Two hundred years ago, on Oct. 26, 1825, New York Gov. DeWitt Clinton boarded a canal boat by the shores of Lake Erie. Amid boisterous festivities, his vessel, the Seneca Chief, embarked from Buffalo, the westernmost port of his brand-new Erie Canal. Clinton and his flotilla made their way east to the canal's terminus in Albany, then down the Hudson River to New York City. This maiden voyage culminated on Nov. 4 with a ceremonial disgorging of barrels full of Lake Erie water into the brine of the Atlantic: pure political theater he called 'the Wedding of the Waters.' The Erie Canal, whose bicentennial is being celebrated all month, is an engineering marvel ' a National Historic Monument enshrined in folk song. Such was its legacy that as a young politician, Abraham Lincoln dreamed of becoming 'the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois.' As a historian of the 19th-century frontier, I'm fascinated by how civil engineering shaped America ' especially given the country's struggles to fix its aging...
learn more
