Perhaps you sang it in music class in elementary school, but “Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal” is not a song about a pet mule. This song commemorates a time in the Erie Canal’s History when mule barges were a common way of moving products down the canal. Later, like in most of the United States, steam became the best way to perform this task.

Building the World Blog by Kathleen Lusk Brooke and Zoe G Quinn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.