Construction of the seventy-six-mile Whitewater Canal took eleven years, from 1836 to 1847, and cost nearly $1.2 million, or about $15,000 per mile in the 1840s. Chief Engineer Myron J. Webb, who wrote that he had two degrees in engineering and earned forty-seven dollars per month, worked with companions he called men of talents and respectability who were far from their native homes. A typical construction unit included thirty-one engineers, one secretary, twenty-four rodmen, twenty axmen, and nine hundred seventy-five laborers. Workers labored twelve to fifteen hours per day in summer and winter, rain or shine, while exposed to malaria, dysentery, typhoid, and cholera. They cleared trees, stumps, and bushes; dug the channel and removed dirt; broke rocks into smaller pieces and hauled them away; constructed towpaths and berms; cut and hauled timber; quarried and hauled limestone; built lock chamber masonry; and constructed aqueducts, bridges, dams, and culverts. Floods and constant expensive repairs that always exceeded revenue ultimately doomed the canal, and the last boat traveled it in 1863. Regular maintenance and repair work on a fourteen-mile section continues today by staff of the Whitewater Canal State Historic Site.