In Rome, New York, construction on the Erie Canal begins.
The Erie Canal was built to create a navigable water route, through northern USA, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. It originally stretched 584 kilometres (363 mi) from the Hudson River near Albany to Lake Erie in Buffalo. Completed in 1825, it was the second-longest canal in the world (after the Grand Canal in China) and greatly enhanced the development and economy of many major cities of New York, including New York City, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo, as well as the United States. This was due in part to the new ease of transporting salt and other necessity goods, and industries that developed around those.The canal was first proposed in the 1780s, then re-proposed in 1807, and survey was authorized, funded and executed in 1808. Its construction began in 1817 after proponents of the project gradually wore down its opponents; and it opened on October 26, 1825. The canal has 34 locks with an overall elevation difference of about 565 feet (172 m), starting upstream with Black Rock Lock and ending downstream with the Troy Federal Lock. Both locks are owned by the United States Federal Government.Prior to the opening of the canal, local transportation of bulk goods was limited to the use of pack animals which had a 250-pound (113 kg) maximum cargo capacity. In the absence of railways, water transport was the most cost-effective way to ship bulk goods.
Political opponents of the canal and of then-New York Governor DeWitt Clinton denigrated it as "Clinton's Folly" or "Clinton's Big Ditch". It was the first transportation system between the East Coast of the United States and the western interior that did not require portage. It was faster than carts pulled by draft animals and cut transport costs by about 95 percent. The canal gave New York City's port a strong advantage over all other U.S. port cities and ushered in the state's 19th century political and cultural ascendancy. The canal fostered a population surge in western New York and opened regions to settlement farther west. It was enlarged between 1834 and 1862. The canal's peak year was 1855, when 33,000 commercial shipments took place. In 1918, the western part of the canal was enlarged to become part of the New York State Barge Canal, which also extended to the Hudson River running parallel to the eastern half of the Erie Canal.
In 2000, Congress designated the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor to recognize the national significance of the canal system as the most successful and influential human-built waterway and one of the most important works of civil engineering and construction in North America. The canal has been mainly used by recreational watercraft since the retirement of the commercial ship Day Peckinpaugh in 1994, although the canal saw a recovery in commercial traffic in 2008.
Rome is a city in Oneida County, New York, United States, located in the central part of the state. The population was 33,725 at the 2010 census. Rome is one of two principal cities in the Utica–Rome Metropolitan Statistical Area, which lies in the "Leatherstocking Country" made famous by James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, set in frontier days before the American Revolutionary War. Rome is in New York's 22nd congressional district.
The city developed at an ancient portage site of Native Americans, including the historic Iroquois nations. This portage continued to be strategically important to Europeans, who also used the main 18th and 19th-century waterways, based on the Mohawk and Hudson rivers, that connected New York City and the Atlantic seaboard to the Great Lakes. The original European settlements developed around fortifications erected in the 1750s to defend the waterway, in particular the British Fort Stanwix (1763) built in New York.
Following the American Revolution, the settlement began to grow with the construction of the Rome Canal in 1796, to connect Wood Creek (leading from Lake Ontario) and the headwaters of the Mohawk River. In the same year the state created the Town of Rome as a section of Oneida County. For a time, the small community next to the canal was informally known as Lynchville, after the original owner of the property.The New York State Legislature converted the Town of Rome into a city on February 23, 1870. The residents have called Rome the City of American History.