OPINION: Erie Canal Creation Contrasts With the Glacial Pace of Public Works in California
This week one of the nation’s earliest and most important public works projects, the 363-mile Erie Canal linking the Hudson River with Lake Erie, marked its 200th anniversary.
There was only negligible media and political notice. That’s regrettable, because the canal opening in 1825 utterly transformed the nation’s economy and ignited its expansion from a few sparsely populated former colonies on the Atlantic Coast some 3,000 miles westward to the Pacific Ocean.
