In 1823 William and Maurice Wurts, dry goods merchants from Philadelphia, conceived the canal as an efficient overland route to transport anthracite coal which had been discovered in Carbondale, Pennsylvania to the Hudson River. They believed the coal would be vital in the development and construction of New York City and after a demonstration of the coal in New York a group of investors founded the Delaware and Hudson Canal company. It took 2500 men and 200 teams of horses to build the canal through 108 miles of wilderness. It opened in 1828 at an approximate cost of 1.2 million dollars, an engineering marvel in pre-industrial America. It remained in service until 1899 when the introduction of the railroads rendered it obsolete, although sections of the canal remained in use into the twentieth century. While primarily intended to transport coal, other goods were moved through the canal such as cement which was discovered at Rosendale and was used in the construction of many civil engineering projects such as canal locks and bridge foundations because of its ability to dry underwater. Bluestone used in the construction of New York’s streets was also transported via the canal.

These important developments in the discovery transportation and use of materials and the building and subsequent enlarging of the canal (3 times between 1842 and 1848) connected the areas along the routes of the Lackawaxen and Delaware rivers. Communities grew up along the route of the canal, often named after those who worked on it such as Port Jervis and Wurtsboro. The canal not only developed and joined the local region but in a wider sense connected its settlements and its people to the growth of New York City, Canada and the wider world. It was this sense of connection that we wanted to discover through hiking the landscape and the route of the canal, joining in our minds the now broken and disjointed remains of what was once a unifying life line through the cultural and actual landscape.