New Haven and Northampton Canal
The New Haven and Northampton Canal was a major private canal built in the early 19th century to provide water transportation from New Haven into the interior of Connecticut and Massachusetts, ending in the Connecticut River at Northampton. Its Connecticut segment was known as the Farmington Canal and the Massachusetts segment the Hampshire and Hampden Canal.
Built in the decade after the opening of the original Erie Canal, the New Haven and Northampton Canal was one of the most significant civil engineering projects in the early 19th century United States and at New England's longest canal. The canal improved freight access for manufacturers and communities in the region during a critical period of the country's First Industrial Revolution. However, as a private venture it was a financial failure and only operated along its full extent from 1835 to 1847. With the advent of rail and steam locomotives, the canal company and right-of-way was quickly converted to a railroad, which was in more recent years converted to a rail trail. Few of the canal's original structures remain but short sections of canal bed and towpath survive as well as several locks.
History
Background
During the early 19th century, the Connecticut River was the most efficient and commercially significant route into the interior of New England. Towns and cities along the river, such as Hartford, Connecticut, benefited from their position and access to water transport. However, Hartford's co-capital at the time, New Haven, relied on difficult overland access to the interior, and a canal had been considered since at least the 1780s. By the time the Erie Canal had begun operations canal enthusiasm was at its height. New Haven businessmen and town representatives met on January 29, 1822 in Farmington to hire the Erie's chief engineer, Benjamin Wright, to survey a route for a canal.Wright hired Eli Whitney Blake to conduct a preliminary survey, and wrote a positive report: "The terrain is favorably formed for a great work of this kind and a canal may be formed for considerable less expense per mile, than the cost of canals now in the making in the state of New York." On May 30, 1822 the Connecticut legislature granted a charter to the "Farmington Canal Company" to build the canal from New Haven to the Massachusetts border. On February 4, 1823, Massachusetts granted its corresponding charter to the "Hampshire and Hampden Canal Company" from Southwick to Northampton. After this second charter was granted, work began.
Memphremagog and Connecticut canal
A vastly more ambitious plan would have extended the canal north through the Connecticut River valley to Barnet, Vermont and on to Lake Memphremagog, where a Canadian company would build to the major shipping route of the St. Lawrence River via the Saint-François River. DeWitt Clinton Jr. of the United States Army Corps of Engineers surveyed several routes to link the Connecticut River and Memphremagog, including a very difficult and expensive route through the Black River Valley, Joe's Pond near Danville, and the Passumpsic River involving 350 locks and a 2-mile-long tunnel. An easier route followed the Barton River and Passumpsic River to Barnet. The proposal to extend the Hampshire and Hampden Canal was ultimately rejected by the Massachusetts legislature in favor of an initiative by competing "Riverites" to improve navigation along the Connecticut River itself.Side canals were also envisioned, including one running from Farmington west through Unionville to Colebrook and the Massachusetts border, where it would link to the Erie Canal via the Hudson River or the proposed Boston and Albany Canal.
Construction
Ground-breaking ceremonies took place on July 4, 1825 at Salmon Brook village in Granby near the Massachusetts–Connecticut border. Between two and three thousand spectators showed up and the Declaration of Independence was read by Timothy Pitkin. However, when Connecticut Governor Oliver Wolcott Jr. employed the ceremonial shovel, it broke. Built before the advent of steam shovels, the canal was graded and dug out with manual labor and the assistance of ox-drawn ploughs and draft horses. Techniques in earthmoving from the Erie were brought over to work on the new canal, including stump pullers which employed a giant windlass mechanism pulled by oxen. Buck scrapers or slip scrapers moved dirt similar to modern-day bulldozers.The canal prism, or cross-section, was wide at the bottom, deep, and wide at the top. At a normal operating water level of the canal was wide. A wide towpath ran along one side.
In Connecticut, the Farmington Canal was built in sections by contractors according to specifications by canal engineers. Some larger individual features such as culverts, bridges, and the Farmington aqueduct were contracted out separately. In Massachusetts' Hampshire and Hampden Canal there were only two contracts. Although engineers and some laborers had come with experience from the Erie, local contractors were generally inexperienced in large-scale excavation and canal construction. As a result some work needed to be rehired or later redone. Though specifications may have called for rolled clay lining of the canal, much of it was unlined sandy soil which required subsequent relining in sections. Hydraulic lime sourced in Southington was later used to build structures and reline locks using masonry.
