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The One Minute Geographer: The Amazing Importance of the Erie Canal, Part 3
We’re continuing our discussion (and list) of important aspects of the Erie Canal — how it helped shape US geography and history.
5) Erie was a model for other canals. The financial success of the Erie Canal spawned a canal building frenzy around the country. Between 1816 and 1840 over 3,326 miles of man-made waterways were constructed, many using construction and engineering techniques pioneered on the Erie Canal. That’s the equivalent distance of an east-west transit of the United States! You can see many of them on the map above.
Other states wanted not only the revenue from the canal itself, but, as we will see, the boom cities along the path of the canal and THE boom city, like New York, at the major ocean port that the canal trade fed into. Big cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore saw New York taking trade away from them and feared competition from each other if the competitor built a canal, so they built them.
Baltimore and Philadelphia were competing for the same inland hinterland, so Baltimore put its efforts into the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal cutting through the Delmarva Peninsula and saving 300 miles off the trip from the Atlantic Ocean to Baltimore. But that also shortened the distance to Philadelphia!
