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Comment by InTheArena | Hacker News Reader

The Erie Canal, and the rest of the entire navigate-able water system is relatively unknown, but is a huge huge reason why we have a United States of America, and not 50 different countries with fractured cultural, military and social histories.

The USA has more interior navigable rivers and waterways than the rest of the world combined. The Erie Canal's connection made it possible to circumnavigate the northeast, northwest, and a good chunk of the Midwest and Canada without ever leaving a protected waterway, thanks to the Mississippi system, New Orleans, barrier islands, and the Great Lakes.

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It's fair to say innit that it connected the American breadbasket with world markets.

It also made Buffalo the largest inland port in America, at least until Chicago took the crown and Buffalo was largely relegated to transshipment. Buffalo still has quite a collection of grain elevators tho.

> The Erie Canal, and the rest of the entire navigate-able water system is relatively unknown

What? It's taught in american schools. Who hasn't hear of the erie canal?

> but is a huge huge reason why we have a United States of America, and not 50 different countries with fractured cultural, military and social histories.

If that was the case, the civil war wouldn't have occurred. The Erie Canal was about making western expansion easier. Plans for the erie canal was developed decades before independence. The federal government, single currency, civil war, etc were the binding force, not the erie canal.

The federal government as a binding force was not really that effective until after the civil war. See the repeated failure to build the transcon railroad which the south blocked fearing the entrapment of the south by another transportation system.

Many of the boomers were taught to sing a song about the Erie Canal in elementary school. How many of us retained any information about, who knows?

Some of us younger folk know the song too: it’s been playing in my head as I’ve been browsing through this thread.

I'm from upstate NY, my mother used to sing this song to me as a child.

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