A cent and a half a mile, a mile and a half an hour. —slogan of the Erie Canal builders, Panel 29, 1956, Jacob Lawrence, from Struggle: From the History of the American People, 1954–56, location and inscription unknown, © 2019 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
This illustration is from one of Lawrence’s source books and depicts the Erie Canal after it was built, and it does not focus on the intensely collaborative efforts required of a diverse workforce to trench the land between the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes region. Lawrence excerpted the panel’s title caption from this page, but he painted a very different image.