In 1807 Jesse Hawley, a prisoner in the Canandaigua jail, wrote essays proposing a waterway from Lake Erie to the Atlantic Ocean. After the War of 1812, settlement in western New York and Ohio increased demand for better transportation to carry manufactured goods and produce to and from the west. With the sponsorship of DeWitt Clinton, the state legislature approved an artificial waterway. Construction began in Rome on July 4th, 1817, and on October 26, 1825, the packet boat Seneca Chief traveled from Buffalo to Sandy Hook as cannons roared along the route. Within 10 years more than 3000 boats worked the canal, including fast packet boats carrying passengers, heavily laden freighters, and line boats carrying mixed cargo. Travel time between Buffalo and New York fell from 6 weeks to 10 days, and the canal operated 7 to 9 months of the year, 24 hours a day, with a maximum speed limit of 4 miles an hour. By 1835 traffic had grown enough to require widening the canal to 70 feet. As part of continuing construction, the Centreport Aqueduct was built in 1854 to carry the canal over Cold Spring Brook. The improved canal brought increased prosperity to the area it served as businessmen, tourists, and immigrants moved west with manufactured goods while grain, coal, lumber, and other raw materials traveled east. In 1917 the Erie Canal was replaced by the New York State Barge Canal System, ending an important era of New York State history. It was the most ambitious public works project of its time, helped lead a national canal movement, and by the beginning of the Civil War had politically and economically joined the agricultural Mid-West and the Industrial East, helping cast New York in its role as the Empire State.