Completed in 1825, the canal was the first navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, vastly reducing the costs of transporting people and goods across the Appalachians.

It was called the Barge Canal at the time, but that name fell into disuse with the disappearance of commercial traffic and the increase of recreational travel in the later 20th century.

Close to the seacoast, rivers provided easy inland transport up to the fall line, since floating vessels encounter much less friction than land vehicles.

However, the Appalachian Mountains were a great obstacle to further transportation or settlement, stretching 1,500 miles (2,400 km) from Maine to Alabama, with just five places where mule trains or wagon roads could be routed.

While in Canandaigua debtors' prison, Hawley began pressing for the construction of a canal along the 90-mile-long (140 km) Mohawk River valley with support from Joseph Ellicott (agent for the Holland Land Company in Batavia).

Shipping goods west from Albany was a costly and tedious affair; there was no railroad yet, and to cover the distance from Buffalo to New York City by stagecoach took two weeks.

Yet these men "carried the Erie Canal up the Niagara escarpment at Lockport, maneuvered it onto a towering embankment to cross over Irondequoit Creek, spanned the Genesee River on an awesome aqueduct, and carved a route for it out of the solid rock between Little Falls and Schenectady—and all of those venturesome designs worked precisely as planned".

The main delays were caused by felling trees to clear a path through virgin forest and moving excavated soil, which took longer than expected, but the builders devised ways to solve these problems.

Most of them were Roman Catholic, a religion that raised much suspicion in early America because of its hierarchic structure, and many laborers on the canal suffered violent assault as the result of misjudgment and xenophobia.

When the canal reached Montezuma Marsh (at the outlet of Cayuga Lake west of Syracuse), it was rumored that over 1,000 workers died of "swamp fever" (malaria), and construction was temporarily stopped.

[25] However, recent research has revealed that the death toll was likely much lower, as no contemporary reports mention significant worker mortality, and mass graves from the period have never been found in the area.

Expansion to the east and west proceeded simultaneously, and the whole eastern section, 250 miles (400 km) from Brockport to Albany, opened on September 10, 1823, to great fanfare.

The former ultimately required building the 1,320-foot (400 m) long "Great Embankment", to carry the canal at a height of 76 feet (23 m) above the level of the creek, which ran through a 245-foot (75 m) culvert underneath.

[citation needed] Two villages competed to be the terminus: Black Rock, on the Niagara River, and Buffalo, at the eastern tip of Lake Erie.

The event was marked by a statewide "Grand Celebration", culminating in a series of cannon shots along the length of the canal and the Hudson, a 90-minute cannonade from Buffalo to New York City.

A flotilla of boats, led by Governor Dewitt Clinton aboard Seneca Chief, sailed from Buffalo to New York City over ten days.

On its return trip, Seneca Chief brought back a keg of Atlantic Ocean water, which was poured into Lake Erie by Buffalo's Judge Samuel Wilkeson, who would later become mayor.

The growth of railroads and highways across the state, and the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway in 1959, caused commercial traffic on the canal to decline dramatically during the second half of the 20th century.

[40] In 2000, Congress designated the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, covering 524 miles (843 km) of navigable water from Lake Champlain to the Capital Region and west to Buffalo.

Efficiently, the smooth, nonstop method of transportation cut the travel time between Albany and Buffalo nearly in half, moving by day and by night.

[47] Packet boats, serving passengers exclusively, reached speeds of up to five miles per hour (8.0 km/h) and ran at much more frequent intervals than the cramped, bumpy stagecoach wagons.

[24]: 59  The best examples, furnished with carpeted floors, stuffed chairs, and mahogany tables stocked with books and current newspapers, served as sitting rooms during the days.

Its impact went much further, increasing trade throughout the nation by opening eastern and overseas markets to Midwestern farm products and by enabling migration to the West.

[24]: 52  By 1828, import duties collected at the New York Customs House supported federal government operations and provided funds for all the expenses in Washington except the interest on the national debt.

Evangelical preachers made their circuits of the upstate region, and the canal served as the last leg of the Underground Railroad ferrying freedom seekers to Buffalo near the Canada–US border.

In Pennsylvania, the Main Line of Public Works was a combined canal and railroad running west from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh on the Ohio River, opened in 1834.

The popular song "Low Bridge, Everybody Down" by Thomas S. Allen was written in 1905 to memorialize the canal's early heyday, when barges were pulled by mules rather than engines.

Consisting of a massive stone aqueduct that carried boats over incredible cascades, Little Falls was one of the most popular stops for American and foreign tourists.

This is shown in Scene 4 of William Dunlap's play A Trip to Niagara, where he depicts the general preference of tourists to travel by canal so that they could experience a combination of artificial and natural sights.

[63][64] Aside from transportation, numerous businesses, farms, factories and communities alongside its banks still utilize the canal's waters for other purposes such as irrigation for farmland, hydroelectricity, research, industry, and even drinking.