How did you get involved with American History and specifically the Erie Canal?
My work in the Erie Canal began while I was graduate student at Syracuse University when I was researching my dissertation on early American literature and the way writers depicted landscape. The director of the Erie Canal Museum in downtown Syracuse invited me to do research for an exhibit on literature and the Erie Canal. I took the project on because it dovetailed nicely with the work I was already doing, and it turned out to be one of the most fun projects I'd ever taken on. Out of that project came my book, The Erie Canal Reader, which is an anthology of the depictions of canal life by literary writers. Also, I had long had an interest in canals since I grew up near the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal in Maryland. I used to love hiking along the towpath and climbing on the abandoned locks.
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What made the Erie Canal so revolutionary?
I think two things made it revolutionary: 1) It opened up traffic to the west and mid-west, making it easy for people and goods to travel cheaply (prior to the opening of the canal people and goods had to travel by foot or wagon on very rough roads); 2) It demonstrated that it was feasible for government to pay for infrastructure projects (back then they called them "internal improvements") like roads and canals and get its money back. Other states refused to invest in infrastructure, insisting that things like roads or railroads should be financed only with private investments. Most of those failed. This is one of the reasons why the North had a much better developed system of canals and railroads and the South did not.
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What was the life of an Erie Canal digger and hoggee like?
I imagine it must have been very hard. A young hoggee walked alongside the horses hauling the canal boats, plus had to act as deckhands and obey the boat captain's orders. They didn't get paid much. Walter Edmunds describes the hoggee's life pretty well in his novel Rome Haul. A digger's life would have been even more brutal. Most diggers were Irish immigrants. They took up digging because it was one of the only jobs they could get. They dug in swamps and forests and were subject to diseases like cholera and malaria. Edmunds describes the life of diggers in his novel Erie Water.
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How did the Erie Canal affect immigrants?
Here your question asks about demographics and population moves that are really outside my area of expertise. It certainly created opportunities by easing transport to the west and also making it easier for farms and factories in upstate New York to expand and profit. Cities like Rochester, Syracuse, and Buffalo would not have thrived without it. You might look at The Artificial River by Carol Sheriff for answers to this question.
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What were some of the cultural effects of the Erie Canal?
The cultural effects run side-by-side with the economic effects--the ease of transport facilitated spread of lots of different cultures from the east to the west (different immigrant communities). One thing easy transport helped create was tourism. Folks in large eastern cities like New York City could travel on the canal to places like Niagara Falls or Trenton Falls. The canal boatmen had a reputation for brawling and bawdy behavior, which effected life on the difference canal cities--though this diminished and eventually disappeared when railroads made the canal obsolete. There is of course the famous "Fifteen Years on the Erie Canal" song.
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What do you believe to be the most important lasting effect of the Erie Canal?
This is a hard question to answer. The canal enabled the settlement of upstate New York in the 1820s, earlier than would have taken place without it. It also spurred a great interest in canal building throughout the country in the first half of the 19th century. Without a doubt, it helped the state and country thrive. At the same time, railroads were only about 25 years behind the canal, so this kind of growth probably would have happened anyway (perhaps in slightly different locations). By the time of the Civil War the canal was almost obsolete. It did plant the seeds for a lot of towns that now line the canal route. It made New York City the wealth center of the country since goods coming from the west eventually passed down the Hudson to NYC. This is one of the reasons New York is the country's financial capital and not Philadelphia or Boston.
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Is there other information you would like to add about the Erie Canal?
Not sure if there's anything else I can add. Look up the books I mentioned. My book, The Erie Canal Reader does have some very interesting travelers' descriptions that would give you a much better sense than I can on canal life. Good luck with your project.