Of Canals and the Men Who Built Them. . .Loammi Baldwin

westmohney
Aug 4, 2024
9 min read

Updated: Jul 14, 2025

. . .the greatest work of its kind that has been completed in the United States ~ U.S. Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin's comment on the Middlesex Canal

Loammi after the war

Our cousin Loammi Baldwin (3C7X) resigned from the military in 1777, citing ill health. He would, however, go on to live 30 more fruitful years. Back in Woburn, Loammi represented his town in the General Court for three years, 1778-80. William Richard Cutter, a historian from Woburn says of Loammi that he "was, in his public career, appointed on many committees on important town business; the records of the town and many autographic town papers are ample evidence of this. He was appointed high sheriff of Middlesex county in 1780, and was the first to hold office after the adoption of the state constitution."

In 1782, Loammi was elected a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences which was founded in 1780 by John Adams and John Hancock, among others. Loammi contributed two papers to the Academy. The first, "An Account of a Curious Appearance of the Electrical Fluid" was an explanation of an experiment he had done ala Ben Franklin with a kite in a thunder shower. Loammi wrote that his parents, family and neighbors all witnessed the "electrical effect" he produced. The second paper, "Observations on Electricity and an Improved Mode of Constructing Lightning Rods" was published in 1797.

In addition to his two scientific papers, Loammi also wrote a sketch on his friend Benjamin Thompson, aka Count Rumford (3C7X), which was published in a local paper. Ben would also be elected to the Academy in 1789 as a Foreign Honorary member.

In 1790, Loammi was elected as one of the officers for the Academy. His name appears on the alphabetical list just after those of Samuel and John Adams.

state issued currency

By 1780, the Continental Currency issued by the United States was virtually worthless. The federal government, in an effort to salvage the economy, encouraged the states to issue their own currency as they had done in the past. Massachusetts issued £394,000 of their own paper money. To prevent counterfeiting, Benjamin Franklin had devised a paper containing flakes of mica and threads of blue silk. The state of Massachusetts adopted this paper for their currency. All of the paper money was signed by two or three men, usually "well recognized upstanding citizens." Cousin Loammi was one of the men chosen to sign the currency and he ended up signing many thousands of them.

Because of the extreme inflation at the the time, these Massachusetts state notes weren't in circulation for very long. Many of them are still around today and in very good condition. Below are two examples of paper money that Loammi signed:

family life

Sadly, In 1786, Loammi lost his wife, our cousin Mary Fowle (3C7X). Mary was 39 when she died leaving her husband with five children ranging in age from 13 to 4. It wasn't until five years later that the bereaved widower married again, this time to our cousin Margery Fowle (5C6X). It's just possible that when Loammi married Margery in January of 1791, she was in the family way. Their daughter was born only seven months later in December of 1791.

Loammi's wives, both Fowles, were 3rd cousins. Also, both of his wives were cousins of ours through different families, Mary through the Wyman's and Margery through the Richardsons. Woburn was filled with Baldwins, Wymans, Symonds and Richardsons who all intermarried extensively.

Loammi had five children with his first wife, Mary and two with Margery.

the Baldwin apple

Loammi wasn't the first to either cultivate or discover the Baldwin apple. He was simply the person who brought it to the public's attention. Surveyor Samuel Thompson, who was a neighbor of Loammi's, came across an apple tree in the town of Wilmington, MA. He brought home some of the apples and a few twigs from the tree. According to Thompson's grandson's account, he "gave some to Colonel Baldwin. . . who valued them so highly that he went into them deeply, and spread them broadcast among his friends, who, having no name for them, gave them his name."

From the grafts he received from Thompson, Loammi set out his own orchard of 144 trees. The Baldwin apple became, for many years, the most popular in New England. The original tree remained in the pasture where it was discovered until 1815 when "it was blown down in the famous 'September Gale.'” A monument, shown below, marks the site of the first Baldwin apple tree:

Our cousin Rufus Kittredge, (5C5X) seemed to be somewhat knowledgeable about the origin of the first tree. In a letter to the Reverend Leander Thompson he wrote:

The original tree grew on the farm of my grandfather. . .He cleared up a small lot, on which he erected buildings. This tree came up not long after in the lane leading from the house to the barn. My father, the late Dr. Benjamin Kittredge (4C6X), who was born in the year 1742. . .said it was a large tree when he was a lad; that it was not engrafted. . .that it was, to use his expression, "the mother of them all."

The apple was confined to that neighborhood for many years when the late Colonel Baldwin, of Woburn, became acquainted with it. He at once perceived its great excellence and Brough tit into general notice.

The original tree was alive. . .in the summer of 1817. In 1832. . .I visited the spot where it once stood, but found it had disappeared. It was a very high tree, by far the highest apple tee I have ever seen. . .Yours truly, Rufus Kittredge, Portsmouth, September 8, 1835.

In 2013, the United States Postal service honored four historic apple strains with their own 33 cent stamps, the Baldwin apple included.

The Baldwin apple "is a bright red winter apple, very good in quality, and easily shipped."

the Middlesex Canal

Jeduthan wasn't the only engineer of note in the Baldwin family. Jeduthan's (and our) cousin Loammi may have had a life filled with notable achievements but his crowning achievement was his role in the construction of the Middlesex Canal. The canal, which was built under Loammi's supervision, ran 27 miles from the town of Lowell all the way to Boston.

Since poor roads and "untamed" rivers made transporting goods across the state so expensive, the idea of a canal was supported by a number of important men in Massachusetts. The charter to begin work was signed by Massachusetts governor John Hancock on June 22, 1793. Hancock, along with John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams also invested in the project which, in the end, cost about $500,000, an "enormous sum" in those days.

