The opening of the Erie Canal transformed New York State's economy by cutting shipping costs from $100.00 per ton by wagon to just a few dollars and opening previously inaccessible markets. Along the canal route, land values doubled and villages rose quickly. Edward, Elihu, and Walter Weed settled in Auburn and in 1818 built a basin north of the city near the present center of Weedsport, with docks, repair facilities, and freight warehouses, and a village soon grew around Weed's Basin that later became Weedsport. The village's early boom lasted until 1841, when the new Auburn-Syracuse Railroad brought direct competition with Auburn, leaving once-full warehouses empty; although Weedsport regained its former traffic after about a decade, its growth had slowed. Canal access also encouraged manufacturing, and in Weedsport the production of women's garments became especially important through the work of A.E. Rheubottom, who began making a patented hoop skirt before 1871 with a single machine and little capital. His successful business sold as far away as Hawaii and led to additional firms, while other garment factories, including Skadan, Kerns & Co., Mitchell & Mack, Crotty & Mitchell, Weedsport Skirt & Waist Co., the Ginsburg Bros., Inc., and the Vulcan Knitting Mills, employed hundreds of local residents. After a disastrous fire at the Crotty & Mitchell Skirt Factory in 1898 put more than 150 people out of work, and as the industry declined, Weedsport's garment trade faded; though the village was known as "the shirt village" from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries, its last surviving businesses closed during the Depression of the 1930s.