In 1816, Philadelphia dry-goods merchants William and Maurice Wurts bought anthracite coal fields in Pennsylvania's Lackawanna Valley and began mining, but the challenge of reaching east coast markets led them, with engineers Benjamin Wright and John Jervis and financial backing from Phillip Hone and others, to create The Delaware & Hudson Canal and Gravity Railroad Company, which carried coal by train from Carbondale to Honesdale and then by water through the Lackawaxen, Delaware, Neversink, and Rondout river valleys to the Hudson River for shipment to New York. Built in three years by 2,500 workers using pick-and-shovel labor and primitive blasting techniques, the canal was a monumental engineering achievement, though construction was dangerous and many workers died in delayed blasts. Despite financial troubles, market fluctuations, floods, and an early cholera outbreak, by 1846 the Delaware & Hudson Canal had become the nation's largest private corporation, moving more than a million tons of coal a year as the country's first vertically integrated corporation, controlling both its product and its distribution. After enlargements increased its width and depth, it moved more than a thousand boats each season, each carrying 140 tons of coal, before the more economical and efficient railroad gradually drove it out of business and the canal shut down in November 1898, leaving a legacy as one of the country's greatest transportation systems and an important contributor to the development of industry in 19th-century America.