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valley beyond began to show evidences of life
One by one the other important centers of trade in the great
valley beyond began to show evidences of life. Marietta, Ohio,
founded in 1788 by Revolutionary officers from New England,
became the metropolis of the rich Muskingum River district, which
was presently sending many flatboats southward. Cincinnati was
founded in the same year as Marietta, with the building of Fort
Washington and the formal organization of Hamilton County. The
soil of the Miami country was as ‘mellow as an ash heap’ and in
the first four months of 1802 over four thousand barrels of flour
were shipped southward to challenge the prestige of the
Monongahela product. Potters, brickmakers, gunsmiths, cotton and
wool weavers, coopers, turners, wheelwrights, dyers, printers,
and ropemakers were at work here within the next decade. A
brewery turned out five thousand barrels of beer and porter in
1811, and by the next year the pork-packing business was
thoroughly established.

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‘The destinies of our country run east and west. Intercourse
between the mighty interior west and the sea coast is the great
principle of our commercial prosperity.’ These are the words of
Edward Everett in advocating the Boston and Albany Railroad. In
effect Washington had uttered those same words half a century
earlier when he gave momentum to an era filled with energetic
but unsuccessful efforts to join with the waters of the West the
rivers reaching inland from the Atlantic. The fact that American
engineering science had not in his day reached a point where it
could cope with this problem successfully should in no wise
lessen our admiration for the man who had thus caught the vision
of a nation united and unified by improved methods of
transportation.

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fate of the great enterprise in a word
The Chancellor rose to his feet with determination and sealed the
fate of the great enterprise in a word.

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passion which the first generation of pioneers had for the
wilderness
In direct contradiction to this longing for society was the
passion which the first generation of pioneers had for the
wilderness. When the population of one settlement became too
thick, they were seized by an irresistible impulse to ‘follow the
migration,’ as the expression went. The easy independence of the
first hunter-agriculturalist was upset by the advance of
immigration. His range was curtailed, his freedom limited. His
very breath seems to have become difficult. So he sold out at a
phenomenal profit, put out his fire, shouldered his gun, called
his dog, and set off again in search of the solitude he craved.

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this is a video shot in California. Blue Ferrari vs Dodge Viper.

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indifferent success and many failures were recorded, the pendulum
of public confidence in this aid to inland commerce swung away,
and highway improvement by means of stone roads and toll road
companies came into favor in the interval between the nation”s
two eras of river improvement and canal building
As most of the efforts to improve the rivers, however, met with
indifferent success and many failures were recorded, the pendulum
of public confidence in this aid to inland commerce swung away,
and highway improvement by means of stone roads and toll road
companies came into favor in the interval between the nation”s
two eras of river improvement and canal building.

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the widespreading canal movement, there was a generous spirit and
a chivalry in the ‘good old days’ of the stagecoach, the
Conestoga, and the lazy canal boat, which did not to an equal
degree pervade the iron age of the railroad
Despite the superiority of the new iron age that quickly followed
the widespreading canal movement, there was a generous spirit and
a chivalry in the ‘good old days’ of the stagecoach, the
Conestoga, and the lazy canal boat, which did not to an equal
degree pervade the iron age of the railroad. When machinery takes
the place of human brawn and patience, there is an indefinable
eclipse of human interest. Somehow, cogs and levers and
differentials do not have the same appeal as fingers and eyes and
muscles. The old days of coach and canal boat had a
picturesqueness and a comradeship of their own. In the turmoil
and confusion and odd mixing of every kind of humanity along the
lines of travel in the days of the hurtling coach-and-six, a
friendliness, a robust sympathy, a ready interest in the
successful and the unfortunate, a knowledge of how the other half
lives, and a familiarity with men as well as with mere places,
was common to all who took the road. As Thackeray so vividly
describes it:

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rival canal with canal
There could be but one answer to the challenge, and that was to
rival canal with canal. These more southerly States, confronted
by the towering ranges of the Alleghanies to the westward, showed
a courage which was superb, although, as time proved in the case
of Maryland, they might well have taken more counsel of their
fears. Pennsylvania acted swiftly. Though its western waterway–
the roaring Juniata, which entered the Susquehanna near
Harrisburg–had a drop from head to mouth greater than that of
the entire New York canal, and, though the mountains of the
Altoona region loomed straight up nearly three thousand feet,
Pennsylvania overcame the lowlands by main strength and the
mountain peaks by strategy and was sending canal boats from
Philadelphia to Pittsburgh within nine years of the completion of
the Erie Canal.

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60 years of Ferrari and Shell.
This by far one of the coolest videos I have ever seen. The transition to the modern formula 1 car is amazing!

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certain respects the effort of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation
Company to bridle the Lehigh and make it play its part in the
commercial development of Pennsylvania
No struggle for the mastery of an American river matches in
certain respects the effort of the Lehigh Coal and Navigation
Company to bridle the Lehigh and make it play its part in the
commercial development of Pennsylvania. The failures and trials
of the promoters of this company were no less remarkable than
was the great success that eventually crowned the effort. In 1793
the Lehigh Coal Mine Company was organized and purchased some ten
thousand acres in the Mauch Chunk anthracite region, nine miles
from the Lehigh River. It then appropriated a sum of money to
build a road from the mines to the river in the expectation that
the State would improve the navigation of the waterway, for
which, it has already been noted, an appropriation had been made
in 1791, in accordance with the programme of the Society for
Promoting the Improvement of Roads and Inland Navigation. Nothing
was done, however, to improve the river, and the company, after
various attempts at shipping coal to Philadelphia, gave up the
effort and allowed the property, which was worth millions, to lie
idle. In 1807 the Lehigh Coal Mine Company, in another effort to
get its wares before the public, granted to Rowland and Butland,
a private firm, free right to operate one of its veins of coal;
but this operation also resulted in failure. In 1813 the company
made a third attempt and granted to a private concern a lease of
the entire property on the condition that ten thousand bushels of
coal should be taken to market annually. Difficulties immediately
made themselves apparent. No contractor could be found who would
haul the output to the Lehigh River for less than four dollars a
ton, and the man who accepted those terms lost money. Of five
barges filled at Mauch Chunk three went to pieces on the way to
Philadelphia. Although the contents of the other two sold for
twenty dollars a ton, the proceeds failed to meet expenses, and
the operating company threw up the lease.

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