From the painting by C.Y. Turner in the DeWitt Clinton High School, New York.
The Ceremony Called “The Marriage of the Waters.”
Another kind of highway which proved to be of untold value to both the East and the West, was the canal, or artificial waterway connecting two bodies of water.
The most important was the Erie Canal, connecting the Hudson River and Lake Erie, begun in 1817. This new idea received the same scornful attention from the unthinking as “Fulton’s Folly.” By many it was called “Clinton’s Ditch,” after Governor DeWitt Clinton, to whose foresight we are indebted for the building of this much-used waterway. The scoffers shook their heads and said: “Clinton will bankrupt the State”; “The canal is a great extravagance”; and so on.
But he did not stop because of criticism, and in 1825 the canal was finished. The undertaking had been pushed through in eight years. It was a great triumph for Clinton and a proud day for the State.
When the work was completed the news was signalled from Buffalo to New York in a novel way. As you know, there was neither telephone nor telegraph then. But at intervals of five miles all along the route cannon were stationed. When the report from the first cannon was heard, the second was fired, and thus the news went booming eastward till, in an hour and a half, it reached New York.
Clinton himself journeyed to New York in the canal-boat Seneca Chief. This was drawn by four gray horses, which went along the tow-path beside the canal. As the boat passed quietly along, people thronged the banks to do honor to the occasion.
When the Seneca Chief reached New York City, Governor Clinton, standing on deck, lifted a gilded keg filled with water from Lake Erie and poured it into the harbor. As he did so, he prayed that “the God of the heaven and the earth” would smile upon the work just completed and make it useful to the human race. Thus was dedicated this great waterway, whose usefulness has more than fulfilled the hope of its chief promoter.
Erie Canal on the Right and Aqueduct over the Mohawk River, New York.