GA Milestones EOG Practice Test 10

Clinton's Ditch

¹In the early 1800s, the young United States faced a problem of geography. Farmers in the new settlements around the Great Lakes could grow far more wheat than they could use, but getting it to the cities of the East Coast meant hauling it over the Appalachian Mountains by wagon, on rough roads, at enormous expense.

²New York's answer was a canal stretching 363 miles across the state, from Albany on the Hudson River to Buffalo on Lake Erie. Boats on the Hudson could already reach New York City, so the canal would connect the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean by water. The idea was simple. Building it was not. Between the Hudson and Lake Erie the land rises more than 500 feet, and the route crossed thick forests, swamps, and rivers.

³Many people thought the plan was hopeless. Thomas Jefferson, a former president, reportedly called the idea "little short of madness." When Governor DeWitt Clinton pushed the plan forward, critics nicknamed the project "Clinton's Ditch" and "Clinton's Folly." In 1817 New York lawmakers approved the money anyway, and on July 4 of that year, workers broke ground near the town of Rome.

⁴Thousands of laborers, including a growing number of Irish immigrants, dug the channel with shovels, picks, and horse-drawn scrapers. Local farmers joined them during slow seasons. The men in charge had little formal engineering training; most had worked as surveyors, measuring land. Because so many of its builders learned their skills on the job, the Erie Canal has sometimes been called America's first school of engineering.

⁵The builders solved problems as they went. They designed machines that could yank tree stumps out of the ground. When they needed a cement that would harden underwater to build the canal's locks, an engineer named Canvass White found a local rock that could be burned and ground into exactly that. In the end, 83 locks raised and lowered boats along the route, while horses and mules walking on a towpath beside the water pulled the boats along.

⁶In October 1825, after about eight years of work, the canal opened. Governor Clinton rode a boat from Buffalo to New York City, where he poured a barrel of Lake Erie water into the Atlantic, a ceremony people called the "Wedding of the Waters." Some of the same people who had laughed at "Clinton's Ditch" now joined the celebrations.

⁷The canal changed trade almost as soon as it opened. The cost of shipping a ton of goods from Buffalo to New York City fell from about $100 to about $10. With shipping that cheap, grain, lumber, and other products from the West poured toward the coast, and manufactured goods and new settlers flowed back the other way. Towns along the route, such as Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo, grew quickly, and the canal helped New York City become the busiest port in the nation.

⁸The canal was widened and deepened several times in the following decades. Eventually railroads took over most of its business, and today the boats on it are mostly pleasure craft, with cyclists and walkers following the old towpath. But for a generation of Americans, the "ditch" that critics had mocked was the road west.