 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(December 2010) |
Thomas Eddy (September 5, 1758 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - September 16, 1827 New York City) was an American merchant, banker, philanthropist and politician from New York.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(December 2010) |
Thomas Eddy (September 5, 1758 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - September 16, 1827 New York City) was an American merchant, banker, philanthropist and politician from New York.
He was the son of Irish Quaker immigrants who had come to America about five years prior to his birth. His father was engaged in the shipping business until 1766 when he went into hardware, but died later the same year. A few years later, the family moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania. When thirteen years old, Eddy was apprenticed to learn the tanning business in Burlington, New Jersey but remained there only two years.
In September 1779, Eddy removed to New York City, and became a merchant, dealing mostly in imported goods which were shipped from England and Ireland by his brother Charles. In 1781, he earned a large amount by the remittance of money from the British headquarters in New York.
In 1782, Eddy married Hannah Hartshorne at New York City. Afterward, he returned to Philadelphia and formed a partnership with his brother George. In the wake of the commercial crisis in the middle of the 1780s, he and his brothers George and Charles went bankrupt. He removed to New York City again, and became the first insurance broker there, and later an underwriter, speculating in public funds. He became thus a director of the Mutual Insurance Company, and the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company. In 1803, he was one of the founders of the New York Savings Bank. [1]
Eddy had been engaged in charitable work, was elected a governor of the New York Hospital in 1793, and became interested in the reform of the penal laws. He lobbied for inmate labor and solitary confinement in place of other forms of punishment such as hanging.. In 1796, Eddy helped State Senators Philip Schuyler and Ambrose Spencer to draft a bill which established the penitentiary system. The bill was passed and Eddy was appointed to the Commission which put it in practice. He was chosen to oversee the construction of the first State Prison, located in Greenwich Village, better known as the old "Newgate" Prison, and became its first Director, from 1797 to 1801. He also urged the State Legislature to build facilities for the mentally ill.
In 1797, Eddy was appointed Treasurer of the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company, which had been established in 1792 with the purpose of developing a navigable route up the Mohawk River to Lake Ontario. When he found his company in financial trouble, he drew upon the idea first proposed by Joshua Forman (member of the New York State Assembly from Onondaga County in 1808) of building a canal, rather than trying to navigate the rivers. He turned to his friend Jonas Platt, then a State Senator and leader of the Federalists in New York, and the two of them decided to propose the creation of a Commission to explore two possible routes of a canal – either to Lake Ontario or to Lake Erie. They would report their findings to the New York State Legislature after their expedition to the west. On March 13, 1810, Platt presented his project for a bipartisan Canal Commission to the State Legislature, and received overwhelming support, and Eddy was appointed one of the Commissioners. The Erie Canal was eventually opened in 1825.
The Erie Canal is a historic canal in upstate New York that runs east–west between the Hudson River and Lake Erie. Completed in 1825, the canal was the first navigable waterway connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes, vastly reducing the costs of transporting people and goods across the Appalachians. The Erie Canal accelerated the settlement of the Great Lakes region, the westward expansion of the United States, and the economic ascendancy of New York state. It has been called "The Nation's First Superhighway."
DeWitt Clinton was an American politician and naturalist. He served as a United States senator, as the mayor of New York City, and as the sixth governor of New York. In the last capacity, he was largely responsible for the construction of the Erie Canal. Clinton was a major candidate for the American presidency in the election of 1812, challenging incumbent James Madison.
A ship canal is a canal especially intended to accommodate ships used on the oceans, seas, or lakes to which it is connected.
The Trent–Severn Waterway is a 386-kilometre-long (240 mi) canal route connecting Lake Ontario at Trenton to Georgian Bay, Lake Huron, at Port Severn. Its major natural waterways include the Trent River, Otonabee River, Kawartha Lakes, Lake Simcoe, Lake Couchiching and Severn River. Its scenic, meandering route has been called "one of the finest interconnected systems of navigation in the world".
The Union Canal was a towpath canal that existed in southeastern Pennsylvania in the United States during the 19th century. First proposed in 1690 to connect Philadelphia with the Susquehanna River, it ran approximately 82 mi from Middletown on the Susquehanna below Harrisburg to Reading on the Schuylkill River.
Peter Buell Porter was an American lawyer, soldier and politician who served as United States Secretary of War from 1828 to 1829.
The Driffield Navigation is an 11-mile (18-kilometre) waterway, through the heart of the Holderness Plain to the market town of Driffield, East Riding of Yorkshire, England. The northern section of it is a canal, and the southern section is part of the River Hull. Construction was authorised in 1767, and it was fully open in 1770. Early use of the navigation was hampered by a small bridge at Hull Bridge, which was maintained by Beverley Corporation. After protracted negotiation, it was finally replaced in 1804, and a new lock was built to improve water levels at the same time. One curious feature of the new works were that they were managed quite separately for many years, with the original navigation called the Old Navigation, and the new works called the New Navigation. They were not fully amalgamated until 1888.
