The Wedding of the Waters, October 1825

Picture the morning of October twenty-sixth, eighteen twenty-five, at the western end of the longest man-made waterway in the world. Governor DeWitt Clinton and a party of dignitaries boarded a canal boat called the Seneca Chief at Commercial Slip, here in Buffalo, preparing to embark on a journey that would take them four hundred and sixty-three miles east to New York City.

The Erie Canal had taken eight years and about seven million dollars and thousands of workers to dig across New York State. Engineers called it Clinton's Ditch, not always as a compliment. Many people had said it could not be done: a channel three hundred sixty-three miles long, forty feet wide, four feet deep, crossing ridges, wetlands, and the Mohawk Valley with no precedent and almost no trained engineers. They did it anyway.

Buffalo had fought hard to become the canal's western terminus. The rival village of Black Rock, just up the Niagara River, had its own claim. Buffalo won the competition by dredging and widening its creek enough to create a workable harbor. When the canal was finished, Black Rock lost its independent existence and was eventually absorbed into the city that the canal had made.

On the morning of departure, the signal went out: cannon fire, town to town, all the way to New York, a ninety-minute cannonade stretching the length of the state. When the Seneca Chief arrived in New York Harbor ten days later, Governor Clinton performed the ceremony his boosters had planned. He poured a cask of Lake Erie water into the Hudson River. They called it the Wedding of the Waters, the symbolic marriage of the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean.

In eighteen twenty, Buffalo had about two thousand residents. By eighteen forty, it had eighteen thousand. The canal made that happen. Every grain elevator on the waterfront, every immigrant neighborhood, every dollar of industrial wealth that followed grew from this morning at Commercial Slip.