor current from interfering with the canal proper and to assure a constant depth (and that seasonally high water did not flood the entire canal), guard gates were installed on either end of the canal's route when passing through these natural waterways. Movable dams, spillways and reservoirs had to be constructed to handle the flowing water any time the guard gates were lowered.
The final challenge for the engineers of the western leg was scaling the Niagara Escarpment at what came to be called Lockport and cutting an immense channel through the ridge west of Lockport in order to keep the canal below the level of Lake Erie. When the task proved too daunting for private enterprise, the state itself had to assume the role of general contractor in what is believed to be the first such instance in the history of the United States. Nathan Roberts, a self-trained engineer who had "read a few books" on locks, designed the Lockport 5 which was the only place on the canal with separate locks for east- and west-bound traffic, necessitated by the time it took to negotiate the 66 foot change in elevation.
The Lockport 5 were actually chiseled and blasted out of solid rock as were the next two miles - at places 30 feet deep - of a seven-mile man-made channel cut through the adjacent ridge. Derricks, invented on the spot, removed huge pieces of rock that were loosened by blasting or by physical labor when the danger of exploding rock was high due to a high concentration of flint. The towpath was literally inscribed into the stone face of the channel. At it's conclusion, this solution yielded 1.5 million cubic yards of byproduct stone, still able to be viewed as the building blocks of local architecture.
THE FINALE
Although two years later than promised and at a cost of hundreds of lives from disease and accident, it was here at Lockport that the canal was finally joined in 1825. Governor Clinton and his entourage embarked on the first complete canal trip accompanied by the firing of a sequence of cannons echoing across the state until the final one was fired in Sandy Hook 81 minutes later. The entire nation had been intently focused for over eight years on this epochal symbol of American promise. One author wrote, "There was not a newspaper worthy of the name in the Union that did not chart the progress of this titanic undertaking, this symbol of American enterprise, of all that Americans thought promising in their destiny."
The Grand Canal, The Great Western Canal, the Big Ditch, Clinton's Folly . . . . The Erie Canal had become the first American School of Engineering, and its builders the fathers of American Engineering and an inspiration to the world. European engineers and dignitaries flocked to New York to examine this masterpiece which stood alone in it's time as a tribute to the genius of man and the dogged determination and innovation of a new nation. The canal worked and the canal prospered, along with the communities along its path and throughout the northeastern seaboard. Due to the canal, the United States was immediately positioned as a significant trading partner with an extensive surplus to sell and an expanded market to purchase; and New York State lived up to its self-nominated status as "The Empire State". While most Americans today seem ignorant of the importance of the canal's contribution, New Yorkers aren't, protecting "their" canal from oblivion in perpetuity in the state constitution.
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
As for me, I grew up in Tonawanda thinking that those guillotine-style guard gates that punctuated the landscape (constructed to prevent the unlikely event that Lake Erie waters would flow down the canal's length and flood the entire width of New York State) were something to be found in every community. My extended family lived in towns like Lockport and Middleport; and I recently discovered that my great, great great grandparents most likely migrated on the Erie Canal from Connecticut to settle in Somerset on the shores of Lake Ontario. My cousin Sue Ann still lives right next to the canal. She can practically reach out her window and dip in her hand.