Editor’s note: Mark Bushnell is a Vermont journalist and historian. He is the author of “Hidden History of Vermont” and “It Happened in Vermont.”
[T]echnology has a way of exciting people when it annihilates time and distance. The automobile, the airplane, the internet — they all get you places, physically or virtually, much faster than you could get there on your own.
During the early 1800s, the technology that had people fired up was the canal. At first blush, transportation canals might not sound particularly impressive; they have been around for more than 2,000 years and boats don’t exactly move at breakneck speeds in canals. But to someone whose world had been limited by the speed of his horse on crude roads or the speed of wind across water, canals were pretty exciting. So exciting, in fact, that Vermonters briefly lost their sense and contracted “canal fever,” a frenzy to build canals, even in highly impractical places, like across the Green Mountains.
For people in the hinterlands, the economy was shifting from a subsistence mode, where people made everything they needed, to one where they produced raw materials that they could trade for finished goods. Canals, which could connect remote areas with cities, were central to this economic revolution. Vermonters were hardly alone in catching canal fever. The contagion was gripping much of the country. It was touched off in 1825 by the completion of the young country’s most ambitious infrastructure project, the 363-mile long Erie Canal.
By that point, Vermont had already been exposed to the infectious economic benefits of a canal. Two years earlier, the 60-mile Champlain Canal had opened, connecting the southern end of Lake Champlain to the Hudson River, and therefore to the large New York City market. The Champlain Canal wasn’t even the first canal in the state. Vermont recorded the charter of a Bellows Falls canal company in 1791. Work was completed in 1802. And a canal on the Connecticut River, in the present-day town of Wilder, started in 1810. These canals bypassed some particularly nasty and unnavigable river stretches.
The Bellows Falls and Champlain Canal projects served as a pair of parentheses bracketing the state – they helped ease the transportation of goods down the margins of Vermont – but what about transporting goods across the state? The cross-state route was slow and arduous at best. To traverse Vermont, one had to travel along primitive roads and by river, with many grueling portages around rapids and falls along the way.
Politicians and businessmen thought they saw a better way. They dreamed of canals connecting both Lake Champlain and Lake Memphremagog with the Connecticut River. The canals were envisioned as part of a water transportation network across a region stretching from Boston to Montreal. Planners didn’t seem overly concerned that the Green Mountains stood in the way.
The job of finding a route for the proposed Lake Memphremagog-Connecticut River canal fell to DeWitt Clinton Jr. of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Clinton, whose father had helped push through the Erie Canal, directed a surveying team that plotted three possible paths. The first route they surveyed left Memphremagog by way of the Black River Valley, then passed through Coventry, before entering Lake Eligo and moving on to the Lamoille River in Hardwick. From there, it headed to Joe’s Pond, into the Passumpsic and Stevens rivers and then into the Connecticut River. But it was far from a level course. At its highest point, the route rose 1,011 feet above Lake Memphremagog and 1,248 above the Connecticut. As part of the route, Clinton suggested boring a two-mile tunnel through a hillside in Walden to avoid the added cost of raising the canal another 128 feet over the hill. Clinton wrote that the tunnel would need to be wide enough “to admit one boat at a time, and with a towing path, and shafts to admit a free circulation of air.” The cost of the tunnel alone was an estimated $130,000, a sizable sum in those days. The entire 61-mile route would have required the construction of 350 locks, seven times more than were needed for the much-longer Erie Canal.
The price tag for this route was an estimated $859,000.
Even the easiest route was no simple matter. It would have required running the canal from Lake Memphremagog, past the outskirts of Derby Line (whose residents had evidently lobbied to have the canal run nearby), then down the Clyde and Nulhegan rivers, before reaching the Connecticut. This 41-mile water route was hardly flat either. Its highpoint was nearly 500 feet above Lake Memphremagog. The cost estimate was a comparatively cheap $306,000, but that figure didn’t include the expensive alterations to the Connecticut River that would have been needed to make certain river sections passable.
Two companies sprang up to argue over how best to tame the Connecticut. Folks with the Connecticut River Company, the so-called “riverites,” argued that “improvement” work should be done within the river. Those with the Connecticut River Canal Company, the “canalites,” advocated for the construction of canals to bypass the river’s wildest spots.
The most ambitious idea involving the Connecticut was probably the proposal to connect the river with Vermont’s principal thoroughfare, Lake Champlain. Shallow-draft boats could make it from the lake up much of the Winooski River. From there, engineers hoped to find a route that would link into the White, Waits or Wells rivers, before reaching the Connecticut. Such a canal would be a vital link in the planned canal system between Boston and Montreal. Even if that larger regional network never materialized, supporters argued, a Champlain-Connecticut canal would still have the benefit of easing trade between the two sides of the Green Mountains.
A team of Army engineers led by Capt. James Graham arrived in Vermont in 1829 to conduct the survey. Graham came away convinced of the canal’s importance, calling it “a source of considerable profit to this portion of (the) country.” And, despite the challenges that building a canal would present, he wrote that “it is quite practicable to effect a communication by means of a canal between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut (R)iver.” Graham favored a Wells River valley route.
James Whitelaw, the state’s surveyor general, begged to differ. Whitelaw, who had seen huge sections of the state during his career, believed that only the connection with the White River was feasible.
We’ll never know who was right. Despite the engineers’ confidence that they could build them, the proposed Champlain-Connecticut and Mephremagog-Connecticut canals faced insurmountable obstacles, not the least of which was the ruggedness of the Green Mountains. Rough terrain made the proposed routes expensive and, ultimately, not fundable.
Soon after that, by the 1830s, canal fever abated. People lost their enthusiasm for canals as they saw a new technology on the horizon, railroads, which promised to do a better job at annihilating time and distance.
