For centuries, this passageway served travelers and traders, first among Native Americans, who used the waterways for trade and shared their routes with French explorers who first envisioned a canal here. From 1836 to 1848, immigrant workers dug the ninety-six-mile Illinois and Michigan Canal by hand, creating a water route between New York harbor and the Gulf of Mexico that helped make Chicago the country's greatest inland port. After the canal opened in 1848, local farming changed as grain elevators rose along the canal, allowing farmers to bring grain to nearby markets instead of hauling it long distances over rough dirt roads; in the mid-1800s, the Hogan Grain Elevator handled hundreds of thousands of bushels of grain each day, with as many as four hundred wagonloads weighed, sorted, and moved by canal boat. The fertile land around Seneca produced corn, wheat, oats, and barley from the time the canal opened, and the Hogan Grain Elevator, the oldest surviving nineteenth-century elevator on the Illinois and Michigan Canal, has been restored. The canal closed in 1933 as larger man-made waterways, railroads, and highways replaced it, and today the Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor welcomes travelers to parks, trails, canal towns, and landmarks along this historic route.