October 20, 2025: Erie Canal Studying: Starting the Project

[On October 26, 1825, the Erie Canal officially opened. So this week, I’ll honor the 200^th anniversary of that huge & hugely important project by highlighting a handful of figures connected to it, leading up to a special weekend tribute to my favorite current civil engineer!]

[NB. This is a reposting of one of my January 2025 historic anniversary posts to set the stage for the rest of the week!]

For the 200^th anniversary of its opening, three figures who helped construct the Erie Canal.

1)      DeWitt Clinton: There’s a whole Early Republic history to be written through the lens of the Clinton family, including George (the fourth Vice President of the US) and his nephew DeWitt (who himself ran for President in 1812, in between stints as a Senator and Governor of New York among other influential roles). The final public act in DeWitt’s life was his two terms as NY Governor, during the second of which he died unexpectedly in February 1828. And no aspect of DeWitt’s time as governor was more significant to him, nor more influential for the state and young nation, than his support for the Erie Canal project (leading to his nickname “Father of the Erie Canal”). He and it met with plenty of opposition, producing such colorful phrases as “Clinton’s Big Ditch.” But as with so many progressive ideas, just about everybody was more than happy to get on board once Clinton’s pet project opened and contributed so potently and positively to the evolving Early Republic.

2)      Canvass White: Prominent political allies are key for any major project of course, but at the end of the day it takes the folks on the ground to make the project a reality. There weren’t really professional civil engineers yet (at least not in America), and so the folks on the ground came from many walks of life: politicians like James Geddes, judges like Benjamin Wright, educators like Nathan Roberts, and amateur inventors and would-be engineers like Canvass White. Just 26 when he began working for Judge Wright as an engineer on the Erie Canal project in 1816, White persuaded Governor Clinton to fund a trip to England to learn more about their canals. He learned so much, and contributed so much to the Erie Canal project over the decade leading up to its opening, that he would be appointed Chief Engineer for multiple subsequent such projects, including the Delaware and Raritan Canal and the Lehigh Canal.

3)      Ely Parker: I’ve written about Parker, one of my favorite Americans, many times in this space, including that hyperlinked post and this one among others. He was born in 1828, so to be clear he didn’t play any role in the original construction of the Erie Canal (he was awesome but not superhuman). But he studied civil engineering at RPI, and when an 1840s extension of the canal was announced, Parker (still only 20 years old at the time) applied for and was appointed as the project’s resident engineer in Rochester. He was also in that same period continuing his lifelong fight for his Seneca Nation’s land rights and claims, which helps us remember both that all construction projects in America intersect with such fraught issues and that figures like Parker have worked to complement rather than oppose these needs.

Next Canal context tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?