The discussion of the settlement of Ohio specifically and the Midwest generally got me thinking about the Erie Canal which has always fascinated me.
Backstory:
When the Europeans first settled North America they obviously lived right along the coast and moved inland later. Most of the inward migration was along rivers. Specifically, a Geographic Feature that is unknown to most people was EXTREMELY important to the early North American settlers.
That feature is called the "Fall Line" and is the most inland navigable point on the rivers flowing to the coast. On nearly all the large rivers along the Atlantic Coast of the US, there is a fairly large City right at the Fall Line.
Ocean-going sailing ships of the day could navigate inland along the rivers to the fall line. Thus, transport of goods (mostly agricultural products) from the colonies (later states) was relatively cheap up to that point. Then, within the area immediately surrounding that, goods could be transported by horse or ox cart to the Cities that sprung up along the Fall Line then loaded onto ships for transport into the worldwide economy. The reverse was true for manufactured goods. England has been short on land for centuries but was the first Nation to Industrialize so mostly this trade meant grain and other agricultural products from North America to England and manufactured goods from England to North America.
The problem is that the fall line along the Atlantic seaboard is fairly close to the coast so only a fairly small portion of North America could connect with the global economy in this way. Beyond that, shipping grain by horse or ox quickly becomes cost-prohibitive.
Side Note:
All over New England there are forests where farms used to be. Prior to modern Transport (starting with the Erie Canal) it wasn't cost effective to ship agricultural products from the Midwest to the East Coast so the food to feed the people living in Coastal cities had to be grown within a fairly short distance of those cities so that it could be shipped by horse/ox cart. This, however, was very difficult. New England's soils are notoriously rocky and not very flat unlike the soils of the Midwest that are more-or-less ideal for growing grains.
Farmers further away couldn't cost effectively ship grain so what they typically did was to distill their grain into spirits because liquor is less bulky and thus more cost-effective to ship. This was the underlying cause of the Whiskey Rebellion.
Back to the backstory:
The one major exception to this issue was the Mississippi river. There are no natural obstacles to navigation along the Mississippi for hundreds of miles inland. However, there were still problems including:
- The Mississippi flows generally N->S rather than W->E so as you move inland along it the climate changes. Ie, you can't just move your Louisiana farm to Iowa because the weather is different. It would be much easier to move E->W because the weather is generally similar at similar latitudes.
- Even though transport DOWN the Mississippi was feasible there was no good way to go UP the Mississippi. There isn't much point in selling grain if you can't get anything in return.
- There was a natural falls at Louisville on the Ohio River. This generally flooded over in the spring so it was navigable for a few weeks or a month every year but not year-around.
The result of all of this was that if you lived in Western New York, Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, etc prior to the opening of the Erie Canal, you were basically off the grid and not really part of the global economy. These people were mostly subsistence farmers and they had to do all of their own manufacturing. It simply wasn't cost effective to ship the agricultural products out or the manufactured goods (clothes, shoes, farm implements, etc) in.
Some trade did happen. River boats were built all along the Mississippi and it's tributaries, filled with grain, and floated down to NOLA where the grain was sold for transport on Oceangoing ships and the ships were sold for lumber either to build Oceangoing ships or NOLA's houses. This, however, was limited.
Then, in 1825 the Erie Canal opened. Agricultural products from anywhere within reasonable shipping distance of Lake Erie, Lake Huron, Lake Michigan, or Lake Superior or the various rivers that flow into them could be shipped across the great lakes to Buffalo then along the Erie Canal to Albany, then down the Hudson to NYC and into the Global Economy. In reverse, Manufactured Goods from all over the world could be shipped to NYC, up the Hudson to Albany, along the Erie Canal to Buffalo, and across the great lakes to all of the upper Midwest.
I find it amazing to think of this in more personal terms. Imagine that your father fought in the Revolution and that you were born in Connecticut a few years after the war in say 1790. Then suppose that your father relocated the family to land given to him by the State of Connecticut for his service in the Revolution so you, your siblings, and your parents moved to Medina, Ohio (or similar) in 1803 right when Ohio became a State.
You'd have been 13 when you helped your family clear fields for farming and build a log cabin or similar structure literally in the wilderness. Then for a little better than 20 years you'd have lived like that, as a subsistence farmer in the wilderness with little-or-no connection to the outside world. You may have had cousins your age who stayed behind in Connecticut and you'd never see them and probably not even be able to communicate by letter because there wasn't a Post Office in the wilderness where you lived. For those 20 years you'd have grown your own food and made basically EVERYTHING you needed from shoes to plows to shirts to saddles you'd have had to make it all yourself.
Then in 1825 the Erie Canal opened and suddenly ships just ~30 miles from your home in Cleveland would have been available to ship your Agricultural Products out and to bring back shoes, clothes, plows, saddles, etc.
In the same year that the Erie Canal opened, Ohio began construction of the Ohio and Erie Canal from Cleveland to Portsmouth. That shortened the distance you needed to haul things even more because Medina is only about 20 miles from the closest point along that canal which opened fully in 1832 when this hypothetical child born in 1790 was 42.
At that point you'd have also been able to send mail to your long lost cousins back in Connecticut. Within a few more years you'd have been able to take a train to visit them.
We think of the pace of change as being faster today but I'm not so sure. The change from being a wilderness settler at the age of 35 to being a connected part of the global economy at the age of 42 to taking a train (unheard of when you were born) to visit relatives hundreds of miles away when you were in your 50's is staggering.
