Wabash & Erie Canal Park in Delphi, Indiana

Per Atlas Obscura, the Wabash and Erie Canal Park in Delphi, Indiana, offers twelve interactive galleries and an 1850s pioneer village documenting a waterway that reshaped the state. Built starting in eighteen thirty-two primarily by Irish immigrant workers, the canal stretched four hundred sixty-eight miles and reached Delphi in eighteen forty, where three mules pulled boats at five to six miles per hour. By that same year, Indiana's population had surged from roughly three hundred fifty thousand to nearly one million. The waterway's deepest irony: it hastened its own demise by hauling the railroad materials that would eventually replace it, with the last boat passing through in eighteen seventy-four.

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