Erie Canal

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Physical

• Canal (as Polygon and as Line)
• Locks (#'s, Points)

Historical

• Jesse Hawley's Prison Letters to Genesee Messenger

  • New York governor and one-time mayor of New York City DeWitt Clinton gets much of the credit for spearheading construction of the state-funded Erie Canal across this route, and he was the politican who sold the concept to the public. But the engineering idea that made it possible was hatched from a prison cell. Jesse Hawley, a flour merchant in western New York, had gone broke trying to move his product down the mess of roads and trails that wended their way out of the wilderness in 1807, and while there he scratched out more than a dozen letters to the Genesee Messenger arguing for construction of a canal linking the Hudson River to the Great Lakes...The letters laid out the general route that the Erie Canal would eventually take (Egan, 15).

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Source for Hawley's Essays/Letters: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma02/volpe/canal/hawley.html