building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

stretches included the Delaware Division (60 miles), the Beaver Division (31 miles)
and the Susquehanna Division (41 miles), named after the rivers involved, and the
Eastern Division (69 miles) which, together with other canals and works,
represented the main line totalling hundreds of miles.
Occasionally, inclined planes were built alongside the canals, which helped
overcome the elevation differentials, which would otherwise have been too long
and too expensive for a canal to overcome, as well as short railroad stretches.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the canals became a transport symbol
and the most effective and most used communication road. Canals were built in all
the states, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississipi and they created innumerous
combinations between the various routes. Therefore, the canals represented the
symbolic infrastructure of this period and made up the vast and little explored
landscape of American waterways, a landscape often ignored by the average
European. For this reason, if we consider the vast implications and relapses in
landscaping, we believe that the recording of this phenomenon is more than a
simple piece of encyclopaedic data. The landscape of the canals [Figures 76‐80]
shows an unexpected America, which has had the opportunity to interact with the
territory in different ways, which are nevertheless important to be able to form an
environmental conscience towards nature.
The cowboy epic and the myth of the railroad did not yet represent a dominant
entity in the first half of the century, and they developed only after the years of Civil
War when, by the twentieth century, they had become the often stereotyped
legend of the great American spaces.
Not by chance was the boat the principal means of transport until the 1860s.
In particular, the steamboat came to play a significant, dominant role alongside the
prolific construction of canals.
The steamboat became the icon of the industrial face of the America that travelled
on water. North River by Robert Fulton (1765‐1815), commonly known as Clermont,
was completed in 1807 and was the first boat to enjoy a certain commercial
success. It sailed up the River Hudson from New York to Albany in 32 hours and
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