The New Basin Canal, also known as the New Canal and the New Orleans Canal, was a shipping canal in New Orleans, Louisiana, operating from 1830s into the 1940s. History The New Basin Canal was constructed by the New Orleans Canal and Banking Company, incorporated in 1831 with capital of 4 million US dollars. The intent was to build a shipping canal from Lake Pontchartrain through the swamp land to the booming uptown or "American" section of the city, to compete with the existing Carondelet Canal in the downtown Creole part of the city. Work commenced the following year. Yellow fever ravaged workers in the swamp in back of town, and the loss of slaves was judged too expensive; so most of the work was done by Irish immigrant laborers. The Irish workers died in great numbers, but the Company had no trouble finding more men to take their place, as shiploads of poor Irishmen arrived in New Orleans. Many were willing to risk their lives in hazardous, back-breaking work for a chance to earn $1 a day. By 1838, after an expense of $1 million, the wide long canal was complete enough to be opened to small vessels drawing , with $0.375 per ton charged for passage. Over the next decade the canal was enlarged to deep, wide, and with shell roads alongside. No official count was kept of the deaths of the immigrant workers; estimates ranging from 500 to 20,000 and more have been published, with 8,000 being a commonly cited total. Many were buried without a grave marker in the levee and roadway-fill beside the canal. Contemporary immigration records and other primary documents do not support a level of Irish population in the city sufficient to support the upper-end of the estimated deaths. Press reports from the time focused more on labor unrest when Irish workers recruited from Philadelphia went on strike to protest the canal's owner's failure to pay them according to the contracts. While it is certain workers died constructing the canal, the first claim of 10,000 deaths did not come until 1937 in a Times-Picayune article by Meigs O. Frost that included lyrics from a popular song that mentioned 10,000 Irish laborers dying from cholera during the canal's construction. Over the years, press reports rose to as high as 20,000 before dropping to the commonly heard 8,000 deaths. The canal originally joined with Lake