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The One Minute Geographer: The Amazing Importance of the Erie Canal, Part 6
We’re continuing our discussion of important aspects of the Erie Canal — how it helped shape US geography and history.
12) The Erie Canal speeded up migration to the Midwest from New England. The well-known cultural geographer, Wilbur Zelinsky, who wrote about cultural core areas in the United States, called New York “New England Extended.” He then showed how the New England and New England extended regions brought their culture mainly through the Erie Canal to the Great Lakes regions. So the northern parts of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois and later, southern Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota became a lot like those states due east in terms of cultural characteristics.
You can see New England’s influence in these areas even in today’s landscape with sometimes a ‘commons,’ the white steepled church (initially Congregationalist or Methodist, the Catholic churches came later), the township system with its town meetings and autonomous school boards, and so on. Some of this migration had started as early as the 1700s and that trend intensified as young farmers went west to make their fortune in the promised land along the Erie Canal. (And many did.)
