Sheboyan History: Erie Canal helped Sheboygan
On the morning of Oct. 25, 1825, cannon fire was heard in Buffalo, N.Y.
A bit further east another cannon fired. And then another and another in quick succession, all the way to New York City.
The Seneca Chief, a canal boat, entered the western terminus of the Erie Canal at 10 o’clock with Gov.DeWitt Clinton on board headed toward New York City.
Once there Clinton poured two kegs of fresh water from Lake Erie into the salt water of the Atlantic in New York Harbor in a ceremony known as the “Wedding of the Waters.” The Erie Canal was officially open for business.
An engineering marvel of its time, the canal was first proposed in 1808 and finally completed in 1825. It connected the Hudson River at Troy, NY, in the east to Lake Erie at Buffalo in the west. Such a canal had been discussed as early as 1768, but every plan placed the western outlet entering Lake Ontario near Oswego. This meant a grueling portage around Niagara Falls for further travel on the Great Lakes.
The Appalachian Mountains proved a formidable barrier to the unpopulated Midwest. It was crucial to find a way through the mountains so those interior lands could be opened to settlers and commerce.
Luckily, the key to the plan was New York’s Mohawk Valley. The only low level, natural opening through the Appalachians, it was the logical place to breach the mountains.
The Niles Weekly Register out of Baltimore announced on July 26, 1817, “The fourth of July was celebrated at Utica, NY, by commencing the excavation that is to unite the great lakes with the Atlantic...” Humorously, the canal’s construction was compared to that of the great pyramids at Giza.
That first canal was dug almost entirely by hand. Thousands of British, German and Irish immigrants provided the muscle. Laborers were paid 80 cents per day – nearly three times the rate they had earned at home. Though only 40 feet wide by four feet deep, it ran 363 miles from Albany to Buffalo where immigrants could board a boat for points west. A series of 83 locks raised the barges 565 feet as one moved west.
Barges were towed by mules or horses along towpaths. Those barges – 14.5 feet wide and 78 feet long – carried as much as 30 tons of cargo and people while being towed by only one mule. A 10-foot-wide towpath was built along the bank. Overhead aqueducts were used to allow streams to cross the canal’s path.
Thomas Jefferson thought the idea of such a canal “little short of madness.” When federal funding proved elusive, the New York State legislature took the matter into its own hands and approved state funding for the canal in 1816, with tolls collected to reimburse the state treasury. The project came with a hefty $7.5 million price tag equal to about $4 billion today. But it was a winner.
DeWitt Clinton championed the project. First mayor of New York City and then governor of the state, Clinton pushed ahead and made it happen. When the first ground was broken at Rome in central New York, digging commenced simultaneously both east to Utica and west to Seneca River.
Snidely called Clinton’s Folly or Clinton’s Big Ditch, it changed the face of the country. Canal boats hauled wheat to the east. The same boats made the return trip laden with immigrants or finished goods for customers in the west.
Within a decade New York City was the busiest port in the country. Shipping costs decreased by almost 90 percent. Yet, all things change, and by the 1890s railroads had claimed all of the passenger business and much of the canal’s cargo business.
The state of Wisconsin benefited because the canal made it possible for thousands of new immigrants to places they would soon call home.
Increase Lapham, Wisconsin’s famed naturalist, got his first job at age 13 cutting stone for lock gates at Lockport, N.Y. At 14, Lapham supplemented his dollar-a-day income by drawing and selling plans of the lock to townspeople.
Gottlieb and Rosina Knecht Torke of the Town of Sherman and their children endured a 34-day sailing journey from Germany to New York, a trip up the Hudson River and a barge west via the Erie Canal, before they arrived in Sheboygan in September 1855.
John Beekman Cole was employed on the Erie Canal in his early life before coming to Sheboygan in 1845. Cole ran a mill on the Pigeon River and managed the Beekman House once he arrived in Wisconsin.
William B. Daharsh, born in Madison County, New York, drove canal boats on the Erie Canal from the time that he was 14 years old until he was 20 when he was made captain of a canal boat. However, in 1853, he migrated westward to Sheboygan County, where he bought 80 acres of land.
The Conways, residents of Meeme Township in Manitowoc County, came from Ireland in 1849. Charles Conway, patriarch of the family, worked as a contractor on Erie Canal in New York State until 1856, when they moved west.
We know the Erie Canal to be a pleasure boating wonder, an amazing waterway, still fully operational. It has become a “yacht highway” great for tourists and history buffs. But remember, it was also once called the Ditch that Changed the Face of America.
Beth Dippel is executive director of the Sheboygan County Historical Society in Sheboygan Falls