The One Minute Geographer: The Amazing Importance of the Erie Canal, Part 2
We’re continuing our list of important aspects of the Erie Canal.
3. The Erie Canal vastly reduced the costs of transporting people and goods across the Appalachians. A mule or a horse can only carry a few hundred pounds on their backs. Or they can pull a wagon of up to 3,000 pounds (but not uphill!). But they can draw a barge carrying about 30,000 pounds along a towpath.
The products going east were almost all primary goods from the land, especially bulky, heavy goods that were otherwise hard to transport. Agricultural products, particularly wheat and corn, made up much of the freight, but quarried stone, timber and coal also filled a lot of barges. Prior to the Erie Canal, most of the limited coal we used was imported from England. As early as the 1860s Rockefeller started shipping oil by canal barge from refineries in Cleveland to New York City. Salt was a major good transported because upstate New York had salt deposits. (Livingston County in upstate, still has the largest salt mine in the US.)
Some local traffic was simply people poling a raft like Huck Finn and Jim on the Mississippi. Generally this only worked going downstream with the direction of water flow.
