Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant passages that answer the question.
Query: How long is the Erie Canal?
The Erie Canal is a canal in New York, United States that is part of the east–west, cross-state route of the New York State Canal System (formerly known as the New York State Barge Canal). Originally, it ran 363 miles (584km) from where Albany meets the Hudson River to where Buffalo meets Lake Erie. It was built to create a navigable water route from New York City and the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. When completed in 1825, it was the second longest canal in the world (after the Grand Canal in China) and greatly affected the development and economy of New York, New York City, and the United States.[2]
During 1832, the Ohio and Erie Canal was completed. The entire canal system was long with 146 lift locks and a rise of . In addition, there were five feeder canals that added and 6 additional locks to the system consisting of:
As with most transportation improvements during the early nineteenth century, industry paved the way within individual states. After successful canal development projects further east in the United States, it would not be long until canals would soon be dug across the Midwest. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 paved the way for improvement projects across the United States and changed the course of American transportation history. The Erie Canal was an immediate financial success. This really set the precedent for future canals and proved canals could provide a viable contribution to local economies.
The Erie Canal Museum is a historical museum about the Erie Canal located in Syracuse, New York. The museum was founded in 1962 and is a private, non-profit corporation. It is housed in the Syracuse Weighlock Building dating from 1850. The Syracuse Weighlock Building was in operation as a weighlock from 1850 to 1883. In 1883 the canal decided to stop charging tolls. The weighlock building was essentially used as a big, elaborate scale to weigh the boats traveling on the Erie Canal and determine how much each boat would pay for a toll. Today the museum includes not only artifacts from the Erie Canal, but also a gallery of present canal life. It is the mission of the museum to help people to learn the rich history of the Erie Canal and that it is not just a thing of the past, but still very much exists today in different forms.
The Western Inland Canal (early attempt of the Erie Canal) was constructed in 1792 and helped the local economy. The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, passes through the city. Lock 17 of the New York State Erie Canal replaced the three locks of the original 1825 Erie Canal and is in height.
The Wabash and Erie Canal was a shipping canal that linked the Great Lakes to the Ohio River via an artificial waterway. The canal provided traders with access from the Great Lakes all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Over 460 miles long, it was the longest canal ever built in North America.
The Old Erie Canal State Historic Park encompasses a linear segment of the original Erie Canal's Long Level section. It extends westward from Butternut Creek in the town of DeWitt, just east of Syracuse, to the outskirts of Rome, New York. The park includes restored segments of the canal's waterway and towpath which were in active use between 1825 and 1917. It is part of the New York State Park system.
Erie Canal Lock 52 Complex is a national historic district located at Port Byron and Mentz in Cayuga County, New York. The district includes two contributing buildings (the Erie House and the blacksmith shop / mule barn); three contributing engineering structures (Erie Canal Lock 52, culvert, and canal prism of the enlarged Erie Canal); and archaeological sites associated with the canal operations. Lock 52 was constructed 1849-1853 as part of the Enlarged Erie Canal program. It remained in operation until the rerouting of the canal under the New York State Barge Canal System in 1917. The Erie House was built in 1894 and is a two-story frame structure that housed a saloon and hotel.
Enlarged Double Lock No. 23, Old Erie Canal is a historic Erie canal lock located at Rotterdam in Schenectady County, New York. It was built in 1841-1842 as part of the First Enlargement. It is built entirely of large cut limestone blocks, laid regular ashlar, and mortared with hydraulic cement. The Northeast lock chamber is long and wide; the Southwest lock chamber is long and 18 to wide; and the Center pier is long and wide. The Southwest lock chamber was expanded in 1889-1890. Lock 23 fell into disuse after the opening of the New York State Barge Canal in 1918. The lock chambers contain no water and the area is open as a local park. The site was reclaimed and stabilized by local volunteers starting in 1999. A replica of a board and batten locktender's hut was constructed between 2000 and 2003 by students from the Union College Department of Civil Engineering.
