Construction of a canal was first considered by
Myles Standish of the
Plymouth Colony in 1623, and the
Pilgrims scouted the low-lying stretch of land between the Manomet and Scusset rivers for potential routes.
William Bradford established the
Aptucxet Trading Post in 1627 at the portage between the rivers. Trade prospered with the Indians of
Narragansett Bay and the Dutch of
New Netherland, and this was a major factor enabling the Pilgrims to pay off their debt. In 1697, the
General Court of Massachusetts considered the first formal proposal to build the canal but took no action. In 1717, a canal was created in
Orleans, Massachusetts called
Jeremiah's Gutter which spanned a narrower portion of the Cape some distance to the east, but it remained active only until the late 1800s. More energetic planning with surveys took place repeatedly in 1776 (commissioned by
George Washington), 1791, 1803, 1818, 1824–1830, and 1860. None of these efforts came to fruition. The first attempts at actually building a canal did not take place until the late 19th century; earlier planners either ran out of money or were overwhelmed by the project's size. The engineers finally decided which route to take through the hillsides by connecting and widening the Manomet and Scusset rivers. The first excavation began in 1880, when the Cape Cod Ship Canal Company hired 400 immigrant Italian laborers to begin digging with shovels and wheelbarrows. The effort ran out of money almost immediately, and the laborers were unpaid and forced to beg for food in
Sandwich. In 1883, the Cape Cod Ship Canal Company reorganized under engineer Frederick Lockwood. The company used a bucket dredge to clear nearly a mile of channel through the Sandwich marshes before shutting down in 1891.
Private construction On June 22, 1909, construction finally began for a working canal under the direction of
August Belmont Jr.'s Boston, Cape Cod & New York Canal Company, using designs by engineer
William Barclay Parsons. The canal engineers encountered many obstacles, such as large submerged boulders. Divers were hired to blow them up, but the effort slowed dredging. Another problem was cold winter storms which forced the engineers to stop dredging altogether and wait for spring. Nevertheless, the canal opened on a limited basis on July 29, 1914, and it was completed in 1916. The privately owned toll canal had a maximum width of and a maximum depth of , and it took a somewhat difficult route from Phinney Harbor at the head of Buzzards Bay. Several accidents occurred due to the narrow channel and navigation difficulty, and these limited traffic and tarnished the canal's reputation. Toll revenues failed to meet investors' expectations as a result, despite shortening the trade route from New York City to Boston by .
Public takeover and expansion at right On July 25, 1918, the Director General of the
United States Railroad Administration took over jurisdiction and operation of the canal under a presidential proclamation. Four days earlier, the German U-boat surfaced off
Orleans, Massachusetts on July 21, 1918, and
shelled the tugboat
Perth Amboy and her string of four barges. The canal remained under government control until 1920, during which the
United States Army Corps of Engineers re-dredged the channel to deep. In 1928, the government purchased the canal for $11.4 million as a free public waterway, and $21 million was spent between 1935 and 1940 increasing the canal's width to and its depth to . As a result, it became the widest sea-level canal of its time. The southern entrance to the canal was rebuilt for direct access from Buzzards Bay rather than through Phinney Harbor. Before construction began, the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology built a huge scale model of the canal (9 feet to a mile, roughly actual size) to study the hydraulic effects of tidal currents on the enlarged and rerouted canal.
World War II During
World War II, shipping again used the canal to avoid U-boats patrolling offshore. It was protected by coastal artillery batteries at the
Sagamore Hill Military Reservation at the northern entrance and the
Butler Point Military Reservation at the southern entrance. The artillery was never fired in defense of the canal. The
Mystic Steamship Company's collier SS
Stephen R. Jones was grounded and sank in the canal on June 28, 1942. Shipping was routed around Cape Cod, and the
Liberty ship SS
Alexander Macomb was torpedoed by the German submarine
U-215 on July 3 with the loss of ten lives. The canal reopened on July 31 after the wrecked
Stephen R. Jones was removed with the help of 17 tons of dynamite. ==Recreational uses==