'Canal fever' blinded Vermonters to obstacles
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During the 1820s, a surveying team recommended the construction of a canal from Lake Champlain to the Connecticut River via the Wells River. NATIONAL ARCHIVE IMAGE |
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By MARK BUSHNELL - Published: November 29, 2009
Technology excites people because it can annihilate time and distance. The automobile, the airplane, the Internet all get you places, either physically or virtually, much faster than you could get there on your own.
During the early 1800s, the technology that had people fired up was the canal. Transportation canals might not sound particularly impressive. After all, they had been around for more than 2,000 years, and canal boats didn't exactly move at breakneck speeds.
But to someone whose world had been limited by the speed one could travel on crude roads or by the unreliable force of wind across water, canals were pretty exciting. So exciting, in fact, that Vermonters seem briefly to have lost their senses and begun to dream of building canals in highly impractical places, like across the Green Mountains.
To understand what sparked this wild dream, it helps to know that during the 1820s Vermonters had contracted what has been called "canal fever." Residents were captivated by the idea that canals could improve their standard of living. The comparatively quick pace of canal boats, which could sail or be pulled by draft animals on shore, would open some formerly remote parts of Vermont to the big-city markets along the coast.
For people in the hinterlands, the economy was shifting from a subsistence mode, where people made everything they needed, to one where they produced raw materials that they could trade for finished goods. Canals were central to this economic revolution.
Vermonters were hardly alone in catching canal fever. The contagion was gripping much of the country. It was touched off by the completion of the young country's most ambitious infrastructure project, the 363-mile-long Erie Canal, in 1825.
Vermont had already gotten a taste of the economic benefits of a canal. Two years earlier, the 60-mile Champlain Canal had opened, connecting the southern end of Lake Champlain to the Hudson River, and therefore to the New York City market.
The Champlain Canal wasn't actually the first canal in the state. Vermont recorded the charter of a Bellows Falls canal company in 1791. (Work was completed in 1802.) And a canal on the Connecticut River, in the present-day town of Wilder, started in 1810. These canals bypassed some particularly nasty and unnavigable river stretches.
The Bellows Falls and Champlain canal projects served as a pair of parentheses bracketing the state. They helped ease the transportation of goods down the margins of Vermont, but what about transporting goods across the state? The cross-state route was slow and arduous at best. To traverse Vermont, one had to travel along primitive roads and by river, with many grueling portages around rapids and falls.
Politicians and businessmen thought they saw a better way. They began dreaming of canals to connect both Lake Champlain and Lake Memphremagog with the Connecticut River. The canals were seen as part of a water transportation network across a region stretching from Boston to Montreal. Planners didn't seem overly concerned that the Green Mountains stood in the way.
The job of finding a route for the proposed Lake Memphremagog-Connecticut River canal fell to DeWitt Clinton Jr. of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Clinton, whose father had helped push through the Erie Canal, directed a surveying team that plotted three possible paths.
The first route surveyed left Memphremagog by way of the Black River Valley, then passed through Coventry, before entering Lake Eligo and moving on to the Lamoille River in Hardwick. From there, it headed to Joe's Pond and into the Passumpsic and Stevens rivers and then the Connecticut River. It was far from a level course. At its highest point, the route rose 1,011 feet above the lake and 1,248 above the river.
As part of the route, Clinton suggested boring a two-mile tunnel through a hillside in Walden, as a way of avoiding the added cost of the numerous locks that would have been needed to raise the canal an additional 128 feet over the hill. Clinton wrote that the tunnel would need to be wide enough "to admit one boat at a time, and with a towing path, and shafts to admit a free circulation of air." The cost of the tunnel alone was an estimated $130,000, a sizable chunk in those days. The entire 61-mile route, 52 miles of which would have been canal, would have required the construction of 350 locks, seven times more than needed for the much longer Erie Canal.
The price tag for this route was an estimated $859,000.
The easiest possibility still would have required running the canal from Lake Memphremagog, past the outskirts of Derby Line (whose residents had evidently lobbied to have the canal pass nearby), then down the Clyde and Nulhegan rivers, before reaching the Connecticut. This 41-mile water route (34 miles of which would require canal building) was hardly flat either. Its high point was nearly 500 feet above Lake Memphremagog. The cost estimate was a comparatively cheap $306,000, but that figure didn't include expensive alterations to the Connecticut River that would have been needed to make certain sections passable.
Two companies also sprang up to argue over how best to tame the Connecticut. Folks with the Connecticut River Co., the so-called riverites, argued that "improvement" work should be done within the river. Those with the Connecticut River Canal Co., the "canalites," advocated for the construction of canals to bypass rough spots.
The most ambitious idea involving the Connecticut might have been the proposal to connect the river with Vermont's principal thoroughfare, Lake Champlain. Shallow-draft boats could make it up much of the Winooski River. From there, engineers hoped to find a route that would link into the White, Waits or Wells rivers, before reaching the Connecticut. Such a canal would be a vital link in the planned canal system between Boston and Montreal. Even if that larger network never materialized, supporters argued, a Champlain-Connecticut canal still would have the benefit of easing trade between the two sides of the Green Mountains.
A team of Army engineers, led by Capt. James Graham, arrived in Vermont in 1829 to conduct the survey. (When winter hit, they left local surveyors to complete the job.) Graham came away convinced of the canal's importance, calling it "a source of considerable profit to this portion of (the) country." And, despite the challenges a canal would present, he wrote that "it is quite practicable to effect a communication by means of a canal between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut (R)iver." Graham favored a Wells River valley route.
James Whitelaw, the state's surveyor general, begged to differ.
Whitelaw, who during his career had seen huge sections of the state, believed that only the connection with the White River was feasible.
We'll never know who was right. Despite the engineers' confidence that they could build them, the proposed Champlain-Connecticut and Memphremagog-Connecticut canals faced insurmountable obstacles, not the least of which was the ruggedness of the Green Mountains. Rough terrain made the proposed routes expensive and, ultimately, unable to attract funding.
By the 1830s, canal fever abated. People lost their enthusiasm for canals because they saw that a new technology, railroads, was on the horizon and promised to do a better job of annihilating time and distance.
Mark Bushnell's column on Vermont history is a weekly feature in Vermont Sunday Magazine. A collection of his columns was recently published in the book "It Happened in Vermont." He can be reached at vermontpastlane@gmail.com.
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