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Our Infrastructure Is Not Our Destiny
Just as America’s canal system rose and fell, so too our current system of fossil-fuel-centric transportation.
Peninsula, Ohio, was once a promising boom town. The hamlet next to the Cuyahoga River was founded by settlers from New England in the early 1800s (the next town up the river is called, appropriately, Boston). It started out as a collection of little log cabins nestled in the woods. Most of the residents were farmers, trying their luck on what was then considered the western frontier of the United States.
Then, in the 1820s, the nation changed. When the Erie Canal, connecting the Hudson River to the Great Lakes, opened in 1825, it created all sorts of transportation possibilities in the Northeast. A journey that might have taken weeks of arduous overland travel could now be accomplished in a quick, easy boat ride. The Erie Canal kicked off a “transportation revolution” that turbocharged the American economy and encouraged many Americans to move west of the Appalachian Mountains.
The success of the Erie Canal inspired a lot of copycats. Investors decided to build an Ohio & Erie Canal from Portsmouth in southern Ohio to Cleveland in the north, connecting the farms of the Ohio River Valley with the shipping and larger markets of the Great Lakes.
The building of the canal was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for little towns like Peninsula. Being part of the canal system would put a settlement on the map. So prominent Peninsula landowners like Hermon Bronson gave the canal company free land as long as they routed the Ohio & Erie through their town.
Bronson’s gambit worked. Thousands of immigrants came to northeast Ohio to dig the canal by hand; it took them seven years to complete it. Many of these immigrants stayed when the canal was finished. After all, it made sense to do so: the canal route was sure to be a center of economic activity. It transformed transportation in Ohio. A trip from Cincinnati to Cleveland now took about three days, whereas before it had taken several weeks.
The value of the free land that Bronson had given to the canal company was paid back in spades as the Ohio & Erie created new business opportunities. Bronson built a new mill between the Cuyahoga River, which provided water power, and the canal, which allowed him to ship his flour to the country’s major population centers.
The little town of Peninsula boomed as it absorbed new residents and a steady flow of travelers moving up and down the canal. Within a couple of decades, it featured 14 taverns and five hotels that hosted all of the people moving through town. Peninsula’s population exploded as boat builders, warehouses, and quarries popped up around the region to take advantage of the canal.
Peninsula’s salad days didn’t last. Now, it’s no longer a prosperous boomtown, though it’s still pretty nice: a cute little village (think antique stores and bike rental places) inside Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
Peninsula’s fate rose and fell with the canal’s. After a few decades of real prosperity (which helped to grow Ohio’s population and wealth immensely), canals lost out to railroads, which proved a cheaper and less geographically constricted way to move people and things around the country. Economics, occasional floods, and mismanagement made the canal — and the towns along it — less relevant as the nineteenth century went on. The canal eventually closed after a big flood in 1913.
Now, the canal looks like this:
The canal itself is simply a ruin, in some places a ditch full of water and in others just a shallow depression full of cattails. Its locks are still mostly there, although they haven’t been regularly operated for a century.
The canal’s towpath, once patrolled by mules pulling canal boats full of grain, is now a recreation trail, frequented by runners, dog walkers, and cyclists (I took the photos above on a morning run not long ago). A few old buildings from the nineteenth-century boom years remain along the canal — now mostly converted into National Park Service outposts or businesses that cater to tourists.
The canal is an exceedingly pleasant place for a stroll or a run, surrounded by both natural wonders and the beauty that characterizes human structures as they yield to nature (I always find it interesting that people find our own constructions very attractive when they’re crumbling).
All of this beauty exists because a way of life came and went, because a type of economy that seemed like it was the future became an artifact of the past.
Two centuries ago, Americans believed that canals were the future. They couldn’t imagine another way of moving goods around the country. Robert Fulton, writing to George Washington, envisioned a whole country crisscrossed with canals that would reach every household and serve as the backbone of a national transportation network:
Proceeding in this manner I find that In about 60 or 70 years Pensilvania (sic) would have 9360 miles of Canal equal to Bringing Water Carriage within the easy Reach of every house, nor would any house be more than 10 or 14 miles from a Canal. By this time the whole Carriage of the country would Come on Water even to Passengers -and following the present Rate of Carriage on the Lancaster Road, it appears that the tolls would amount to 4,000,000 per year…. It would fill the whole Country, and in Less than a Century bring Water Carriage within the easy Cartage of every Acre of the American States, — conveying the Surplus Labours of one hundred Millions of Men.
Needless to say, this isn’t how it turned out.
I couldn’t help but think of our own society as I ran past the ruins of the canal and then read up on its history. We tend to think — as many societies do — that the way we do things is the way we’ll always do them, that our infrastructure is our destiny. But the story of the Ohio & Erie Canal (and the railroads that succeeded it) shows otherwise. Infrastructure comes and goes; what once seemed like the only way to do things becomes a relic of the forgotten past.
To be more direct: just as America’s canal system rose and fell, so will our current system of fossil-fuel-centric transportation. We often hear people complain that switching away from fossil fuels — and some of the infrastructure that has contributed to climate change, like sprawling suburbs and car-centric cities — is too hard, or even impossible.
We’ll never build out a network of electric-car charging stations, they say, or How could we possibly replace all of these highways with mass transit? But the infrastructure that dominates our world today once seemed impossible, until it didn’t.
I’d imagine that old Hermon Bronson could not have imagined the soaring interstate highway bridges that carry traffic over the ruins of the canal he helped build. He couldn’t have understood that his canal — which seemed like a symbol of a new industrialized future — would lose its usefulness after a few decades, becoming first a polluted sewer and then a charming ruin.
He couldn’t have been able to know that, by tying itself to a soon-to-be-obeolete technology, Peninsula was tying its hands. It would be the railroad towns that won out — until they were bypassed by the cities favored by the interstate highway system.
Perhaps someday, my great-grandchildren will visit the Cuyahoga Valley and walk along the ruins of the canal. Maybe, by then, they’ll be able to gawk at more ruins — perhaps they’ll look at the crumbling remnants of the highway bridges that pass overhead and wonder how the car was able to dominate so much of our national life. Or maybe, after going to the canal museum to check out how the system of locks worked, they’ll visit a gas station museum and marvel at the fact that people used to drive around atop a tank of toxic, explosive fuel, the burning of which created a global environmental crisis.
As we begin to imagine a new way of organizing our economy, let’s remember that infrastructure isn’t destiny, nor is it forever. Today, our fossil-fuel present may feel like the only “practical” way to do things — just as the canals, and then the railroads, once felt like the only possibility.
So the next time a transition away from cars, fossil fuels, and the other technologies that dominate our world seems impossible, think about Hermon Bronson and Robert Fulton, who surely thought that canals were the infrastructure of the future. They were wrong, and so are the people who tell us that it’s impossible or impractical to build a greener world.
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