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.
