Block · one region of the page, as the scanner read it. It may hold a whole story, part of one, several, or an advertisement; stitching blocks into articles is the next step. Text is supplied OCR.
Page 8 · column 6 of 9 · from the scan, no model involved
reports Trout, but Ficklin made a sketch and submitted it to the Board of Public Works in 1850. From this sketch, most of the lock, dam and canal sites have been rediscovered.
By early winter in 1850, Ficklin reported that 250 laborers were at work on all but one of the eight sites. At first it was difficult to find enough laborers in the sparsely-populated, agriculture-oriented community, but waves of Irish immigrants in this country due to the potato famine in Ireland followed American canal construction and Trout assumes that some of them eventually found their way into Ficklin’s crews. The 1850 census lists a number of Irish laborers living in the county, but at quite a distance from any of the construction sites.
Ficklin was a good organizer and he was able to report, in 1851, “the improvement is so far ad
96.0%