During the season of 1818, all but five of the ninety-four miles of Middle Section were grubbed and cleared with these powerful machines; little the wonder, however, for one of the stump machines, costing two hundred and fifty dollars, operated by seven men and two horses, could grub from thirty to forty large stumps a day. Of the eighty-nine miles cleared, forty-eight miles of the line was dug, eight miles being completed and accepted. One ten-mile stretch was half done and one twenty-mile division was one-fourth done. The total estimated expense of the Middle Section was $1,021,851; up to January 25, 1819, $578,549 had been expended; the $443,302 remaining was considered sufficient to complete the section. This division of the canal was completed in 1819; for twenty-seven miles it was navigable and had not the frost intervened, large boats could have traversed its entire length before the close of the year. The expense proved to total up to $1,125,983, an excess over the estimate of $104,132. The explanation of this excess brings out some interesting facts concerning the progress of the work. For instance, the aqueducts over Oneida and Onondaga Creeks had been made of solid masonry instead of wood as stipulated in the estimate. Lack of snow during the winter of 1818-19 had prevented the hauling of much of the needed material. Sickness among the army of workmen had produced costly delays; pioneer conditions prevailed--the fever and ague of those who first invaded the sluggish morasses of the interior of a new continent. Special trouble had been experienced where the canal line approached the low-lying valley of the sluggish Seneca. For thirty-five miles the works paralleled this stream, and pioneers here suffered heavily every fall; of course the laborers on the canal were, to say the least, not more fortified against the miasma and fever than the pioneers who came more or less prepared for such drawbacks. At one time a thousand men on the Erie Canal were stricken down in this region, and in some instances the work on certain "jobs" was entirely abandoned for several weeks.