Additional feeder canals soon extended the Erie Canal into a system. These included the Cayuga-Seneca Canal south to the Finger Lakes, the Oswego Canal from Three Rivers north to Lake Ontario at Oswego, and the Champlain Canal from Troy north to Lake Champlain. From 1833 to 1877, the short Crooked Lake Canal connected Keuka Lake and Seneca Lake. The Chemung Canal connected the south end of Seneca Lake to Elmira in 1833, and was an important route for Pennsylvania coal and timber into the canal system. The Chenango Canal in 1836 connected the Erie Canal at Utica to Binghamton and caused a business boom in the Chenango River valley. The Chenango and Chemung canals linked the Erie with the Susquehanna River system. The Black River Canal connected the Black River to the Erie Canal at Rome and remained in operation until the 1920s. The Genesee Valley Canal was run along the Genesee River to connect with the Allegheny River at Olean, but the Allegheny section, which would have connected to the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, was never built. The Genesee Valley Canal was later abandoned and became the route of the Genesee Valley Canal Railroad.
The canal known as the Wabash & Erie in the 1850s and thereafter, was actually a combination of four canals: the Miami and Erie Canal from the Maumee River near Toledo, Ohio to Junction, Ohio, the original Wabash and Erie Canal from Junction to Terre Haute, Indiana, the Cross Cut Canal from Terre Haute, Indiana to Worthington, Indiana (Point Commerce), and the Central Canal from Worthington to Evansville, Indiana.
The Miami and Erie Canal Deep Cut is a well-preserved long section of the Miami and Erie Canal near Spencerville in western Ohio. The segment represents one of the major construction efforts of the canal; in order to avoid using locks to go over a ridge, the canal was dug deeply into it, far more than the depth of the canal itself. Workers dug the canal bed up to into the blue clay ridge that separated the St. Marys and Auglaize River watersheds. It is a United States National Historic Landmark. The cut is owned by the state and managed by MetroParks as Deep Cut Historical Park, with multi-use trails and a picnic area.
The Whitewater Canal was built based on an 1834 survey conducted by Charles Hutchens. The design called for a canal seventy six miles long starting at Nettle Creek near Hagerstown and following the river valley through Connersville, Brookville and into Harrison, Ohio, then back into Indiana to finish at Lawrenceburg. In the the canal dropped . This a very ambitious route as it was quite steep and required the crossing of the Whitewater over an aqueduct at Laurel as well as several other streams of lesser size. The drop compares the Erie Canal which dropped but did so in . The Wabash & Erie Canal dropped in while the Chesapeake & Ohio dropped in . That meant that the Whitewater descended 6.4 feet per mile compared to the Chesapeake & Ohio at 2.9 feet per mile, the Erie at 1.7 feet per mile and the Wabash & Erie at 1 foot per mile. The steepness became a problem whenever heavy rains came.
Consequently, the burden of building canals passed to the states. The Erie Canal in New York proved to be an early success after it was completed in 1825. The Ohio House and Senate had worked for two decades to pass legislation authorizing a canal, gaining success with the Act of February 4, 1825, which finally approved the construction of the Ohio canal system. The canal was largely state-funded, using money acquired from selling off land near where the canals were to be dug. The state government planned and built two canals in the state: the Miami and Erie Canal, from Cincinnati to Toledo, connecting the Ohio River and Lake Erie; and the Ohio and Erie Canal, which connected Cleveland, another lake port, to Portsmouth. This system provided the interior of Ohio with new travel routes that effectively extended to the major Atlantic port of New York City, as merchants could ship goods through Lake Erie, the Erie Canal, and the Hudson River to New York.
Eel River Section Between Terre Haute and Worthington, is long. Legally referred to as the Cross Cut Canal. This created a link to the Central Canal and a route to Evansville. Since no other section of the Cross Cut Canal was contemplated nor built, it is considered historically to be part of the Wabash and Erie Canal. The canal had to overcome the at the summit. Water was supplied by the Eel River Feeder, the Birch Creek Reservoir and Splunge Creek Reservoir. 
Work started in 1836 but abandoned in 1839. The project was completed in 1850, serving the Wabash and Erie Canal system until 1861. The Cross Cut Canal is considered to be part of the Wabash & Erie Canal System.
