Canal Fever.

Even before its completion in 1825 the Erie Canal was making money for its owner, the state of New York. This made state governments all over the nation take notice. Excitement over the Erie prompted several Eastern states to start canal projects in the 1820s, but it was in the new states between the Appalachians and the Mississippi that "canal fever" took particularly virulent form. Between 1810 and 1840 canal mileage in the United States increased from 100 to over 3,300 miles, a building boom paralleled only by the rapidity of railroad construction in the following decades and the building of the interstate highway system in the 1950s and 1960s.

Need.

Before the canals some Western farmers and storekeepers made annual trips to the Eastern cities to sell their produce and cattle or to stock up on dry goods for the coming year. Traveling in caravans over the...