In August of 1793, Loammi began surveying the canal route, aided by his teenage sons and British engineer William Weston.

The canal, which took ten years to complete, was one of the first civil engineering projects of that type in the United States. Some of the land along the 27 mile route was donated and the rest either purchased or taken by eminent domain which was a new concept at that time. The water sources were the Concord River in North Billerica "with additional water to be drawn as needed from Horn Pond in Woburn.

Note: Our immigrant grandfather Thomas Richardson (9GGF) settled on land very close to Horn Pond in the 1630s. A street directly adjacent to the Pond is named Richardson St. after Thomas and his brothers, Ezekiel and Samuel.

In 1782, one of Grandpa Thomas' great-great-grandsons, Thomas Richardson (3C7X), was fortunate enough to purchase mill property in Billerica which lay right in the line of the future canal. Cousin Thomas, a wealthy man who owned over 200 acres of farmland, was described as "a man of worth and piety." In 1794, The Middlesex Canal Company bought Thomas' mill property at a total cost of $6,265. It was on this bit of land that the company's first blacksmith shop was built to aid in the construction of the canal.

Another piece of property purchased by the Canal company was seven acres belonging to "William Rogers, gentleman." This property was originally owned by William's great-great grandfather, John Rogers and John's next-door neighbor, our infamous uncle Roger Toothaker (8U) who died in prison after being accused of witchcraft. In 1795, 3 years after Roger's death, Natives raided the Rogers and Toothaker properties, killing Roger's wife and daughter, Margaret (1C9X). The Rogers family then acquired the Toothaker property.

The map below shows the location of Thomas Richardson's property with a line from Richardson's Mill and Canal Maintenance Shops. Uncle Roger's property is listed under Toothaker Tavern directly below the word TEWKSBURY even though it appears that the Toothakers never owned a tavern. The black line is the canal and the blue in the Concord River.

The New England Historical Society's article "The Middlesex Canal, New England's Incredible Ditch" had this to say about Loammi's role:

Baldwin, the Middlesex Canal’s chief engineer, found innovative solutions to the problems encountered along the way. He developed hydraulic cement to make waterproof bindings for the locks by mixing ground volcanic stone with lime and sand. He built a floating towpath of logs to span the Concord River, and he engineered a 188-foot wooden aqueduct to carry the canal over the Shawsheen River. Baldwin also designed an early predecessor of the dump truck, a dump cart, to remove earth from the dig sites.

Two of the three original incorporators of the canal were related to us, Loammi and our cousin Samuel Swan, Jr. (4C7X).

a working canal

Water was first diverted into the canal in December of 1800. To celebrate the event, Loammi held a "gala ball" at his mansion in Woburn. Below is a drawing of the canal with Loammi's home in the background.

Below is a picture of the house Loammi built as it looks today. It was moved from it's original location and now sits closer to the canal that he built.

Beginning on the Merrimack River in Lowell about a mile above Pawtucket Falls, the canal then traveled southeast for thirty-one miles, ending at Charlestown, near Boston. On the map below, which runs north to south, Lowell is on the far left and Charlestown on the far right.

The canal, used by "lumbermen, quarrymen and farmers, merchants, leather industry, textile mills," led to a sharp increase in the movement of products. While a wagon and team of oxen could haul about three tons, a canal barge could haul ten times that amount. It only took 18 hours to get from Boston to Lowell and "[b]oats as long as 75 feet could be poled, rowed and even sailed down the river, then pulled by horses along the canal."

The Middlesex Canal so revolutionized the transport of goods across Massachusetts that its design was studied by engineers working on other major canal projects such as the Erie Canal. Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin called it "the greatest work of its kind that has been completed in the United States." Another person paying close attention to Loammi's work was our cousin Samuel Blodgett (2C8X) who was working on a canal of his own. We'll have his story in our next post.

closure and legacy

A plan for the Boston and Lowell Railroad to run parallel to the canal was proposed in 1836. Ironically, the surveyor for the project was Loammi's son, Loammi Jr. (4C6X). In mapping the railroad, he used the original survey done for the canal.

The building of the railroad essentially rendered the canal obsolete. In 1851, after fifty years of operation, the Middlesex Canal collected its last toll and by 1853 had completely ceased operations except for mills that operated on its banks.

Today, only remnants of the canal still survive, most of it buried under roads and parking lots. The Middlesex Canal Association was formed in 1962 to try and preserve and celebrate what's left. The Association may have been instrumental in getting the American Society of Civil Engineers to designate the canal a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1967. The Association also runs the Middlesex Canal Museum and Visitor Center in North Billerica and has plans for a Canal Park behind the Woburn Library. If enough money can be raised, the Association hopes to build a canal dock building like that shown in the Louis Linscott painting shown below:

The Middlesex Canal was the last major project of Loammi's Baldwin's life. He died at age 63, seven years after the canal's completion.

In 1915, a Woburn newspaper ran this article:

The unique and comprehensive collection of scientific books, formerly the property of Col. Loammi Baldwin, the "Father of civil engineering in America," and later added to by his son, Loammi Baldwin, also a noted consulting engineer, has been donated by the Woburn Public Library to the Mass. Ins. Of Tech. The collection comprises 22,000 volumes and is considered one of the most complete of old-time scientific libraries. These books were bequeatherd to the Woburn Library by the late Catherine R. Griffiths (5C5X), daughter of George R. Baldwin (4C6X), a lineal descendant of the eminent engineer.