From “Abandoned Canals of the State of New York,” Popular Science Monthly 75 (September 1909)
It’s that time of year again: Halloween, and map quizzes in my US History survey. These two events converge in the single most common undergraduate typo: the labeling of the “Eerie Canal” through upstate New York. Reliably, every year a solid quarter of the class makes this spelling error. (I blame their being educated largely in Virginia, which means that didn’t get a solid year of Erie Canal propaganda in 4th grade.) This excellent typo raises a whole range of questions about what the “Eerie Canal” could possibly refer to. But I demure. Instead, I’ll take the occasion to quote a great paragraph from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s scathing description of traveling the Erie Canal, which he published in 1835 in the New-England Magazine. Read more
