Erie Canal

5 hours

They may have overlapped, neither was a one-week or similar quickie task. the National Road was, as the name implies Federally funded. The Erie Canal was largely a New York venture of governor De Witt Clinton, also an early patron of what became the New York Central Railroad- which followed a similar route- as the folk song has it- and She ( the mule) knows every inch of the way, from Albany to Buffalo- Low Bridge, everybody down! and so on...NOT Journal Square to 33rd!. that"s the Path.

Some of the canals have been shut down but what is left, you can take a boat the entire way.

When the barge on the Erie Canal reaches Lake Erie, the goods or people need to be transferred to a boat to go to the next destination.

The Erie Canal connects New York City and Buffalo, New York, a distance of 363 miles. It opened in 1825 to connect the Atlantic Ocean, traveling up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany and taking the canal to Lake Erie and the Great Lakes System.

Two effects that it had on the nation were that it opened the upper Ohio Valley and the Great Lakes region to settlement and trade, and it fueled nationalism by unifying these two sections of the country.

Many of the immigrants that traveled the Erie Canal ended up in cities like Cleveland and Chicago. Some of the workers of the Erie Canal also worked on canals in Ohio and the Illinois Michigan canal near Chicago.