Source link : https://bq3anews.com/the-erie-canal-how-a-big-ditch-remodeled-the-usas-financial-system-tradition-or-even-faith/
2 hundred years in the past, on Oct. 26, 1825, New York Gov. DeWitt Clinton boarded a canal boat via the shores of Lake Erie. Amid boisterous festivities, his vessel, the Seneca Leader, embarked from Buffalo, the westernmost port of his brand-new Erie Canal.
Clinton and his flotilla made their manner east to the canal’s terminus in Albany, then down the Hudson River to New York Town. This maiden voyage culminated on Nov. 4 with a ceremonial disgorging of barrels filled with Lake Erie water into the brine of the Atlantic: natural political theater he known as “the Wedding of the Waters.”
DeWitt Clinton pouring water from Lake Erie into the Atlantic, engraved via Philip Meeder.
The New York Public Library by means of Wikimedia Commons
The Erie Canal, whose bicentennial is being celebrated all month, is an engineering wonder – a Nationwide Ancient Monument enshrined in folks music. Such was once its legacy that as a tender baby-kisser, Abraham Lincoln dreamed of changing into “the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois.”
As a historian of the Nineteenth-century frontier, I’m thinking about how civil engineering formed The usa – particularly given the rustic’s struggles to mend its getting older infrastructure nowadays. The hole of the Erie Canal reached past Clinton’s Empire State, cementing the Midwest into the prosperity of the rising country. This human-made waterway remodeled The usa’s financial system and immigration…
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Author : bq3anews
Publish date : 2025-10-20 14:54:00
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