The Erie Canal's Invisible Dead

The Erie Canal Heritage Corridor runs three hundred sixty-three miles from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, lined with interpretive signs, historic locks, and markers explaining the engineering achievement that remade the commercial geography of a continent. What the corridor does not contain is a monument to the men who built it.

Between eighteen seventeen and eighteen twenty-five, approximately fifty thousand workers dug the canal by hand. Many were local farmers and laborers at first, and Irish immigrants recruited in growing numbers as the digging pushed into the harder, swampier sections, drawn by advertisements promising steady wages in a country that was supposed to offer opportunity. They arrived to find swamps, limestone shelves, and canal sections filled with the standing water that bred Anopheles mosquitoes. Malaria was endemic to the construction zones.

The wage was roughly fifty cents a day, plus a daily whiskey ration, which the canal company believed would ward off the fever. It did not ward off the fever. The Canal Museum in Syracuse holds wage records and some contemporaneous accounts from the construction era. They describe a workforce for which no systematic death records were kept. The total number of workers who died building the Erie Canal is not established in the public record. The men who died of malaria in the swamp sections between Rome and Syracuse, who died in blasting accidents in the limestone cuts near Lockport, who died of exposure in the winter construction camps, are counted in no official ledger. They have no names on any wall.

What they built carried the freight that made New York City the commercial capital of America. The canal is still there. The men who dug it are remembered by no one in particular, and by the water they moved.