As mentioned before, the route to Lake Erie afforded by the canal, following the Welland and Niagara Rivers, was difficult and slow. The Feeder connected directly to Lake Erie, but it was long, and, not intended as a ship canal, of insufficient capacity. Over the course of the canal's first full navigation season in 1830, it became evident that a more direct route was necessary.
The Walhonding Canal was a canal in Coshocton County, Ohio that was used as a feeder canal for the Ohio and Erie Canal. A small canal, at only long, it was wholly contained within Coshocton County, following the Mohican River from Cavallo south to the confluence with the Kokosing River, which together with the Mohican forms the Walhonding River. The canal followed the Walhonding River southeast toward Coshocton where it met the Ohio and Erie Canal in Roscoe Village.
Local brokerages and trading houses exchanged the agricultural commodities of farmers for currency, hardware, and trade goods brought in across Lake Erie from the East by way of the Erie Canal. The Milan Canal was deep and directly connected to Lake Erie, allowing Lake Erie schooners to transport goods to and from Milan without the use of small, shallow-draft canal boats required on other canals. The confluence the deep ship-bearing canal, the great agricultural fertility of the regional Ohio soils, and the direct access to New York markets by way of the Erie Canal made Milan a retail center from the 1830s to the early 1850s. 
However, with the advent of railroads in the 1850s, the canal-borne prosperity terminated. In 1868, the canal's feeder dam failed due to a flood, permanently ending Milan's direct connection to the lake. The original canal route can be observed and followed today along the Erie MetroParks "Huron River Greenway."
The Long Level was a section on the old Erie Canal, extending from Frankfort, New York westward to Syracuse, New York. The flat topography of this area meant that this section of the canal required no lockage. Initial construction on the Erie Canal was begun on this section at Rome, New York on July 4, 1817.
George Washington had promoted the construction of canals to provide interior transportation for the fledgling nation. Once the Erie Canal was opened in 1825, entrepreneurs promoted other canals, including the Miami and Erie Canal and the Wabash and Erie Canal. The Miami and Erie ran from Lake Erie to the Little Miami River near Cincinnati, through Paulding County, and the Wabash and Erie Canal went west into Indiana, meeting the Miami and Erie in Junction, a community in Auglaize township. The canal excitement was so great that people were leaving Fort Wayne, Indiana for Junction, feeling that it had a much brighter future. Canal workers choosing Paulding County as their tax home built the county's population to 25,000 people in 1835, a number it has never approached since.
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.
There is no Lock E1 or Lock E31 on the Erie Canal. The place of "Lock E1" on the passage from the lower Hudson River to Lake Erie is taken by the Troy Federal Lock, located just north of Troy, New York, and is not part of the Erie Canal System proper. It is operated by the United States Army Corps of Engineers.[41] The Erie Canal officially begins at the confluence of the Hudson and Mohawk rivers at Waterford, New York.
Today, the reconfiguration of the canal created during the First Enlargement is commonly referred to as the "Improved Erie Canal" or the "Old Erie Canal", to distinguish it from the canal's modern-day course. Existing remains of the 1825 canal abandoned during the Enlargement are sometimes referred to today as "Clinton's Ditch" (which was also the popular nickname for the entire Erie Canal project during its original 1817–1825 construction).
Wabash and Erie Canal Culvert #100, also known as Burnett's Creek Arch and County Bridge #181, is a historic culvert built for the Wabash and Erie Canal and located at Adams Township, Carroll County, Indiana. It was built in 1840, and is a semicircular span measuring 20 feet long, 10 feet high, and 87 feet, 6 inches wide. It is constructed of limestone slabs. The culvert now supports a county roadway.
The Beaver and Erie Canal, also known as the Erie Extension Canal, was part of the Pennsylvania Canal system and consisted of three sections: the Beaver Division, the Shenango Division, and the Conneaut Division. The canal ran north–south near the western edge of the state from the Ohio River to Lake Erie through Beaver County, Lawrence County, Mercer County, Crawford County, and Erie County, Pennsylvania.