I’ve lived by the Erie Canal for years but this question only recently occurred to me. Nowadays, the canal is mostly used for pleasure boating but it was obviously built for commercial reasons.
Now I understand the eastern part of the canal and how it was a good idea linking the Hudson River with the Great Lakes. But the canal runs parallel to Lake Ontario for about 150 miles from Syracuse to Buffalo before going into Lake Erie (most of this distance it’s about ten miles from the lake). Wouldn’t it have been more sensible to run the canal up to Oswego and then have a seperate short canal in western New York running between Lake Ontario and Erie (bypassing Niagara Falls) with the traffic between these canals sailing on the lake? The cost of digging a hundred miles of additional canal couldn’t have been negligable.
The possible explanations don’t make sense to me. The land between the canal and the lake is flat and wouldn’t have prevented excavation. Sailing on Lake Ontario wouldn’t have been that big a challenge to ships could cross the Atlantic. It is possible that Washington was worried about the British naval presense in Lake Ontario, but if so why weren’t the concerned about travel in Lake Erie? If I find it hard to believe a pork barrel project that size could have been enacted in Congress that early in the republic’s history.
Ocean-going ships couldn’t use the canal. Canals of the era were fairly shallow. Goods were shipped on barges or specialized canal boats that (generally) were pulled by horses which walked on a towpath paralleling the canal. Also, sailing ships of any size would have problems tacking and otherwise maneuvering on the canal. Canal boats, in turn, didn’t work on lakes, because of their lack of sails and general unweatherly construction (flat bottom, shallow draft.)
I assume that the extra miles on the end avoided the need to unload cargo from a canal boat and load in onto a lakegoing sailing ship.
Not to mention that you can’t tow a boat on a lake very easily, so you’d be at the whim of the wind. Canals are probably not as prone to being shut down due to bad weather as well, so there might have been safety considerations.
To add to Random’s post–canals of the era (unlike, say, the Panama canal, which was meant to provide a shortcut for oceangoing ships from Atlantic to Pacific) had little to do with ordinary sailing. The resemblance was purely coincidental.
Think of them more as specialized water railroads than boating shortcuts.
Right, but you need to look at cost-effectiveness, and safety factors. Sailing on Lake Ontario, it being a “Great Lake”, with all the Great Lakes’ tricky weather, required more of a big ocean-going type of boat, which was fairly expensive and required much more by way of technology, equipment, staffing (sailors), etc.
Being towed down a canal by a mule only called for a simple, cheap, easy-to-operate flatboat (and a mule, of course, and some rope). So it really was more cost-effective to dig the canal around the side of Lake Ontario like that. That way you could have lots more small businessmen all buying flatboats and mules to cash in on the business opportunity, whereas making everybody go up the Oswego Canal to Lake Ontario (they did eventually “run the canal up to Oswego”) and then around to Lake Erie would have meant that only big businessmen who could afford the initial investment in a big serious boat could get in on it.
And the whole idea was to increase trade.
Also, without the canal going through Western NY like it does, it would have bypassed a huge chunk of land, which would have been left out in the cold, trade-wise, and whose citizens would have made their unhappiness plain via the ballot box.
Also, being towed down the still water of a canal was a lot safer than basically “putting to sea” on a Great Lake. Practically impossible to sink a canal boat unless you did something really stupid like smash it into a bridge piling, but boats sank on the Great Lakes all the time.
The first and most important thing is that up until railroads were common, shipping by water – even by a very indirect route – was by FAR the cheapest way to move things. F. Braudel says in one of his books that the cost of something shipped overland could DOUBLE over a 100 miles in Roman times. Things didn’t change that much until railroads.
Apart from this, canals were built for different reasons. In China they were largely to avoid pirates on the open ocean (China didn’t have enough fighting fleet to patrol the entire coast.) In England, they were partly a result of an investment fad – the dot.com of the day – where everyone thought they were going to get rich quick. So they overbuilt like crazy.
The Eire Canal was not created on account of fear of pirates, or especially because it was a fad. It was a matter of distance, weather concerns, fascination with new technology, etc. I don’t recall reading this, but it must have occurred to people that it would be a good idea to have water transportation someplace where the British and French couldn’t easily access it.
The Erie canal was built before there really were modern and effective railroads. Canals were the best thing to build, if you wanted to move goods to market cheaply. I’m told that some historian did a computer model that actually had canals being more cost-effective than railroads (somewhat untrustworthy, according to Shenckman, who mentions this in his book Legends, Lies, and Cherished Myths of American History, and I believe it.) Certainly people were for it – although they called the canal “Clinton’s Folly” (for N.Y. governor De Witt Clinton), people turned out for the “marriage of the waters” when Clinton poured Lake Erie water into the Hudson. Certainly it must have been a big deal, if I still know this story today.
You can see how effective it was from the population figures of cities on the canal, like Rochester. The population zoomed upwards immediately after the canal went through. Rochester already had the land to grow crops and the water power (from Genessee falls) to grind wheat into flour – what it needed, more than anything, was a way to get that flour (and other produce) to New York City cheaply and in bulk. This the canal gave them. Rochester became “The Flour City”, and still bears its canal-day marks to this day.
(The Canal was long ago r-routed south of the city to become the N.Y. State Barge Canal, which is still used commercially, if not as heavily. The Rochester corporate boundary throws out two “pseudopods” that trace the canal’s path into and out of the City Center. After the Canal was re-routed, they put down train tracks, making a “subway” that was used for over half a century, then eventually given up to roads. Part of it is still used by the Gannett newspapers to deliver the big rolls of newsprint to the presses downtown without bringing them through city streets. The Canal bridge, over which the Canal crossed the Genessee River is still in service next to the Rundel Library downtown. The City’s nickname has since been changed from “The Flour City” to the homonymous “The Flower City”, and is said to honor the Lilac – a rewriting of history.)
