The Panama Canal may have been more famous, with a whole international exhibition once devoted to it, but only the Erie Canal, similarly dubbed “the eight wonder of the world,” inspired a song. Designed to connect the frontier settlements west of the Appalachian mountains with the commercial and population centers in the East, it would go over the Hudson and Mohawk valleys, the only semi-flat path through the mountains north of Alabama. But building an artificial waterway stretching for 363 miles (and 500 feet in altitude) would be no easy feat.

On this day, July 4, in 1817 ground was broken on the building of the Erie Canal, connecting New York City to the Lake Erie and the other Great Lakes. it was first commissioned by Governor Dewitt Clinton, and detractors of the project and the governor took to calling it “Clinton’s big ditch”.

The completed canal was no ditch, but a truly spectacular feat of engineering. Some 18 aqueducts carried the canal over ravines and rivers. A total of 83 locks raised the water level 568 feet from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. The canal’s 4-foot dept and 40-foot width accommodated barges up to 30 tons of freight. Until the development of the railroad it would be the center of commerce between the states around it.