Creative Books

New England farmers swarmed into the region, hard on the
heels of the retreating Indians. Scarcely more than a decade before
1820 western New York presented typically frontier conditions. The
settlers felled and burned the forest, built little towns, and
erected mills, and now, with a surplus of agricultural products,
they were suffering from the lack of a market and were demanding
transportation facilities. Some of their lumber and flour found its
way by the lakes and the St. Lawrence to Montreal, a portion went by
rafts down the Allegheny to the waters of the Ohio, and some
descended the upper tributaries of the Susquehanna and found an
outlet in Baltimore or Philadelphia; but these routes were
unreliable and expensive, and by one of them trade was diverted from
the United States to Canada. There was a growing demand for canals
that should give economic unity to New York and turn the tide of her
interior commerce along the Mohawk and Lake Champlain into the
waters of the Hudson and so to the harbor of New York City.


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