{"id":9243,"date":"2020-07-08T07:01:04","date_gmt":"2020-07-08T12:01:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rochistory.com\/blog\/?p=9243"},"modified":"2020-07-07T16:24:36","modified_gmt":"2020-07-07T21:24:36","slug":"erie-canal-history-or-myth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rochistory.com\/blog\/?p=9243","title":{"rendered":"Erie Canal: History or Myth"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Sunday there was “America: Our Defining Hours” on the History Channel. One segment was about the Erie Canal. They mentioned that during construction that about 1000 workmen died. I started thinking about that. I don’t know of any graves of those poor unfortunate men. Where are the graves of those workmen? Maybe most aren’t marked but you would think that there should be a few with tombstones.<\/p>\n

The program also mentioned Irishmen did the hard work of construction. That has been repeated many times over the years. Problem is that there weren’t a lot Irish in New York State in the late 1810s and early 1820s. A few years ago I heard that that the story of the Irish building the canal wasn’t true. A large group of Irish did come to the US during the potato famine (1845 – 1849). During that time the canal was being enlarged. Maybe there were Irishmen doing construction at that time.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>One thing that they did not<\/strong> mention was the labor saving stump puller in the picture. It stood 16 feet tall. The outer wheels were for moving the set-up. A rope to the stump was wrapped around the shaft. Another rope around the inner wheel went to a team of oxen (barely visible in the left corner). It made pulling stumps a lot easier.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Sunday there was “America: Our Defining Hours” on the History Channel. One segment was about the Erie Canal. They mentioned that during construction that about 1000 workmen died. I started thinking about that. I don’t know of any graves of those poor unfortunate men. Where are the graves of those workmen? Maybe most aren’t …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘Erie Canal: History or Myth’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[169],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-canal"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rochistory.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rochistory.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rochistory.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rochistory.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rochistory.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9243"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rochistory.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9245,"href":"https:\/\/rochistory.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9243\/revisions\/9245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rochistory.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rochistory.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rochistory.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}