The canal's southern terminus in New Haven called for the construction of a basin prior to entering the Long Island Sound. Long Wharf and Tomlinson's Wharf to the northeast were joined by a Canal Wharf, upon which tide gates were hung at either end. The area enclosed by the new wharf, about 15 acres, formed the "Canal Basin" which served as a shelter and port for loading and unloading goods. Boats could traverse the basin's tide gates at high tide; at low tide they were shut to maintain water levels. The city relied on a consistent supply of water from the canal for firefighting. A tide mill was built off an added sluice on Tomlinson's Wharf, later a canal-powered mill operated near the southernmost Lock 28. William Lanson, who had extended the Long Wharf in the decade prior, was the contractor tasked with completing the Canal Wharf and other structures in New Haven. The canal's route through the city followed an existing creek and crossed numerous streets, requiring at least 14 bridges.
When fully completed in 1834 the canal was long, of which were in Connecticut and in Massachusetts. There were 28 locks constructed in the Connecticut canal, between New Haven and Granby. A guard lock near the state border partitioned the two sections, where the canal entered the Congamond Ponds in Southwick. Boats traversed open sections of Congamond with the help of a 700-ft-long floating towpath. A further 32 locks were constructed in Massachusetts between Southwick and Northampton.
Aqueducts and feeder canals
The canal makers reached a problem at the "great level" in Connecticut, the stretch of land between locks in Southington and Granby, which was the longest distance of the canal at the same water level. Once the Farmington River was reached, the canal was about above river level. An aqueduct was planned, initially in conjunction with a lock, but it was decided to forgo the lock and make the aqueduct taller. The Farmington aqueduct spanned with 6 arches, spaced apart.The pillars that remained after the canal closed were noted as a state landmark through the 1950s, but the 1955 floods damaged the pillars beyond repair, and they were removed in 1956–58. The aqueduct's remnants are now preserved as part of the Farmington Land Trust.
In Massachusetts two large aqueducts crossed the Westfield River and Mill River, spanning and respectively. However, their height is unknown and no traces remained by the 20th century.
Initially planned as a western branch, a feeder canal was built off a dam on the Farmington River near Unionville. Other feeders were constructed from the Westfield River, Little River, and Salmon Brook. The Westfield River feeder was particularly extensive at over 6 miles. A catastrophic flood shut down the canal north of Westfield for most of 1837 as the feeder was repaired and its dam rebuilt further upstream. Canal operation required vast amounts of water, and a significant amount would filter into the ground, through breeches, or otherwise be wasted.
Operation
On June 20, 1828, with the completion of the canal from New Haven to Farmington, the first canal boat James Hillhouse, named after one of the canal's early promoters and first president of the Farmington Canal Company, launched from Farmington with much fanfare. By 1830 the canal was open to Southwick and the Congamond Ponds. The full length of the canal was navigable by September 1834 but the first boats didn't arrive in Southampton until 1835. On July 29, 1835 the canal was officially opened with a ceremony in Northampton and the passing of the first boat through the locks leading to the Connecticut River.Packet boats with compartments offered passenger service along the route. According to an 1835 advertisement the full trip between New Haven and Northampton took 24 hours and cost $3.75, including meals. Light packet boats, pulled by horses, were given a speed limit of so as not to wash out canal banks. Far more numerous on the canal were freighters, which were long and wide, barely fitting in the locks, and able to carry as much as 25 tons. Heavier freighters, pulled by several mules or horses, moved at roughly half the speed. Draft animals were swapped out at sections along the route.
Canal basins were dug out along the route to allow for boat traffic to pass and avoid bottlenecks. Many became established as important trading centers and places of official canal business. Tolls and fines were assessed by selected bonded representatives of the canal company, who were stationed and resided in New Haven, Farmington, Avon, Granby, in Connecticut; Westfield and Northampton in Massachusetts. A building that housed canal offices in Avon still survives at 12 West Main Street.
In Plainville there were two basins, each with a freight house. The first and largest was "Whiting's Basin", built by Ebenezer Whiting, located north of the present intersection of Route 10 and Route 372. Opposite Whiting's Basin near Norton Place was the canal's only dry dock, a crucial location for the repair of boats, which had its own guard lock and a waste weir to drain. Further south near what would become the center of Plainville was "Bristol Basin", and another store operated by Whiting's brother. Adna Whiting's "General Store" had doors leading directly to the canal for drop offs and sold a variety of jelly, spices, grains, etc. Bristol Basin was also notable for being a hub for the burgeoning clock-making industry in Bristol to the west, including Eli Terry's mass-produced parts for his pillar and scroll clock.
Inventor Benjamin Dutton Beecher tested an early "Ericsson-type" screw propeller steamboat on the canal, travelling from New Haven and reaching as far north as Hamden before running aground.
The canal's later years saw advancements such as the linking of the Western Railroad in Westfield, Massachusetts and its most profitable year in 1844. However, a succession of storms and droughts shut down the canal through most of 1843 and 1845.