John Hancock in 1793 signed the act incorporating the Middlesex Canal Company. He was the first proprietor of the Middlesex Canal The canal was "the greatest work of the kind that has been completed in the United States." So wrote Albert Gallatin, US Secretary of Treasury, in his 1808 report to Congress. The canal by connecting Boston with the Merrimack River would make possible by ease of transportation as far as Concord NH similar prosperity as New York City derived from the Hudson and Philadelphia from the Delaware. (The execrable roads had nothing of the slitheriness of a waterway: a horse and wagon could haul two tons, a horse and canal boat twenty tons.)

As soon as the digging was completed in 1803, a glass factory was operating where the canal entered the Merrimack with boats bringing sand from New Jersey to be melted at 2,400 degrees by burning the forests of New Hampshire, floated to the factory as rafts on the river. Window glass was shipped for use at Monticello. The head of the canal at the Merrimack River became Lowell's Middlesex Village.

Medford ship building, which built 400 ocean-going ships, and Medford's rum distilleries used the canal for lumber and fuel from New Hampshire. Somerville's brick kilns burned the forests of New Hampshire. Woburn's tanneries were based where tanbark from New Hampshire was delivered by canal. Woburn's Horn Pond developed as a playground for Boston with comfortable, convenient travel on the canal. Lowell was founded where tons of cotton could be transported inexpensively by canal, making Lowell the eighteenth largest city in the United States in 1840. In sum, the canal was the waterway by which Middlesex County prospered.

The Middlesex Canal Association was founded in 1962 as the result of a rousing talk on the canal at an October 1961 meeting of the Billerica Historical Society. Since then the Middlesex Canal has been added to the National Register of Historic Places, Massachusetts has established a Middlesex Canal Commission with the goal of a Middlesex Canal Heritage Park, a link between Boston and Lowell National Historic Parks. The association has a 4400 sq. ft. visitor center at the summit pond of the canal at the Billerica Falls of the Concord River, open 100 days/year. The association has walks, co-sponsored by the Appalachian Mountain Club, talks, and bike tours of the canal each year. The J.M.R. Barker Foundation has supported the association with a $10,000 grant for a children's educational program.

New York state will celebrate the bicentennial of the Erie Canal next year. The Middlesex Canal Association celebrated in 2003 the bicentennial of completion of the Middlesex Canal, fourteen years before the Erie will celebrate its beginning. For the 55 years since its founding, the association volunteers have worked as prayed by the proprietors of the canal at the groundbreaking on the banks of the Concord River summit pond to "benefit present and all Future Generations." Towpath Topics, the journal of the association, now at volume 55, is a record of the accomplishments of the volunteers of the association.

The Cummings Foundation should make a major grant to the Middlesex Canal Association because the canal (1) made possible the prosperity of Middlesex County from John Hancock in 1793 upto the arrival of the iron horse in 1835 and (2) it has a future as a Commonwealth of Massachusetts Middlesex Heritage Park. And because the association should be (3) rewarded for 55 years walks, talks, and education for the public and (4) to support its next half century of service.

www.middlesexcanal.org