Thomas Jefferson called a 360-mile canal through upstate New York little short of madness, yet the Erie Canal went on to reshape the American economy. This episode explores how a widely mocked infrastructure project broke through the Appalachian barrier using the natural gap of the Mohawk Valley.

We look at why water transport slashed shipping costs, how Governor DeWitt Clinton secured $7 million, and how judges, a math teacher, and a self-taught engineer designed locks to climb the Niagara Escarpment. Then we follow the immigrant labor that dug it, the 1825 Wedding of the Waters, its role in the Underground Railroad, and its decline into today’s recreational waterway.

• Why overland freight in the early 1800s pushed farmers to turn grain into whiskey
• How canal locks lifted boats with nothing but gravity
• The stump puller and other inventions used to carve through old-growth forest
• Why the story of mass deaths at Montezuma Marsh is a myth
• How tolls paid off the construction debt and made New York City the dominant seaport