1To George Washington from Elkanah Watson, 10 February 1797 (Washington Papers)
...three miles of canals were in place on the Mohawk River, at Little Falls and at German Flats, N.Y., by 1798. In 1812, the state of New York took over the company as part of the Erie Canal project (see
2To James Madison from Arthur Breese, 11 April 1794 (Madison Papers)
...Western Inland Lock Navigation Company, which planned improvements on the Mohawk River. The company’s early efforts, directed by Philip Schuyler, were unsuccessful (Nathan Miller, “Private Enterprise in Inland Navigation: The Mohawk Route prior to the Erie Canal,”
3To George Washington from the Commissioners for the District of Columbia, 11–12 March 1793 (Washington Papers)
...the first surveyor general of American territory south of Tennessee in 1803 and mapped the first public mail route between the Federal City and New Orleans. He spent the last years of his life working as chief engineer on the Erie Canal. Briggs wrote a letter to the commissioners on 12 Jan. 1793 defending Ellicott (