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Journey Along the Middlesex Canal

Film Screening and Q&A

Join us for a screening and discussion with the filmmaker.

This film documents the history and traces the route of the Middlesex Canal today, including Wilmington, where numerous watered sections and structures remain well  after over 200 years. 
 
While the Erie Canal has become well-known in the annals of American history, the Middlesex Canal, built two decades earlier and a model for canal engineers throughout young America, has only recently become recognized for its important achievements. Extending 27 miles northeast from Boston harbor to the Merrimack River near present-day Lowell, Massachusetts, the Middlesex Canal provided low-cost and efficient freight transport for almost five decades, helping to establish the canal in the U.S. as a viable means of economic development.

The building of the Middlesex Canal also served as a proving ground for an American practice of civil engineering. Its construction, for example, saw one of the first uses of telescopic leveling devices in America, the first innovations in cement-making, the first experiments in "puddling" canal banks to make them water-tight, and the first use of dump carts to speed excavation. While the canal never turned a profit for its private investors, it nonetheless stimulated economic growth along its path, establishing a foundation for one of America's first major industrial regions.

The Canal project was supervised from by Colonel Loammi Baldwin, a self-educated Revolutionary War veteran who relied on British engineer William Weston to help him survey and lay out the canal's path. 

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