Coordinates: 38°16′18″N 85°46′46″W / 38.27170°N 85.77940°W / 38.27170; -85.77940 The Louisville and Portland Canal was a 2-mile (3.2 km) canal bypassing the Falls of the Ohio in the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky. It opened in 1830, and was operated by the Louisville and Portland Canal Company until 1874, and became the McAlpine Locks and Dam in 1962 after extensive modernization.
Although initially a private company, construction of the canal required heavy investment from the federal government, which gradually came to own the canal through an unusual buyout plan. The canal represented the first major improvement to be successfully completed on a major river of the United States.
Read more about Louisville And Portland Canal: Background, Precursors, Formation, Government Buyout, Obsolescence, Economic Impact, Improvements
Famous quotes containing the words portland and/or canal:
“It is said that a carpenter building a summer hotel here ... declared that one very clear day he picked out a ship coming into Portland Harbor and could distinctly see that its cargo was West Indian rum. A county historian avers that it was probably an optical delusion, the result of looking so often through a glass in common use in those days.”
—For the State of New Hampshire, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“My impression about the Panama Canal is that the great revolution it is going to introduce in the trade of the world is in the trade between the east and the west coast of the United States.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)