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| | From: Palettescape (Original Message) | Sent: 10/26/2007 11:46 PM |
Friday, October 26, 2007 ERIE CANAL DAY
After 8 years of digging ... and digging ... and digging, Clinton’s Big Ditch was completed. (That’s not Bill Clinton, but De Witt Clinton, governor of the state of New York at the time.) The 363-mile-long inland waterway, connecting Lake Erie to New York City by way of the Hudson River, opened to boat traffic on this day in 1825. Cannons fired in celebration and folks lined the route to cheer the $7,602,000, pet project of Governor Clinton. He knew that this, the first major, man-made waterway in the U.S. would be enormously important to the settlement of the Great Lakes region. And right he was! By the 1840s, thousands of barges used the ditch. The boatmen who worked them, known for their drinking and brawling, and their adventures on the Erie Canal became subjects of many stories and songs. One such refrain, the result of a storm that halted the ‘canawlers�?(as the barge operators were called) went something like this: Oh, the Erie was a risin�?BR>And the gin was gettin�?low, And I scarcely think we’ll get a drink Till we get to Buffalo.
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Oh, the Erie was a risin�?BR>And the gin was gettin�?low, And I scarcely think we’ll get a drink Till we get to Buffalo. I Love History
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