[On October 26, 1825, the Erie Canal officially opened. So this week, I’ll honor the 200th anniversary of that huge & hugely important project by highlighting a handful of figures connected to it, leading up to a special weekend tribute to my favorite current civil engineer!]
On two contrasting yet interconnected experiences that the pioneering civil engineer carried with him throughout his short but hugely influential life.
As I briefly mentioned in Monday’s post, in 1817, after he had been working on the Erie Canal for about a year (under the supervision of judge turned chief engineer Benjamin Wright), Canvass White persuaded Governor DeWitt Clinton to support and fund a research trip to England. There he spent more than a year traveling over 2000 miles on foot throughout the country, studying the construction and operation of canals. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that not long after his return home he developed and patented a groundbreaking new way of producing waterproof hydraulic cement from limestone, nor that he then permitted the use of his patented formula only for work on the construction of canal locks. You can’t tell the story of Early Republic America without thinking of the continued English influence, and White clearly had learned across the pond not just how to make the most of one’s home terrain, but also how to do so in service of his fellow countrymen.
That English experience and influence is particularly interesting in White’s case because just a few years before his trip he had been fighting against the English. In the spring of 1814, while he was attending Connecticut’s Fairfield Academy to study mathematics, minerology, and surveying under the legendary Revolutionary-era Dr. Joseph Noyes, White temporarily left school to volunteer for the U.S. Army during the War of 1812. He was commissioned as a lieutenant and led a company of volunteers in the July 1814 assault on and capture of Ontario’s Fort Erie; he was severely wounded during that battle, but after returning home and convalescing did complete his studies and move into his work on the Erie Canal. Yet his war wounds would never entirely heal, and seem to have been the cause of the lifelong ailments that led him to move to Florida in search of a more temperate climate and tragically die very young, in 1834 at the age of just 44.
Those two defining experiences clearly reflect opposed perspectives on England, and thus illustrate that White had a profoundly open mind, to be able, just a few years after that grievous injury, to travel so fully throughout this former foe. But I would also argue that they can and should be interconnected, and not just because White certainly carried both with him for his remaining couple decades of life. To my mind they exemplify a young man who would go to any lengths, literally and figuratively, to do what he believed necessary to work for the good of his community and peers. The Preamble of the Constitution includes “promote the general Welfare” as one of the ways in which “We the People” hope “to form a more perfect Union.” That first phrase can be interpreted in various ways to be sure, but I don’t know that I’ve ever encountered a life that included multiple actions so intended within such a short period of time as that of Canvass White.
Next Canal context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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