Canals and Waterways

Canals and Waterways. The first waterway engineers in the Americas were the prehistoric builders who constructed fish weirs and ditches. Europeans encountered snags, sandbars, and rapids. In 1785, George Washington organized a company that cleared rocks from the Potomac. Canal builders also developed the Santee, James, Delaware, Susquehanna, Schuylkill, and Merrimack Rivers.

Canals in the Antebellum Era were typically semipublic stock corporations supported by state and municipal bonds. In 1808, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin asked Congress to supplement local investment with twenty million dollars for roads and canals. John C. Calhoun's “Bonus Bill,” an elaborate attempt to implement Gallatin's concept, was vetoed by President James Madison in 1817. New Yorkers, twice denied federal assistance, raised seven million dollars in state revenues and bonds for the 364‐mile Erie Canal, completed in 1825.

The Erie Canal inspired an enthusiastic “canal era” of state and federal waterway projects. Encouraged by the U.S. Supreme Court's outspoken nationalism in Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), Congress purchased $300,000 in canal stock to finance a cut through the Delaware Peninsula. Virginians chartered a larger enterprise, the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. By 1830, New Jersey, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had launched ambitious projects, and Pennsylvania spanned the Alleghenies with the Main Line Canal from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, opened in 1834.

Antebellum canal engineers were mostly millwrights, surveyors, mechanics, or masons, some field‐trained on the Erie Canal and others formally schooled at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Construction fell to dollar‐a‐day laborers, increasingly Irish Americans. The financial panic of 1837 hurt canal investors, pushing Maryland, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois to the brink of bankruptcy. In 1838, as the nation's attention shifted to railroads and steamboats, Congress suspended federal aid to canal corporations. From 1815 to 1861 the total U.S. expenditure on canal construction was about $195 million dollars—two‐thirds of it public money.

After the Civil War, the federal investment in waterways focused on levees, jetties, locks, and dams. One popular project was the deepwater shipping channel that opened the Mississippi River below New Orleans. Serious flooding in Louisiana, meanwhile, led to the 1879 establishment of a levee‐oversight bureau called the Mississippi River Commission. In 1902, Congress extended federal financing through the U.S. Reclamation Service, later renamed the Bureau of Reclamation. Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska, a crusader for public hydropower, sponsored the 1933 law that created the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

Rural demand for electricity helped justify massive construction. One engineering triumph was Boulder Dam (renamed Hoover Dam in 1947) on the Colorado River, finished in 1935. The 1936 Flood Control Act greatly expanded the Army Corps of Engineers' jurisdiction with $310 million for some 250 projects. Flood control became a primary justification for the corps' basinwide dam and canal projects such as the St. Lawrence Seaway, opened in 1959, the Pick‐Sloan project on the Missouri River, and the Tennessee‐Tombigbee Waterway. In all, about 75,000 large dams have been built in the nation's rivers.

A major twentieth‐century waterway project was the St. Lawrence Seaway. This joint Canadian–U.S. engineering project was authorized by Canada in 1951 and by the U.S. Congress in 1954. The seaway opened in 1959. By a system of canals, dams, and locks extending over 2,300 miles westward from Montreal, the St. Lawrence Seaway links the Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence River and the Atlantic Ocean by a twenty‐seven‐foot‐deep channel that can accommodate freighters with a capacity of nearly 30,000 tons. The seaway proved an economic boon to such ports as Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee and Duluth, enabling the agricultural and industrial products of the upper Middle West to reach world markets, and bringing imported goods and raw materials to the American heartland.

Once widely praised as monuments to American know‐how, dams, ecologists now maintain, have degraded water quality and killed migrating fish. In 1997, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) responded to environmental protest by calling for the removal of Edwards Dam in Maine. In the Pacific Northwest, meanwhile, a Corps study concluded that the most effective way to restore sea‐going salmon and steelhead was to breach Snake River dams.
See also Roads and Turnpikes, Early.

Bibliography

Ellis L. Armstrong , History of Public Works in the United States, 1776–1976, 1976.
Richard A. Bartlett , Rolling Rivers: An Encyclopedia of America's Rivers, 1984.

Todd A. Shallat