[On October 26, 1825, the Erie Canal officially opened. So this week, I’ll honor the 200th 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!]
On two contrasting
yet interconnected experiences that the pioneering
civil engineer carried with him throughout his short but hugely influential
life.
As I briefly
mentioned in Monday’s post, in 1817, after he had been working on the Erie
Canal for about a year (under the supervision of judge turned chief engineer Benjamin
Wright), Canvass White persuaded Governor DeWitt Clinton to support and
fund a research trip to England. There he spent more than a year traveling over 2000 miles
on foot throughout the country, studying the construction and operation of
canals. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that not long after his return home
he developed and patented
a groundbreaking new way of producing waterproof hydraulic cement from
limestone, nor that he then permitted the use of his patented formula only for
work on the construction of canal locks. You can’t tell the story of Early
Republic America without thinking of the continued English influence, and White
clearly had learned across the pond not just how to make the most of one’s home
terrain, but also how to do so in service of his fellow countrymen.
That
English experience and influence is particularly interesting in White’s case
because just a few years before his trip he had been fighting against the
English. In the spring of 1814, while he was attending Connecticut’s Fairfield
Academy to study mathematics, minerology, and surveying under the legendary
Revolutionary-era Dr. Joseph Noyes,
White temporarily left school to volunteer for the U.S. Army during the War of
1812. He was commissioned as a lieutenant and led a company of volunteers in the July 1814 assault on and
capture of Ontario’s Fort Erie; he was severely wounded during that battle, but
after returning home and convalescing did complete his studies and move into
his work on the Erie Canal. Yet his war wounds would never entirely heal, and
seem to have been the cause of the lifelong ailments that led him to move to
Florida in search of a more temperate climate and tragically die very
young, in 1834 at the age of just 44.
Those two
defining experiences clearly reflect opposed perspectives on England, and thus
illustrate that White had a profoundly open mind, to be able, just a few years
after that grievous injury, to travel so fully throughout this former foe. But
I would also argue that they can and should be interconnected, and not just
because White certainly carried both with him for his remaining couple decades
of life. To my mind they exemplify a young man who would go to any lengths,
literally and figuratively, to do what he believed necessary to work for the
good of his community and peers. The Preamble of the
Constitution includes “promote the general Welfare” as one of the ways in
which “We the People” hope “to form a more perfect Union.” That first phrase
can be interpreted in various ways to be sure, but I don’t know that I’ve ever
encountered a life that included multiple actions so intended within such a
short period of time as that of Canvass White.
Next Canal
context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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