building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

Furthermore, the Erie Canal was a pipeline for ideas used not only by migratory
flows from the Atlantic, but also by religious and utopian communities, which used
it to move around to reach chosen places or to carry out missions within the states.
Nowadays, numerous parks and museums along the canal give added value to a
system which crosses 23 counties and includes approximately 4,800 square miles.
Since the year 2000, the United States Congress has recognised the great historic
and cultural value of the work and now the Erie Canal Way Corridor belongs in the
National Heritage list.
The waterway scenarios of the Mid‐West were not limited to the territory between
Lake Erie and the Hudson. Additional canals, which penetrated still further to the
west and south, were added to this system. Mention should be made of the Miami
and Erie Canal, 301 miles in 1845 from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Toledo, Ohio; the
Wabash and Erie Canal, 460 miles in the 1850s from Toledo, Ohio to Evansville,
Indiana; the Ohio and Erie Canal, 308 miles in 1832 from Akron, Ohio to
Portsmouth, Ohio.
The main canals usually merged with rivers and lakes, and sometimes ran parallel to
them or joined them wherever possible. The secondary canals, on the other hand,
either joined the main canals as “tributaries”, or they linked up other canals to each
other to create an extremely vast, waterway landscape.
Another important water infrastructure was The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal,
opened in 1831, 184 miles long, which connected Cumberland, Maryland to
Washington, D.C. It ran parallel to the River Potomac, whereas the elevation
differential was overcome by locks. The history of Chesapeake is linked to the
Potomac Company. This company was founded in 1785 by George Washington in
order to enable and improve the navigability of the Potomac, but it was not
particularly successful. Work only began in 1828 according to a project prepared by
Benjamin Wright, head engineer of the Erie Canal. At the same time, the state of
Pennsylvania also began numerous public works to construct canals, dams, locks
and aqueducts.
In the early 1840s, The Pennsylvania Canal consisted of a canal system of
approximately a thousand miles of navigable water, of which the most important
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