THE Erie Canal was born in 1825 and still lives. The Morris Canal opened six years later but had stopped functioning by 1929, and all that remains today are a few stretches -- at Boonton, Clifton and Wharton, for example -- and the mass of memorabilia on view here, at the Macculloch Hall Historical Museum.
This Georgian pile was erected in 1810 by George Macculloch, a prosperous businessman who had arrived in this country a few years earlier. His business had to do with banking and overseas trade and, evidently, his reason for immigrating was the economic inconvenience caused by the Napoleonic wars.
Once settled in Morristown, Macculloch plunged into local life, opening a school and, though a Presbyterian, assisting in the building of St. Peter's Episcopal Church. His chief contribution, however, was promoting the Morris Canal, for which he invoked nature as a justification.
She "seems really to have intended it," Macculloch wrote in Morristown's newspaper, The Palladium of Liberty, "by holding out every facility in the form and texture of the ground," the position of the water and its abundance. The big capitalist in the sky had even provided the incentive of minerals -- the iron, zinc, copper, black lead and lime that lay along the route the canal was to take, a route that led to the Delaware, Pennsylvania and the coal needed to process these elements.
It was 1822 and the United States, having lost three years to the War of 1812, was scrambling to catch up with England in the rush to industrialization. This meant implementing the recommendations in "Roads and Canals," a report by Jefferson's Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin.
The notion of Manifest Destiny cannot have been alien to Macculloch, for he had been born in India (1775), the son of an East India Company officer. Orphaned nine years later, the boy was sent home to Scotland, where he was educated -- unusually well, from the sound of it.
Macculloch, the family man, is covered in a booklet put out by the museum; the general focus is on the entrepreneur, along with his friends in high places. These included DeWitt Clinton, who, as Governor of New York, pushed vigorously for the Erie Canal, and James Renwick, a science and engineering professor at Columbia College and father of the architect of the same name.
Among the likenesses is one of Robert Fulton attributed, perhaps optimistically, to Benjamin West. Though he had died in 1815, Fulton is present as an eminence grise, notably by way of his illustrated treatise on canal navigation (1796) and the inclined plane invention that it includes. A powerful influence on waterway design the world over, this was a Rube Goldberg portage whereby cars or "cradles" mounted on rails were loaded with boats at one level and, attached to cables operated by water-powered machinery, hauled up to the next level.
The canal ran first from Newark, later Jersey City, to Philipsburg, on the Delaware, a distance of 102 miles. Approached from the eastern end, it climbed 914 feet -- to Lake Hopatcong -- and from the west, 760 feet, an accomplishment that called for 23 planes and 23 locks.
They are the best part of the show, these photographs of the equipment, the craft and the people who made a living from the canal. Unlike the present era, the machine age provided jobs in abundance and, for the "water gypsies," shelter, too. An entertaining picture features two small children chained to a boat's superstructure. The alternative, illustrated by a Harpers Monthly cartoon of 1860, was "Child Overboard."
The boat captains came in all types: the bewhiskered "Billy Black" Maccullough is captioned "the wildest kind of Irishman"; but, alas, he finally settled down as a "God-fearing, Sabbath-respecting citizen." James (Camel) Campbell, in his tweed suit, was one of several black captains.
The show's piece de resistance is the 15-foot-long mural of one craft drawn by mules and another in the cradle. Painted for the Wharton Town Hall by Louis Valdemar Fischer, the picture was recently reproduced in The Star-Ledger, much to the surprise of the 87-year-old artist, who hadn't laid eyes on it since completing it in 1938.
With its topographical maps, letters, samples of cargo like the nails that put Boonton on the map as an iron town, this is an encyclopedia, the work of Richard Simon, a museum trustee. But it says little about the Morris Canal and Banking Company and even less about its investors beyond mentioning the financial scandal that resulted in the appointment of Cadwallader Colden as president in 1827. It does, however, report that Washington Irving was on the board, from 1836 to 1840.
"The Morris Canal, New Jersey's Mountain-Climbing Waterway" is on view through Nov. 17. The museum is at 45 Macculloch Avenue and is open Thursday, Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 4 P.M.
Photo: The inclined plane at Port Colden, a photograph in "The Morris Canal, New Jersey's Mountain-Climbing Waterway," an exhibition at the Macculloch Hall Historical Museum.