I have recently (today) visited the Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse,

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>>53617091
>The Erie Canal is famous in song and story. Proposed in 1808 and completed in 1825, the canal links the waters of Lake Erie in the west to the Hudson River in the east. An engineering marvel when it was built, some called it the Eighth Wonder of the World.

>In order to open the country west of the Appalachian Mountains to settlers and to offer a cheap and safe way to carry produce to a market, the construction of a canal was proposed as early as 1768. However, those early proposals would connect the Hudson River with Lake Ontario near Oswego. It was not until 1808 that the state legislature funded a survey for a canal that would connect to Lake Erie. Finally, on July 4, 1817, ground was broken for the construction of the canal. In those early days, it was often sarcastically referred to as "Clinton's Big Ditch". When finally completed on October 26, 1825, it was the engineering marvel of its day. It included 18 aqueducts to carry the canal over ravines and rivers, and 83 locks, with a rise of 568 feet from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. Cross-section of the original Erie Canal It was 4 feet deep and 40 feet wide, and floated boats carrying 30 tons of freight. A ten foot wide towpath was built along the bank of the canal for the horses and/or mules which pulled the boats and their driver, often a young boy (sometimes referred to by later writers as a "hoggee").

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>>53617123
>In a time when bulk goods were limited to pack animals (an eighth-ton [250 pounds (113 kg)] maximum), and there were no railways, water was the most cost-effective way to ship bulk goods.

>The canal, denigrated by its political opponents as "Clinton's Folly" or "Clinton's Big Ditch", was the first transportation system between the eastern seaboard (New York City) and the western interior (Great Lakes) of the United States that did not require portage.

>It was faster than carts pulled by draft animals, and cut transport costs by about 95%.[8] The canal fostered a population surge in western New York and opened regions farther west to settlement. 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 ran parallel to the eastern half of the Erie Canal, and extended to the Hudson River.

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>>53617164
>The Erie Canal greatly lowered the cost of shipping between the Midwest and the Northeast, bringing much lower food costs to Eastern cities and allowing the East to economically ship machinery and manufactured goods to the Midwest. The canal also made an immense contribution to the wealth and importance of New York City, Buffalo, and New York State. Its impact went much further, increasing trade throughout the nation by opening eastern and overseas markets to Midwestern farm products and by enabling migration to the West.

>The Erie Canal was an immediate success. Tolls collected on freight had already exceeded the state's construction debt in its first year of official operation. By 1828, import duties collected at the New York Customs House supported federal government operations and provided funds for all the expenses in Washington except the interest on the national debt. Additionally, New York state's initial loan for the original canal had been paid by 1837. Although it had been envisioned as primarily a commercial channel for freight boats, passengers also traveled on the canal's packet boats. In 1825 more than forty thousand passengers took advantage of the convenience and beauty of canal travel. The canal's steady flow of tourists, businessmen and settlers lent it to uses never imagined by its initial sponsors. Evangelical preachers made their circuits of the upstate region and the canal served as the last leg of the underground railroad ferrying runaway slaves to Buffalo near the Canada–US border. Aspiring merchants found that tourists proved to double as reliable customers. Vendors moved from boat to boat peddling items such as books, watches and fruit while less scrupulous "confidence men" sold remedies for foot corns or passed off counterfeit bills. Tourists were carried along the "northern tour", which ultimately led to the popular honeymoon destination Niagara Falls, just north of Buffalo.

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>>53617181
>Pulled by teams of horses, canal boats still moved slowly, but methodically, shrinking time and distance. Efficiently, the nonstop smooth method of transportation cut the travel time between Albany and Buffalo nearly in half, moving by day and by night. Venturing west, men and women boarded packets to visit relatives, or solely for a relaxing excursion. Emigrants took passage on freight boats, camping on deck, or on top of crates. Packet boats, serving passengers exclusively, reached speeds of up to five miles an hour, and ran at much more frequent intervals than the cramped, bumpy stages.

