Where two history buffs go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe.
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The Middlesex Canal: Boston’s First Big Dig (episode 225)
In the last decade of the 18th century, a group of investors called the Proprietors of the Middlesex Canal turned a crazy idea into reality. After some initial stumbles, they were able to successfully build a navigational canal from Boston Harbor to the Merrimack River in Lowell. In an era before highways and airports, it became the first practical freight link between the markets and wharves of Boston and the vast interior of New England in Central Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Against all odds, it was a success, and an unparalleled feat of engineering. However, its perceived success was short lived, with the coming of the railroad spelling doom for the canal business and commercial failure for the Proprietors.
Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/225/
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Boston’s First Big Dig- Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin praises the Middlesex Canal
- 1793 act incorporating the Proprietors of the Middlesex Canal
- Links to the acts amending the original incorporation from 1794 to 1809
- Benjamin Wright’s survey of the canal route, compiled in 1830
- 1830 charter for the Boston & Lowell Railroad
- 1843 company history of the canal
- 1898 article about the “old” canal
- Moses Whitcher Mann’s 1902 paper on the canal
- Thomas M Stetson’s 1914 recollection of skating on the canal, from the Medford Historical Society
- 1991 pamphlet from UMass Lowell’s Center for Lowell History
- 2008 maps superimposing the canal route on modern neighborhoods
- 2008 article about the buoyed warp lines used to cross the Charles; look at the diagram to make sense of it!
- 2017 article on the canal from the journal of the American Society of Civil Engineering
- John Adams is amazed by canal locks in 1760
- John Quincy Adams discusses his investment in the canal in 1798
- Charles Francis Adams discusses the family’s investment in the canal in 1835, 1836, and 1839
- This detail didn’t make it into the show, but farmers upstream on the Concord sued after the Billerica dam that filled the canal also flooded their fields. Today, those flooded fields are Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge. Here’s a 1989 article about the controversy, as well as an 1861 engineering report on the effect of the dam.
- Episode 224: John Hancock and the Liberty Riot
- Episode 203: The Railroad Jubilee
- Episode 156: Nancy Seasholes and The Atlas of Boston History
- Episode 130: Earl Taylor and Tide Mills
- Episode 115: Bridging the Charles River
- Episode 59: The Mother Brook, America’s first (industrial) canal