<P> Packet boats, measuring up to seventy - eight feet in length and fourteen and a half feet across, made ingenious use of space, in order to accommodate up to forty passengers at night and up to three times as many in the daytime . The best examples, furnished with carpeted floors, stuffed chairs, and mahogany tables stocked with current newspapers and books, served as sitting rooms during the days . At mealtimes, crews transformed the cabin into dining rooms . Drawing a curtain across the width of the room divided the cabin into ladies' and gentlemen's sleeping quarters in the evening hours . Pull - down tiered beds folded from the walls, and additional cots could be hung from hooks in the ceiling . Some captains hired musicians and held dances . The canal had brought civilization into the wilderness . </P> <P> The men who planned and oversaw construction were novices as surveyors and as engineers . There were no civil engineers in the United States . James Geddes and Benjamin Wright, who laid out the route, were judges whose experience in surveying was in settling boundary disputes . Geddes had only used a surveying instrument for a few hours before his work on the Canal . Canvass White was a 27 - year - old amateur engineer who persuaded Clinton to let him go to Britain at his own expense to study the canal system there . Nathan Roberts was a mathematics teacher and land speculator . Yet these men "carried the Erie Canal up the Niagara escarpment at Lockport, maneuvered it onto a towering embankment to cross over Irondequoit Creek, spanned the Genesee River on an awesome aqueduct, and carved a route for it out of the solid rock between Little Falls and Schenectady--and all of those venturesome designs worked precisely as planned". (Bernstein, p. 381) </P> <P> Construction began July 4, 1817, at Rome, New York . The first 15 miles (24 km), from Rome to Utica, opened in 1819 . At that rate, the canal would not be finished for 30 years . The main delays were caused by felling trees to clear a path through virgin forest and moving excavated soil, which took longer than expected, but the builders devised ways to solve these problems . To fell a tree, they threw rope over the top branches and winched it down . They pulled out the stumps with an innovative stump puller . A pair of huge wheels were mounted loose on an axle . A large wheel, barely smaller than the others, was fixed to the center of the axle . A chain was wrapped around the axle and hooked to the stump . A rope was wrapped around the center wheel and hooked to a team of oxen . The mechanical advantage (torque) obtained ripped the stumps out of the soil . Soil to be moved was shoveled into large wheelbarrows that were dumped into mule - pulled carts . Using a scraper and a plow, a three - man team with oxen, horses, and mules could build a mile in a year . </P> <P> The remaining problem was finding labor; increased immigration helped fill the need . Many of the laborers working on the canal were Irish, who had recently come to the United States as a group of about 5,000 from Ireland, most of whom were Roman Catholic, a religion that raised much suspicion in early America due to its hierarchic structure, and many laborers on the canal suffered violent assault as the result of misjudgment and xenophobia . </P>

Where did they start digging the erie canal