Wedding of the Waters: Erie Canal Opens America

Governor DeWitt Clinton poured Lake Erie water into New York Harbor on November 4, 1825, in the "Wedding of the Waters" ceremony marking the Erie Canal's completion after eight years of construction. The 363-mile waterway connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean through a series of eighty-three locks that climbed over six hundred feet in elevation from Albany to Buffalo. Clinton had championed the canal against enormous political opposition. Critics called it "Clinton's Ditch" and argued that the project's forty-million-dollar cost was insane for a nation whose entire federal budget was barely twice that amount. Thomas Jefferson had told the canal's advocates that the project was "a century ahead of its time." Clinton ignored them all. The canal slashed shipping costs by ninety-five percent, reducing the price of transporting a ton of freight from Buffalo to New York City from one hundred dollars to ten dollars. The economic impact was immediate and transformative. New York City, which had been only the fifth-largest port in the United States, became the nation's commercial capital within a decade. Towns along the canal route, including Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo, exploded in population. The canal opened the Great Lakes region to settlement and trade, turning the Midwest from frontier to farmland in a single generation. It also triggered a canal-building frenzy across the eastern states, as other cities attempted to replicate New York's success. Most of those canals failed financially. The Erie Canal remained profitable for decades before railroads eventually captured the freight traffic. The original canal was enlarged twice and finally replaced by the New York State Barge Canal system in 1918.