Middlesex Canal - Conception

Conception

In the years following the American Revolutionary War, the young United States began a period of economic expansion away from the coast. Because of extremely poor roads, the cost of bringing goods such as lumber and fur to the coast could be quite high. Up and down the Atlantic coast, companies were formed to develop canals as comparatively inexpensive means to bring goods from the interior of the country to the coast, and to send imported goods into the interior.

In Massachusetts several ideas were proposed for bringing goods to the principal port of Boston. A group of leading Massachusetts businessmen and politicians proposed a connection from the Merrimack River to Boston Harbor in 1793. The Middlesex Canal Corporation was chartered on June 22, 1793 with a signature by Governor John Hancock. Hancock was also among the investors who purchased shares, along with other luminaries such as John Adams, John Quincy Adams, James Sullivan, and Christopher Gore. Sullivan was chosen company president, and its vice president and eventual chief engineer was Loammi Baldwin, a native of Woburn who had attended science lectures at Harvard College and was a friend of physicist Benjamin Thompson.