The largest and most important was New York’s Erie Canal, approved by the state legislature in 1817 and completed eight years later. Before long there were dozens of them, then hundreds, steaming along the Mississippi River and other major rivers.Ĭanals gave the maritime transportation system still greater reach. Steamboats made two-way river traffic a viable proposition-and they could haul a large amount of freight. In 1807, his paddle-wheeled vessel, the Clermont, achieved the astonishing speed of eight kilometers per hour (five miles per hour) on its first voyage up the Hudson River from New York City, New York, to Albany, New York. While American engineer Robert Fulton did not invent the steamboat, he was the first to make an unqualified success with the technology. Meanwhile, river transport was aided immensely by the application of steam power. By 1818, it had crossed the Appalachian Mountains and reached Wheeling, West Virginia, permitting overland travel between the Potomac and Ohio rivers. The Army Corps of Engineers began building the Cumberland Road, also called the National Road, in 1811. The federal government paid for one major highway during this era, heading westward from Cumberland, Maryland, at the inland headwaters of the Potomac River. The toll roads usually failed to turn a profit for their investors, but they provided a major boost to regional commerce. By the early 1820s, thousands of kilometers of graded paths crisscrossed the region. Soon, other groups of merchants were incorporating to pave more turnpikes, especially in the northeast. It was the country’s first toll road, financed and built privately by a corporation, which was chartered by the state. In 1794, a new road opened between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. As a rule, the movement of agricultural produce and other goods was costly and took a great deal of time. Post roads between the colonies had been built by the mid-1700s, but they were poorly built and not suitable for commercial transport. Farmers living near the Hudson River or other river systems could float their crops downstream to the port cities. Eighteenth-century America depended chiefly on water transportation to link small-scale farming and the artisan industry with transatlantic trade. These expanded transport links laid the foundation of a bustling nationwide economy of commercial agriculture and industry.ĭuring the colonial and revolutionary periods, most of the nonindigenous population of North America lived near the Atlantic coast. These investments in infrastructure, often described as “internal improvements” in the political debate of the time, rapidly transformed the North American continent into a patchwork of overland roads, canals, and railways.
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In the first half of the 19th century, Americans built a robust transportation network through new technologies and heroic engineering ventures. A brief look at the early United States illustrates this principle dramatically.
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The ability to transport goods and human beings safely and efficiently across long distances is fundamental to economic life in modern societies.