Installation 1/5
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Industry and Commerce
The Erie Canal made Buffalo a leading transshipment port. Commerce on the waterway created great wealth as businessmen seized upon opportunities. The waterfront, with its massive grain elevators, also made Buffalo a leader in the grain trade.

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[00:03.60] The Erie Canal was one of the foundations of what we know of as American capitalism.
[00:09.12] The other foundations were the people who learned to bring together capital from a diverse variety of sources, and banks,
[00:18.08] the foundations of big industrial enterprises.
[00:23.80] It accumulates in a way that creates the transformation of quantity into quality.
[00:29.80] So you have so much economic activity that eventually you jump into a different kind of economy.
[00:39.75] On the one hand you have Buffalo as this transshipment point and powerhouse and what we would call now a world trade center.
[00:49.04] It was sending grain from the Midwest to the East Coast and Europe.
[00:54.39] Where that cargo transshipment takes place is where wealth is generated.
[01:00.05] You couldn't sail a schooner down the Erie Canal.
[01:02.00] So you had to offload your cargoes from schooner or steamboat onto the much smaller canal boats and send them down the waterway to New York.
[01:11.01] So we went through stages where we were the leading lumber port in the world,
[01:14.97] we did huge shipments of coal,
[01:17.20] we did huge shipments of ore.
[01:19.52] But the king was grain.
[01:21.13] Buffalo was the flour mill and grain storage capital of the world.
[01:25.77] You could ship grain in quantity.
[01:28.46] And the costs of doing that went way down, 10 percent or less of what they had been beforehand by wagon.
[01:35.10] So now you could feed the East Coast, which triggered population growth on the East Coast.
[01:41.52] It made New York a preeminent port — passed Charleston, passed Boston, passed Baltimore and Philadelphia — cemented it as the major American port, the major American city.
[01:52.56] So that kind of thing became a major transportation route of global importance.
[02:15.94] One of the things that developed was this infrastructure of trade.
[02:20.30] Imagine, there were a lot of ordinary people who lived along the canal whose quality of life was enhanced in a variety of ways.
[02:28.46] Our history is unimaginable without the Erie Canal and I think that there are relatively few things that you can say our history would be unimaginable without.
[02:41.67] One of them is the American Revolution.
[02:44.00] The Declaration of Independence,
[02:47.00] the Constitution,
[02:49.05] and the Bill of Rights.
[02:52.00] And the Erie Canal in a non-political way, although it sent tentacles out to politics, of course.
[03:04.08] The Erie Canal made possible the knitting together of the northern states and a vision of the future of the country.
[03:12.80] A country of dense economic activity and economic growth,
[03:18.00] the work of economic businesses and industries and institutions that created the modern United States.