Addendum: There was no reason to build the canal to send goods to Europe. Albany (its eastern terminus) had easy access to the port of New York without the canal. Anyone along the canal who wanted to send goods overseas could just ship them to Albany and to New York – a lot easier than going out of Lake Ontario (and before the St. Lawrence Seaway was built in the 1950s, I’m not sure you could even travel east from the lake).
Actually, it still is (subject to the ability to get close to one’s destination). One reason the the U.S. ore fleets and Canadian ore and grain fleets have stayed in business on the Great Lakes (despite being shut down for from three to five months a year) is that the fleets can still ship bulk cargo much more cheaply than the railroads. My numbers are years out of date, so I don’t know what the current rates are, but 30 years ago, the boats could charge less than half what the railroads charged and still make a profit. (The 1972 rates just over $2.00 ship, and around $4.50 rail. It appears that recently the rates were $6 ship, $11 rail.)
In terms of canal vs lake, however, a lot of cost savings would have been lost for bulk cargoes in the transfers. All cargoes were loaded and unloaded by hand (or by wheelbarrow or bucket). Inserting those transfers from canal barge to sailing vessel on Lake Ontario and then back to canal barge to go around Niagara and then back to sailing vessel at Lake Erie to reach Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago would have added a lot more cost than running the canal all the way to Lake Erie for a single transfer.
Moving things by water has inherent advantages, but after about 1840 in the United States, railways could be cheaper. Canals are tend to be cheaper than railroads if all three of these apply:
The product doesn’t depreciate if it’s shipped slowly (Which counts out: passengers, mail, newspapers, perishable goods…)
The land is relatively level. Imagine making a canal over the Rocky Mountains. Ouch. (Hmmm. Science fiction movie potential.)
The canal is shorter than the alternative route.
As a sidelight, it’s interesting that one of the most important canals in the world also uses a “railroad”: the Panama Canal. The water takes the bulk and the weight, the railroad provides the traction.
A slight nitpick, you should probably change that ‘commercially’ to ‘recreationally’. I live not far from the canal and visit the canal and the communities beside it on a regular basis and the only ‘barges’ I’ve ever seen on it were maintenance boats owned by the Throughway Authority who oversees the canal. Virtually all traffic on the Barge Canal nowadays is recreational.
I have a hard time accepting that the cost of transferring cargo on and off a boat twice was so high that it offset the cost of building a hundred mile canal. But even if that was true, it doesn’t explain why the canal was built. At the time, building public projects like canals was a very controversial decision for the government. It would have been unlikely that the government would have been able to build a canal at public expense in order to save shipping companies from a private expense.
Wasn’t part of the reason for the routing due to the fact that the canal was at a fairly high elevation, equivalent to the top of the Niagara Escarpment, all the way west, and never had to (expensively, by way of locks) go down into the lowlands around Lake Ontario at all?
The following link is to a “memoir” (actually, a brief historical survey rather than a personal reminiscence) of the development of the canal, written at the time of its opening in 1825.
In it, (after passing a few brief racist comments and then wading through miles of “elevated” 19th century prose), the author notes that until around 1803 - 1805, nearly all schemes for various canals followed the suggestion Little Nemo put forth of running one canal to Lake Ontario and a second canal around the Niagara Falls.
Beginning with some observations by Governeur Morris in 1803 (and promoted by several residents of western New York–most notably the land agent (and prime booster for Buffalo) Joseph Ellicott), the trend shifted away from the Lake Ontario route to one employing a direct link to Lake Erie. (Besides Ellicott, a Dr. Hugh Williamson is credited with launching a strenuous publicity effort to choose the overland route under the pseudonym Atticus. Other sites note that “Atticus” was none other than De Witt Clinton, himself.) There does not seem to have been any direct public debate on the choices, although this site mentions and a few other sites support the notion that Ellicott expended considerable enrgy arguing for the cross-country route and against the Lake Ontario route.
The next site proposes the writings of Jesse Hawley (written while in debtor’s prison) as the principal source of the idea of the overland route and “Atticus” (this time identified as Clinton) as the most important popularizer of the route. Again, while they mention some discussion over the Lake Ontario/overland dispute, they provide no serious information regarding the actual arguments put forth. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA02/volpe/canal/history_body.html
If there are on-line copies of the “Atticus” papers, they may explain the reasons why the overland route won. On the other hand, it may have actually been something rather easier to understand:
In this Memoir of De Witt Clinton by David Hosack, is an appendix relating the “SERVICES OF THE LATE DR. HUGH WILLIAMSON” that include a quick table of eligible voters (recalling that many states had land requirement and poll taxes in those days) in which it is noted that the Western District of New York had substantially more eligible voters than any other region. If it was perceived by the westerners that a canal running through their back yards would be more profitable than a water route wandering around the Lake Ontario shore–and if it was perceived by the legislature that the western region needed to be propitiated, that may be all the explanation we need.
(It is late and I am not pursuing this any further, this evening.)
“The New York State Barge Canal carried commercial traffic until 1994 when its relatively small size coupled with rising labor cost brought this traffic to an end. However, during the late 1990’s, the federal and state governments are spending millions of dollars to enhance and increase recreation use of the New York State Canal System.”
