The Erie Canal was a 363 mile long, 40 foot wide, 7 foot deep waterway built from 1817 to 1825 that connected Lake Erie with the Hudson River and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean, accelerating westward migration, fostering thriving communities along its route, and helping transform New York into the Empire State. Built without professional engineers, it required massive excavations, dams, locks, bridges, and aqueducts completed with dynamite, hand tools, and the labor of people and animals, and many of these feats were accomplished in the Tonawandas. To accommodate mule-drawn barges, the route between Tonawanda and Lake Erie used the flattest terrain, paralleling the Niagara River. At the canal's western end, a wooden dam across the mouth of Tonawanda Creek raised the water level by four feet, improving navigation on the creek and allowing water to feed the manmade channel to Buffalo, but the elevated water level also caused severe spring flooding. State engineers dug the State Ditch from Ellicott Creek through town to the river to control the flooding, but it failed to solve the problem, and large areas of the city continued to be overwhelmed until the dam was removed in 1918. With little to stabilize the canal banks, repair work, dredging, and debris removal were continually necessary, much of it done during winter, and bridges carried land traffic over the canal at Main, Seymour, Bouck, and Gibson Streets. In 1896, an attempt to electrify canal transportation used an overhead cable system to tow barges by an electric motor called the electric mule from Tonawanda to Buffalo, but the motor and operator often caused the cable to sag, the system proved unreliable, and it was abandoned. By the 1920s, steam powered ships could master the Niagara River's current, and this section of the canal was abandoned.