J. Breen, president of the Middlesex Canal Association, will talk on the significance of the canal as part of an interstate water highway essential to the Industrial Revolution in Massachusetts.

The Corporation was chartered in 1793 to build a 27-mile canal between the Charles River at Boston and the Merrimack River at what became Lowell. It was built 30′ wide, 3½’ deep minimum, had 8 aqueducts, 20 locks, and 50 bridges. The Secretary of the Treasury described it as the greatest work of its kind in the United States in an 1808 report to the Senate. The Corporation was liquidated in 1853 after the one-horse canal boat lost the competition with the railroad. The first locomotive of the Boston & Lowell was rated 30 horsepower.

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