The Canal Era's place in US history

No.

we were going to ride the entire Erie Canal from Baltimore To Buffalo but I sold my boat.
From Baltimore ya take the C&D canal to the Dealware and then ride up the Eastern inland waterway to the Hudson and north to the ERie canal.
We wanted to go over to the Ganinoquay and Toronto, but, I needed the money for business and hadda sell my little Iapetus.

I've managed to live near the sites of two former canals: The Middlesex Canal and the NEw Haven-Northampton Canal.

By the 1830s, the country had a complete water route from New York City to New Orleans. Amazing.
Ten years later the railroads started to make canals unprofitable.
I grew up in No. Virginia and spent a whole lot of time hiking the C&O canal. Here's one of the locks today. Great Falls

William Least Heat Moon, wrote a book in the 1980's about a trip he and a friend took across the US. The only thing different about this trip as compared to any other trans continental trip is that these two guys did it in a BOAT. They crossed the US via the interlocking network of canals, to rivers, to canals and to lakes and canals and rivers. The trip started on the East River , rounding Manhattan and up the Hudson to the ERie Canal to the great lakes, the Ohio, to the Missouri and via circuitous coonections to the columbia . They did have to portage about 50 miles over the rockies but outside of that , the trip was 99.99% on water.
The trip was in a 22 ft C-Dory, a very worthy little craft with a below deck forward set of bunks, and a roomy pilot house which contains the kitchen ,bathroom, booth and a small couch which converts to a bed. Its like the inside of a fairly roomy camper and two people are comfortable. The boat is all Alum inum and is a favorite of the ALaska "Safeboat" crowd. It rides well in squalls and can roll over and right itself like a USCG cutter.

My own desire to do part pf the trip (At least to the Ohio was one of a series of boat trips we contemplated while I still had a boat. Though our boat was more than 2/3 of a C-Dory longer and had a bigger draft, It could have made everywhere he did with the exception of the "snags" of the Missouri so we never even gave that a thought.

Heres a C-Dory. A neat little boat with a real killer attitude. Its a great shoaling boat that takes standing waves and, in my mind, a tsunami, with ease.

In 1810, a fact about the geology of the US had occured to De Witt Clinton. He saw from the early maps from the French and Indian and the Revolutionary eras that NYstate presented the only reasonably wide cleft in the Appalachian Mountains. WHile there were "notches" and'GAPS' that presented steep sided narrow passages, the prospect of hauling goods over the mountains was daunting. In most cases, farmers and producers would use the Ohio to the Mississippi and haul reight by barge to New Orleans. New York city was only a small burg of about 10000 people. New Orleans, Philly , Boston and even Charleston were bigger in 1810.

Clinton thought that, because of the wide Niagara and Oneida plains, where the Appalachians were "torn" by Logans Line (A geological province that marks a structural boundary between teh Canadian/NEw England Appalachians and the SOuthern APpalachians. CLintons idea was thought mad because the surveying control that was required was also daunting. They would need to establish elevation accuracies of as little as 1" per running mile.(That is less than 0.01 degree of slope) No surveying levels or even theodolites were capable of that kind of accuracy everyone thought.

While the committee for the siting of the canal worked on the surveying (Theyfinally would up using wetted hoses to maintain level control per 500 feet). This trick was used by the Romans to maintain close level control.
THE REALLY BIG PROBLEM was to keep the canal from leaking all its water from the waterway proposed to go from North of Albany to Buffalo NY. The water entry would be controlled by inlet spillways and locks, but unless some kind of hydraulic cement was developed for this project New York would always remain a third world town.
ENTER CANVAS WHITE, a surveyor and a tinkerer. HE was sent to EWngland to see what the EWNglish did to solve this problem and found out the type of hydraulic cement that was used there. WHITE looked at it and said that, with the materials back home , hecould devise a better hydraulic cement to tightly seal the bottom and sides of the canal, especially in the areas where the regional water table and stream levels were beolw the water level in the canal. In these areas the hydraulic pressure would , if not designed for, allow all the ater to leak out faster than it could be replenished.
WHITE succeeded for everybody" s benefit except hois own. He had the patents and the know how but the manufacturers of the cement glommed up all the profits and payed him about 4 cents a "load" (load was ill defined and he got screwed really nicely)

The hydraulic cement was lousy for structutral strength as it wsnt a "pozzoloni type "portland cement". It was mostly a specific type of Calcium Magnesium sand and mud mix that was wonderful for setting up and drying under water.

The result was that, within 20 years after the ERie CAnal opened in 1827, New York had ballooned to over a half million people and became the US center of commerce and shipping.