Jesse Hawley was a flour merchant in Geneva, New York who became an early and major proponent of building of the Erie Canal. Look up flour in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Merchants function as professionals who deal with trade, dealing in commodities that they do not produce themselves, in order to produce profit. ... Geneva is a city located in Ontario County, New York, USA. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 13,617. ... The Erie Canal (currently part of the New York State Canal System) is a canal in New York State, United States, that runs from the Hudson River to Lake Erie, connecting the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean. ...

Struggling to receive shipments and make deliveries over the wretched roadways of the era, Hawley imagined the canal as early as 1805. Eventually, in 1807, Hawley's difficulties in securing reasonably priced transportation drove him to debtors prison for twenty months. While in prison, writing under the name Hercules, he published fourteen essays on the idea of the canal from the Hudson river to Lake Erie; they appeared in the Genesee Messenger. For other uses, see Debt (disambiguation). ... The Hudson River, called Muh-he-kun-ne-tuk in Mahican, is a river running mainly through New York State but partly forming the boundary between the states of New York and New Jersey. ... Lake Erie, looking southward from a high rural bluff near Leamington, Ontario Lake Erie (pronounced ) is one of the five large freshwater Great Lakes in North America, which are among the largest in the world. ...

Considering his modest education and lack of formal training as an engineer or surveyor, Hawley's writing was remarkable; he pulled together a wealth of information necessary to the project, provided detailed analysis of the problems to be solved, and wrote with great eloquence and foresight on the importance the canal would have to the state and to the nation. Though they were deemed the ravings of a madman by some, Hawley's essays were to prove immensely influential on the development of the canal. Look up engineer in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Surveying is concerned with the application of mathematics and physics in obtaining accurate measurements for the determination of the position of points on the Earths surface. ...

Sources

• Bernstein, Peter L., (2005), Wedding of the Waters, W.W. Norton & Company, New York.

External links

• The Essays of "Hercules"
• Memoir of De Witt Clinton Section regarding the value of Hawley's ideas.
• John Rutherford, 1760-1840, Facts and observations in relation to the origin and completion of the Erie Canal
• U.S. Canal timeline, 1800s