SSAT Practice Test 7

¹In 1817, when New York began digging a canal from Albany on the Hudson River to Buffalo on Lake Erie, many people thought the state had lost its mind. The route stretched about 363 miles through forests, swamps, and rising ground, and few Americans had any training in building such a work. Critics mocked the project as "Clinton's Ditch," after DeWitt Clinton, the governor who had championed it.

²The men who planned the canal largely taught themselves. James Geddes, one of its chief engineers, had worked as a land surveyor and a local judge and had never built a canal. He and his colleagues learned from books, from trial and error, and from one another. When the builders needed a mortar that would harden underwater, a young engineer experimented with limestone found near the route and produced a cement that did the job.

³Much of the digging was done by hand, with shovels, picks, and horse-drawn scrapers. Workers invented devices on the spot, including a machine for pulling up tree stumps. The canal's 83 locks, chambers that raised and lowered boats like the steps of a staircase, carried traffic over the long climb from the Hudson to the level of Lake Erie.

⁴In October 1825, the finished canal opened with a celebration that moved across the state. Clinton traveled by boat from Buffalo all the way to New York City, and at the end of the journey he poured a keg of Lake Erie water into the sea, a ceremony people called the "Wedding of the Waters."

⁵The mockery ended quickly. The cost of shipping goods between the Great Lakes region and New York City fell to a fraction of what it had been, farmers in the West found new markets, and towns along the route, such as Syracuse and Rochester, swelled. New York City became the busiest port in the nation. The ditch had become a highway.