Construction of the Erie Canal began with a groundbreaking on July 4, 1817. Completed in 1825, the original 363-mile Erie Canal was the first navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the upper Great Lakes, facilitating expansion westward including the Iowa Territory. It was a civil engineering marvel at 40 feet wide and four feet deep before a succession of expansions, including when more than half of the original canal was abandoned for barge traffic from 1905 to 1918. Today it is 351 miles long, 120 feet wide and 12 feet deep with 35 locks. An illustration, “Lockport, Erie Canal, 1825,” is from the book by Cadwallader Colden, “Memoir, prepared at the request of a committee of the Common council of the city of New York, and presented to the mayor of the city, at the celebration of the completion of the New York canals.” Photo courtesy of The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library
Jan/Feb 2026 (Volume 18, Issue 1)
By Ambassador Kenneth M. Quinn
As part of the yearlong recounting of significant events from our country’s history as part of America’s 250th anniversary, it is worth noting that an event of enormous relevance to Iowa was celebrated in New York on Sept. 25, 2025, while going unnoticed in the Hawkeye State.
On that date, the 200th anniversary of the opening of the Erie Canal was commemorated with the reenactment of the journey of the Seneca Chief, the “packet boat” on which the then governor of New York traveled from Buffalo to New York City in 1825, as he officially opened that waterway.
Why should this be of particular interest to Iowans? It’s a bit of a convoluted story that begins with the War of 1812 and ends with an innovation that revolutionized our state’s agriculture, leading to Iowa becoming a state in 1846, just eight years after officially being opened for settlement.
While that conflict with the British was listed in the victory column for the young American Republic when the Treaty of Ghent was signed in 1814 ending the hostilities, in fact, the War of 1812 had been so damaging economically to the United States that by 1817 the country was in a deep recession. In the hope of providing a stimulus to promote economic growth, the governor of New York went to Washington, D.C., with a proposal to build a set of canals which would not only generate jobs but also open a passage from the Atlantic Ocean port of New York City to the territories west of the Appalachians, including those new lands west of the Mississippi River that had been obtained in the 1803 Louisiana Purchase.
Specifically, the governor sought federal funding to build a canal to Lake Erie as well as for the construction of a connector canal to the north which could link it to Lake Champlain, which bordered Vermont. While retired President George Washington was supportive of the proposal, Thomas Jefferson, perhaps recalling that the New York governor had run for president in 1812 against his fellow Virginian James Madison, derided the proposal, calling it “little short of madness.”
Jefferson’s opposition killed the bill in Congress and left the governor with no choice but to seek to build both canals with his state’s own resources at a cost of $7 million in bonds to fund it. Eight years later, construction of the 363-mile Erie Canal was completed in 1825, immediately facilitating the travel of new European immigrants and goods from the port of New York to the Midwest.
The historic impact for Iowa, however, came a decade later when an even more disastrous economic depression—the Panic of 1837—swept across the United States, forcing the closure of large and small businesses, including a blacksmith shop in Middlebury, Vt. In a desperate move to seek a new livelihood, that young shop owner boarded a barge which took him down the Champlain Canal and then onto the Erie Canal heading west to Buffalo, N.Y. From there, he made his way across the Great Lakes, and then down the Illinois River, eventually ending up in Grand Detour, Ill., where he established a new blacksmith shop. That blacksmith was named John Deere.
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