>Packet boats, measuring up to seventy-eight feet in length and fourteen and a half feet across, made ingenious use of space, in order to accommodate up to forty passengers at night and up to three times as many in the daytime. The best examples, furnished with carpeted floors, stuffed chairs, and mahogany tables stocked with current newspapers and books, served as sitting rooms during the days. At mealtimes, crews transformed the cabin into dining rooms. Drawing a curtain across the width of the room divided the cabin into ladies' and gentlemen's sleeping quarters in the evening hours. Pull-down tiered beds folded from the walls, and additional cots could be hung from hooks in the ceiling. Some captains hired musicians and held dances. The canal had brought civilization into the wilderness.

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>On both the old "Clinton's Ditch" and in the early years of the Enlarged Erie Canal, both passenger boats (called "packets" or "packet boats"), usually horse-drawn, and working boats (also called "line boats" or "freighters"), drawn by either horses or mules, were common. Originally intended as a more comfortable alternative to the bone-jarring stagecoach, the packet boat fell out of favor as railroad travel improved, and basically disappeared by the latter half of the 1800s. On the current Erie (Barge) Canal, there being no towpath, line boats were replaced by tugboats ("tugs" or towing boats) with their attached barges, as well as motorized freighters. Today, the most common boats are recreational boats, although commercial traffic still exists, and has actually increased in recent years.

>Packet boats came in different sizes, but the most common size was 60-80 feet long by just over 14 feet wide. All featured the same basic accommodations: a multipurpose room which served as lounge, dining room, and sleeping room (with a curtain to separate the ladies and men), and a kitchen. The average charge for traveling on packet boats was 4 cents per mile, and included meals and sleeping accomodations. For those who couldn't afford a packet boat, line boats could take passengers at a charge of 2 cents per mile, and sometimes one cent, but accomodations were proportionally less comfortable and travel somewhat slower.

Surely an interesting time in history, anon, and I can see how the focal point of the canal would be great. However, you might want to jazz things up - make it alt history, add magic, etc.

>>53617091
That's some cool shit. I think if you add a political tone to do with the Brits and Canada, that'd go a long way. Surely other states in the Union were unhappy with the competition as well?

War of 1812 and whatnot, too.

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>>53618050
>A picturesque celebration of "the wedding of the waters" followed the completion of the work. On the morning of October 26, 1825, the first flotilla of canal-boats bound for the seaboard left Buffalo, starting at the signal of a cannon fired at the Erie in-take. This shot straightway was echoed guns having been stationed at regular intervals down the whole length of the new waterway, and thence onward down the Hudson to New York; where, precisely one hour and twenty-five minutes after the first gun had been fired beside the lake, the last gun was fired beside the sea. During another hour and twenty-five minutes the answer from the ocean to the inland waters went thundering onward into the northwest.

>And then, at this end of the line, the enthusiasm aroused in so thrilling a fashion had a whole fortnight in which to cool while the boats were crawling eastward. Yet crawling is a dull word to apply to what really was a triumphal progress. It would be more in harmony with the oratorical spirit of the occasion to say that the boats came eastward on the crest of a wave of popular rejoicing.

>At five o'clock on the morning of November 4th this fresh-water cyclone completed the last stage of its eventful progress "a grand procession, consisting of nearly all the vessels in [the] port [of New York] gaily decked with colors of all nations," went down to the lower bay where Governor Clinton, from the deck of the United States schooner Dolphin, poured a libation of the fresh water brought from Lake Erie into the salt water of the Atlantic Ocean and so typified the joining together of the inland and the outland seas.

I am envisioning this as a religious procession and celebration; some great union of water spirits, appeasing them, maybe something to do with Native American mythology?

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>A bevy of nobles lounge on the deck of a packet ship, taking in the gorgeous sights, as less advantaged people are packed as tightly as steerage below.

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Speaking of New York, you could make an entire campaign around Gang Warfare without ever having to slay a single dragon.

Could even combine the two into gangs (many previously pirates) fighting for control of the underground black market shipping done on the canals.

>>53619044
Would work pretty fantastically in the time period, I think. I wonder if there were actual gangs and shit, I mean, there were huge businesses, they must have had enforcers and whatnot.

Politics of the time were evidently run by big business, so corruption and everything that comes with it is natural. Wasn't unionization a big thing around then, too? At least, the lack of unions? The common man was likely fairly downtrodden - would be a good environment for heroic characters from a low class background