The canal opened on October 26, 1825, after eight years of digging. It ran 363 miles from Buffalo on Lake Erie to Albany on the Hudson, where goods could float on to New York City and the sea. Governor DeWitt Clinton led the effort and rode the first boat east. The idea had been doubted.
Critics called it "Clinton's Folly" and said no one would use a ditch across the state. The builders proved them wrong with simple tools, oxen, and gunpowder, and they hauled the channel over hills by a stair of eighty-three locks. The work was slow and cheap. A farmer's load could cross the state in days, not months, and the canal paid its cost back within years.
The effect was huge. Freight that once cost a hundred dollars a ton by road moved for a few dollars on the canal, and farm goods from the Midwest reached the port of New York in days, while towns rose along the bank and New York overtook New Orleans and Boston as the nation's trade gate. The West opened up. The waterway moved millions of tons a year within a decade of opening, and it pulled people west to farm the land it had opened.
The canal paid for itself many times over and was enlarged again and again. It tied the interior to the coast and made the phrase "the Empire State" real. Barges still pass some of the old line today.