The Erie Canal Was Dug by Hand The States That Copied It Went Broke

New York paid off the Erie Canal loan by 1837. Pennsylvania sold its copy at a loss in 1857. In 1817 New York borrowed about $7 million to dig a 363-mile canal, and gave the job to judges and land surveyors because the country had no professional civil engineers. By 1834 the tolls had passed $8 million. Other legislatures read those numbers and borrowed for canals, banks and railroads of their own. In 1841 and 1842, eight states and the Territory of Florida defaulted. Pennsylvania's canal had needed a reservoir above a town called Johnstown. Next entry: Chicago, and the river it made run backwards. Entry 002 · The Erie Canal, 1817 to 1857 Chapters 0:00 Entry 002 · The Erie Canal, 1817 to 1857 1:30 A ditch nobody would fund 4:15 Engineers who weren't 8:33 Muscle, not machines 11:11 The swamp and the cliff 14:45 The ditch that paid for itself 17:00 Everybody wanted one 22:18 Closing the entry Entry 001, the Johnstown Flood:    • The Dam That Drowned Johnstown (1889)   Sources American Heritage, "Little Short of Madness" New York Heritage, "Economic Growth" History.com, "Erie Canal" Consider the Source NY (New York State Archives Partnership Trust), "Building the Grand Canal" New York Heritage, "The Canal Engineers" American Society of Civil Engineers, "Benjamin Wright" American Society of Civil Engineers, "Canvass White" Wikipedia, "Erie Canal" Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862 (1996) Wikipedia, "Montezuma Marsh" American Heritage, "1825: One Hundred and Seventy-Five Years Ago" Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia, "Main Line of Public Works" Tredyffrin Easttown Historical Society Quarterly, on the sale of the Main Line (1857) National Park Service, Johnstown Flood National Memorial, "South Fork Dam" Wikipedia, "U.S. state defaults in the 1840s" American Heritage, "Debts We Never Paid" Grinath, Wallis & Sylla (1997), "Debt, Default, and Revenue Structure: The American State Debt Crisis in the Early 1840s," NBER Historical Working Paper 97 Wallis, Sylla & Grinath (2004), "Sovereign Debt and Repudiation: The Emerging-Market Debt Crisis in the U.S. States, 1839-1843," NBER Working Paper 10753 Gerard Koeppel, Bond of Union: Building the Erie Canal and the American Empire (2009) Credits Music: "Anguish" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... Music: "Meditation Impromptu 01" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... Music: "Heavy Heart" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b... "WLA nyhistorical Keg with stand from Erie Canal celebration" by Wikipedia Loves Art participant "the_adverse_possessors", CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons. "Erie Canal Locks at Lockport, New York, July 2016 - 01" by Andre Carrotflower, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Historical photographs: Library of Congress (Prints & Photographs Division), New York Public Library (Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views), National Park Service. Public domain. Maps and diagrams are original explanatory reconstructions. Sound effect: "Turning a page.ogg" by planish, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Thumbnail: dramatized illustration. All photographs in the video are real archival images. #ErieCanal #EngineeringHistory #AmericanHistory