October 26
ERIE CANAL DAY
After 8 years of digging ... and digging ... and digging, Clinton’s Big Ditch was completed. (That’s not Bill, or Hillary Clinton, but De Witt Clinton, governor of the state of New York at the time.)
The 363-mile-long inland waterway, connecting Lake Erie to New York City by way of the Hudson River, opened to boat traffic on this day in 1825. Cannons fired in celebration and folks lined the route to cheer the $7,602,000 pet project of Governor Clinton. He knew that this, the first major, man-made waterway in the U.S. would be enormously important to the settlement of the Great Lakes region. And right he was!
By the 1840s, thousands of barges were using the ditch. The boatmen who worked them, known for their drinking and brawling, and their adventures on the Erie Canal became subjects of many stories and songs. One such refrain, the result of a storm that halted the ‘canawlers’ (as the barge operators were called) went something like this:
Oh, the Erie was a risin’
Those Were the Days, the Today in History service from 440 International
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