How America Dug a 363-Mile Ditch Through Wilderness With Shovels

How America Dug a 363-Mile Ditch Through Wilderness With Shovels The Erie Canal (1817–1825) was dug entirely by hand — fifty thousand men with shovels carved 363 miles of canal through New York wilderness, building 83 locks and 18 aqueducts with no dynamite, no steam shovels, and almost no trained engineers. It cut the cost of moving a ton of freight from one hundred dollars to under nine, and turned a mocked governor's "folly" into the project that made New York City the richest city in America. This is the story of DeWitt Clinton's impossible gamble, the Irish immigrants and German stonemasons who invented their own tools as they went — the slip scraper, the stump puller, America's first hydraulic cement — the staircase of five locks that climbed the Niagara Escarpment at Lockport, the thousand workers lost in the Montezuma Marsh, and the "Wedding of the Waters" that opened the American interior to the world. SOURCES: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal history.com smithsonianmag.com If you care about the men who built this country with their hands, subscribe to The Grit Age. #AmericanHistory #HistoryDocumentary #ErieCanal #Engineering #19thCentury Visuals and voiceover in this video were generated with AI. 0:00 The ditch they said could never be dug 1:01 The problem 2:01 Clinton's Folly 3:07 Fifty thousand shovels 4:59 The mountain 6:09 The swamp 7:10 The Wedding of the Waters 8:38 Legacy of the ditch