The National Road and the Wabash and Erie Canal

In the eighteen twenties and thirties, Indiana was infrastructure-obsessed. The new state had one urgent problem: getting goods to market. The fertile land was filling with settlers, corn was growing in every cleared field, but the rivers ran the wrong direction, and roads in the wet seasons became impassable.

The solution, Indiana's politicians believed, lay in two great engineered corridors, one of stone and one of water. The National Road entered Indiana from the east around eighteen twenty-seven, following roughly the line of what is now U.S.

Route Forty. It was the first federally funded highway in American history, authorized by Congress in eighteen oh-six and built westward from Cumberland, Maryland. In Indiana it passed through Richmond, Centerville, Cambridge City, Knightstown, and Indianapolis, threading through the middle of the state toward the Illinois line.

For a generation, it was the main artery of American migration and commerce. But Indiana's great dream was the Wabash and Erie Canal. Begun in eighteen thirty-two, it would eventually stretch about four hundred sixty-eight miles from Toledo, Ohio to Evansville on the Ohio River, the longest canal ever built in North America.

At its peak in the eighteen forties, flatboats loaded with grain and pork moved slowly through locks and cuts across the northern half of the state. Towns along the canal, including Huntington, Peru, Logansport, Delphi, and Lafayette, boomed. Then the railroads arrived.

Within a decade of the canal's completion, rail lines offered faster, cheaper transport. By the eighteen sixties, the canal was mostly abandoned. You can still find the earthwork berms and dry channels in the fields and woodlots of northern Indiana, a ghost infrastructure that briefly connected the middle of a continent to the world.