Excerpt from "The Canal Boat"

By Nathaniel Hawthorne

Originally published in the New England Magazine, 1835

Amended version available online from the University of Rochester, Department of History, Erie Canal Library

http://www.history.rochester.edu/canal/ bib/hawthorne/canalboat.htm

When the Industrial Revolution began in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was extremely difficult and expensive to transport goods across the country. In the early 1800s the Allegheny Mountains (a range in the Appalachian system extending through Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia) formed the western frontier of the nation. Beyond the Alleghenies lay the Old Northwest (the modern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin), a land rich in natural resources such as timber, minerals, and fertile soil. However, there were few roads, and those that did exist were muddy and filled with boulders and...