USA - New York - Excavation Of The Deep Cut

Excavation of the Deep Cut

Workers excavate the Erie Canal through solid rock west of Lockport, New York, using hand tools, blasting powder, and horse-powered cranes.

Sent by Smith Benedikt from Ohio, USA.

In 1809, when President Thomas Jefferson reviewed New York’s ambitious plans for a more than 360-mile canal connecting the Hudson River (and therefore New York Harbor) to the Great Lakes, he dismissed it as “little short of madness” and refused to authorize federal funding. Less than a decade later, when New York’s politically savvy governor DeWitt Clinton pushed the controversial canal plan through the state legislature, opponents mocked the project as “DeWitt’s Ditch” and “Clinton’s Folly.”

Yet in 1825, just eight years after workers broke ground, DeWitt boarded a barge called the Seneca Chief and took a victory cruise along the newly opened Erie Canal, an engineering marvel, unlike anything America had ever seen. The man-made waterway, designed by untrained engineers, featured 83 separate locks, two massive stone-and-cement aqueducts to crisscross the Mohawk River, and a final ingenious “flight” of interconnected locks to raise boats over the 70-foot Niagara Escarpment (read more).