the need of getting out with their increasing crops,
their multiplying flocks and herds, and they made their need known to
the nation, to which they were everywhere akin, and the nation answered
through Congress by beginning, in 1806, the National Road, which was
finished by 1838, from Baltimore as far as Indiana. This road first
opened the East to Ohio; then in 1811 a steamboat made its appearance on
the Beautiful River, and after that steam commanded all the Southern and
Southwestern waters for us, as well as those of the inland seas on the
North. Then, that all these waters might be united, the state began in
1825 to build a system of canals, from Cleveland to Portsmouth and
from Toledo to Cincinnati. When these canals were completed, with their
branches, they gave the people some nine hundred miles of navigable
waters within their own borders. The main lines were built, not by
companies for private profit as the railroads have since been built,
but by the people for the people, and it may be said that the great
prosperity of Ohio began with them. Wherever they ran they drained the
swamps and made the land not only habitable but beautiful. They were dug
by Ohio people, and the sixteen millions of dollars that they cost
came back into the hands of the men who gladly taxed themselves for the
outlay. The towns along their course grew, and new towns rose out of the
forests and prairies.

The Ohio people had the impulse to this great work from the New York
people, who had built the Erie Canal from Albany to Buffalo, and whose
governor, De Witt Clinton, had urged forward that work. Now, when our
whole state was ablaze with joy at the action of the legislature in
providing for the work, Governor Clinton was invited to come and first
strike the spade into the earth in digging the new canals. He arrived by
steamboat at Cleveland, where the people received him and his train of
distinguished New Yorkers with rejoicings worthy of the great event. He
took stage for Newark, and on the 4th of July, 1825, when our state
had just come of age, in the presence of all the Ohio magnates and
dignitaries, and a mighty throng of citizens, he lifted a spadeful from
the ground on the Licking Summit. Governor Morrow of Ohio lifted the
second spadeful, and then followed a struggle among the distinguished
men as to which should lift the third. New Yorkers and Ohioans vied in
filling a wheelbarrow with successive spadefuls, and a happy citizen
o