building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

y the engineer Benjamin Wright (1770‐1842), a professional expert and head of
the project design company, whereas the third stretch was completed by the
engineer, Charles C. Broadhead.
At the time, the “frontier” line ran along the River Ohio and came to an end behind
other natural barriers. A few years later, the opening of the canal changed the
situation [Figures 76‐80]:
Such was substantially the situation in 1825, the year when "Clinton's
big ditch" was opened its entire length, and the historic cask of water
brought from Lake Erie was solemnly emptied into New York harbor. A
glance at the map of settlement in 1830 will show in a graphic way the
changes in the frontier line since 1820. The Erie Canal was not
responsible for it all, but it was a potent factor. The rise of such cities
and towns as Buffalo, Black Rock, Tonawanda, Lockport, Middleport,
Medina, and Albion was due directly to their relation to the canal, as the
names of two of them indicate. But many villages sprang up in
the "back country" as the adjuncts of increasing farming communities,
where the difficulty of transporting household goods and food, in the
first place, and later to market grain or cattle, had been a deterrent to
anything but the sparsest population 178 .
During the construction of the waterways, lateral canals were built and other works
were begun to serve the towns, which could now expand. This was the case of the
Rochester aqueduct, built on the River Genesee as a copy of the arches in Roman
bridges according to a project, which was obviously influenced by romantic ideas,
evoked by the surrounding, picturesque forests. Many stretches of the Erie Canal
were improved and widened in the decades which followed, until it became an
extremely complex, infrastructural work, the symbol of national pride and American
entrepreneurial ability [Figure 81].
In 1826 approximately 19,000 boats used the “big ditch”, as the Erie Canal was
called, and the company successfully recovered construction costs in less than ten
years. Thanks to the canal, the costs for goods travelling between Buffalo and New
York decreased from 100 to 15 dollars per ton and the time required from 20 to 8
days 179 .
178 MATHEWS, Lois Kimball, The Erie Canal and the Settlement of the West, Buffalo, 1910, p. 193
179 For this data cf. JONES, A., Maldwyn, The Limits of Liberty American History 1607‐1992, London,
Oxford University Press, 1995 [first ed. 1983] (Italian translation Storia degli Stati Uniti d’America.
Dalle prime colonie inglesi ai giorni nostri, Milan, Bompiani 2011; p. 106)
104