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.
Read more about this topic: Middlesex Canal
Famous quotes containing the word conception:
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“Every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)
“The philosopher’s conception of things will, above all, be truer than other men’s, and his philosophy will subordinate all the circumstances of life. To live like a philosopher is to live, not foolishly, like other men, but wisely and according to universal laws.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)