The Genesee Valley Canal is a former canal that operated in western New York between 1840 and 1878. It ran for a length of 124 miles, passing through 106 locks. Its course was later used by the Genesee Valley Canal Railroad and today comprises portions of the Genesee Valley Greenway.
The New York State Canal System is a successor to the Erie Canal and other canals within New York. The 525-mile (845 km) system is composed of the Erie Canal, the Oswego Canal, the Cayuga–Seneca Canal, and the Champlain Canal. In 2014 the entire system was listed as a national historic district on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 2016 it was designated a National Historic Landmark.
The Commission to Explore a Route for a Canal to Lake Erie and Report, known as the Erie Canal Commission, was a body created by the New York State Legislature in 1810 to plan the Erie Canal. In 1817 a Canal Fund led by Commissioners of the Canal Fund was established to oversee the funding of construction of the canal. In 1826 a Canal Board, of which both the planning commissioners and the Canal Fund commissioners were members, was created to take control of the operational canal. The term "Canal Commission" was at times applied to any of these bodies. Afterwards the canal commissioners were minor state cabinet officers responsible for the maintenance and improvements of the state's canals.
The Welland Canal has gone through many incarnations in its history. Today, five distinct canal-construction efforts are recognized. The retronym First Welland Canal is applied to the original canal, constructed from 1824 to 1829 and 1831 to 1833.
Jesse Hawley was an American flour merchant in Geneva, New York, who became an early and major proponent of building of the Erie Canal.
Benjamin Wright was an American civil engineer who was chief engineer of the Erie Canal and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. In 1969, the American Society of Civil Engineers declared him the "Father of American Civil Engineering".
The history of turnpikes and canals in the United States began with work attempted and accomplished in the original thirteen colonies, predicated on European technology. After gaining independence, the United States grew westward, crossing the Appalachian Mountains with the admission of new states and then doubling in size with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. The only means of transportation at the time between the coastal states and interior lands remained on water, by canoe, boat and ship, or over land on foot and by pack animal. Recognizing the success of Roman roads in unifying that empire, political and business leaders in the United States began to construct roads and canals to connect the disparate parts of the nation.
Wood Creek is a river in Central New York State that flows westward from the city of Rome, New York to Oneida Lake. Its waters flow ultimately to Lake Ontario, which is the easternmost of the five Great Lakes. Wood Creek is less than 20 miles (32 km) long, but has great historical importance. Wood Creek was a crucial, fragile link in the main 18th and early 19th century waterway connecting the Atlantic seaboard of North America and its interior beyond the Appalachian Mountains. This waterway ran upstream from the Hudson River along the Mohawk River. Near present day Rome, the Mohawk River is about one mile from Wood Creek across dry land. In the 18th century, cargo and boats were portaged between the Mohawk and Wood Creek; the crossing was called the "Oneida Carry". In 1797, the Rome Canal was completed and finally established an all-water route. The waterway then followed a downstream run along Wood Creek to the east end of Oneida Lake. After a 20 mile crossing to the west end of the lake, the waterway entered the Oswego River system. This system led either to the Lake Ontario port at Oswego, or further westward along the Seneca River.
William Weston was an English civil engineer who worked in England and the United States of America. For a brief period at the end of the 18th century, Weston was the pre-eminent civil engineer in the new US and worked on the Schuylkill and Susquehanna Navigation Company, the Western and Northern Inland Lock Navigation Companies in New York, the Middlesex canal in Massachusetts, the Schuylkill Permanent Bridge at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and the Potomac navigation.
Isaac Stoutenburgh was an American politician from New York.
The Schuylkill and Susquehanna Navigation Company was a limited liability corporation founded in Pennsylvania on September 29, 1791.
The Canal Age is a term of art used by science, technology, and industry historians. Various parts of the world have had various canal ages; the main ones belong to Egypt, Ancient Babylon, and the historical empires of India, China, Southeast Asia, and mercantile Europe. The successes of the Canal du Midi in France (1681), Bridgewater Canal in Britain, and Eiderkanal in Denmark (1784) spurred on what was called in Britain "canal mania". In the Thirteen Colonies in 1762 legislation was passed supporting in the colonial-era Province of Pennsylvania to improve navigation on the Schuylkill River through Philadelphia.
Alfred Kelley was a banker, canal builder, lawyer, railroad executive, and state legislator in the state of Ohio in the United States. He is considered by historians to be one of the most prominent commercial, financial, and political Ohioans of the first half of the 19th century.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
