Somewhere around here I have book about the building of the Erie Canal.
The Erie was also dug by hand which had to be a monstrous undertaking
going all across the top of New York from Albany to Buffalo. But the
most amazing part to me was that they were crossing heavily forested
ground and had to remove all the trees (including stumps and roots).
The solution was supposedly concocted by some of the workers and not the
project engineers (actually, there weren't any professional engineers in
New York at that date). The solution for getting rid of the stumps was
to literally rip them out of the ground with a device consisting of a
thick axle made from a heavy log to which a wheel was attached at each
end. The wheels, IIRC, were about 20 feet (6 meters) in diameter. Then
a chain was attached to the axle and to the stump. Teams of 2-4 oxen
would pull on the device causing the wheels to rotate and the axle to
turn. That in turn caused the chain to wind up on the axle and pull the
stump out. They must have pulled many, many thousands of trees this way.
On 5/8/2012 12:34 PM, Paul Braun wrote:
> It amazes me that men, mostly Irish immigrants, could dig something like
> that all with hand tools. It was hard, brutal work.
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