The Cape Cod Canal Turns 100 | New England By the Numbers
1623 year Myles Standish proposed creating a canal separating Cape Cod from the Massachusetts mainland for safer, more efficient travel 291Get Our FREE Yankee Best New England Vacations Guide! Email(Required) Subscribe years until the canal finally opened:July 29, 1914 600+ number of people who drowned in those shipwrecks Fourteen Thousand boats now passing through the […]
By Grim Andrew|Aug 22 2014|
Cape Cod Canal Bridge
Credit: Kenneth Wiedemann/Istockphoto
Credit: Kenneth Wiedemann/Istockphoto
1623
year Myles Standish proposed creating a canal separating Cape Cod from the Massachusetts mainland for safer, more efficient travel
291
years until the canal finally opened:July 29, 1914
600+
number of people who drowned in those shipwrecks
Fourteen Thousand
boats now passing through the canal every year
1,750
number of ships wrecked while sailing around the Cape in the 50 years before the canal opened
100×25
feet: the canal’s original width and depth, too narrow and shallow for many ships to pass through
700
number of jobs created during the Great Depression for further construction and improvements
$11,990,000
cost of the canal’s construction in 1914
$21 million
amount spent by the U.S. government between 1935 and 1940 on widening and deepening the canal
20,000,000
cubic yards of earth removed to open the canal in 1914
