Cape Cod Ship Canal Company

Product Details

Historical Context

The construction of the Cape Cod Canal, planned since 1624, was begun in earnest in 1883-89 by Frederic Lockwood's Cape Cod Ship Canal Company, which succeeded in excavating a 7,000-foot ditch before going bankrupt. The Cape Cod Ship Canal Company was originally incorporated in 1880, but ran out of money multiple times, resulting in a number of reincorporations before work actually started in 1883.

In 1899 the company's rights were acquired by the Boston, Cape Cod & New York Canal Company, backed, and later acquired, by the New York city subway builder, August Belmont.

The 8-mile canal , engineered by William Barclay Parsons, formerly civil engineer on the Panama Canal Commission, opened for business as a toll route. Three drawbridges, high tolls, shallow depth, and narrow width all discouraged the traffic by which Belmont hoped to make the canal pay.

Despite a toll of as much as $16 for vessels, August Belmont's canal quickly became a money loser. The canal could not accommodate ships with a depth of more than 15 feet, and its swift currents and narrow width further discouraged use by larger ships.

By 1915, Belmont attempted to sell the Cape Cod Canal to the Federal government. The Federal Railroad Administration acquired the canal three years later toward the end of World War I after a German submarine fired on an American tugboat, the Perth Amboy, three miles off the coast of Nauset Beach, Cape Cod.

Improvements later followed, as the landmark Bourne and Sagamore highway bridges over the Canal were completed in Bourne in 1935, as was the monumental Buzzard's Bay vertical-lift railroad bridge. In 1936, dredging to widen and deepen the canal removed ten million cubic yards of earth.

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