(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Photo Diary: Erie Canal Discovery Center, Lockport NY [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2022-08-03

The Erie Canal Discovery Center near Buffalo NY preserves a portion of the Erie Canal.

For those who don't know, I live in a converted campervan and travel around the country, posting photo diaries of places that I visit. I am currently in New York.

After the war of 1812, the United States had firmly established control of the area around the Great Lakes. Settlers from the east flooded into the area, and populations began to swell at Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, and other cities.

For thousands of years, the Iroquois Native Americans in upstate New York had utilized the river systems as transport routes, using canoes. The Americans now did the same, carrying cargo on large wooden boats called “bateaux”. These bateaux carried up to 20 tons of grain, lumber and furs to the east coast cities, and carried manufactured goods back to the midwest.

But there were gaps in these river and lake systems which interrupted the trip and made it necessary to laboriously unload the boats, load cargo onto wagons, and travel overland to reach the next river port. It became a serious impediment.

In response, the New York State Legislature, at the urging of Governor DeWitt Clinton, adopted a plan in 1817 for a canal that would connect the eastern seaboard, at Albany, with the midwestern Great Lakes, at Buffalo. Interestingly, the Canal did not follow what would seem to be the easiest route--along Lake Ontario and then the St Lawrence River to the Atlantic. The United States had invaded Canada during the War of 1812 and tensions were still high along the Canadian border, and the Americans did not want their trade routes to be too close to what remained a potential military enemy. So the proposed new canal would lie entirely within New York.

Stretching some 365 miles across the mountains of upstate New York, the pathway would have to rise 560 feet in elevation from the Hudson River in Albany until it reached the level of the Great Lakes in Buffalo, and many engineers did not think it could be done. This included the Federal Government, which refused to help fund the project. The Erie Canal was dubbed “Clinton's Ditch” or “Clinton's Folly”.

Undaunted, the New York legislature passed a series of bills to fund the project without Federal aid, eventually spending some $7 million (a mind-boggling sum at that time). Work began with much fanfare on the Fourth of July 1817. It was decided to build the most difficult portion of the Canal—the series of locks that covered the mountainous central stretch—first, so the project was begun in the small town of Rome NY.

It was a massive technical challenge. Most of the canal had to be dug by hand, by hired teams of laborers. (Dynamite had not been invented yet, and the only available explosive was black powder.) As originally planned, the canal was 40 feet wide at the surface and tapered to 28 feet wide at the bottom--enough to allow two cargo boats to pass each other. It was to be at least 4 feet deep in all places. Since most cargo boats of the time did not have engines, they would be pulled along by teams of mules who would walk along a “towpath” placed at the side of the canal for the purpose.

Since the canal crossed a series of mountain ranges, engineers needed a way to alter the canal's water level and move the boats to a higher or lower elevation. The solution was the “lock”. These were enclosed boxes along the canal which could be sealed at both ends by watertight doors. Boats would enter these enclosed areas, the doors would be shut, and water would be flooded in or out to raise or lower them and allow them to proceed. A total of 83 locks were constructed along the route.

The first section of the Canal to be opened was in 1819: this was a 15-mile stretch from Rome to Utica. By 1823 the section running from Albany to Brockport was finished. On October 26, 1825, a grand ceremony in Buffalo marked the opening of the completed canal. Boarding a cargo boat called Seneca Chief, Governor Clinton inaugurated the first end-to-end trip through the Erie Canal. The entire trip could be made in just five days, and the cost of shipping a ton of cargo from Buffalo to New York City now plummeted from $100 to just $10.

The effect was dramatic. Cargo shipments between Buffalo and Albany skyrocketed, trade networks now reached from the Mississippi River Valley and New Orleans all the way to New York and Philadelphia, and midwest cities like Cincinnati, Erie and Toledo became important shipping centers. The Canal was dubbed by some newspapers as “The Mother of Cities”. Fed by expanded trade from the Canal route, New York City now grew to become the largest in the US, with its population quadrupling between 1820 and 1850.

The Canal also had an unfortunate effect on New York's Native American populations. The Erie Canal cut through the traditional territories of several members of the Iroquois Confederation, including the Oneida, Cayuga, Onondaga, Mohawk and Seneca. These Native Nations had been severely weakened by the recent War of 1812, and when the US decided to remove them and relocate them to “Indian Territory” further west, they were in no position to resist.

Over the decades, as cargo ships got bigger and became motorized, the Canal was constantly widened, deepened and straightened to accommodate them. In 1842 the original lock system was expanded. During the First World War, another wider and deeper Canal with newer locks was dug alongside sections of the original one.

The Erie Canal remained an important trade route until the advent of the railroad network began to diminish its usefulness. By 1870 Chicago had become a major railroad hub, and by 1919 it was the freight train, not the cargo boat, which carried trade between the midwest and the east. The Erie Canal declined in importance, many segments were closed, and others decayed and disappeared. The final blow came when the St Lawrence Seaway was completed in 1959, allowing sea-going cargo ships to enter all the way to the Great Lakes.

Today, the remaining segments of the Erie Canal are protected as the Erie Canalway National Heritage Corridor, established in 2000, and several towns in upstate New York have preserved portions of the Canal as local or state parks. A series of museum sites preserves and interprets some of the remnants of locks, and surviving stretches of the canal are used by pleasure boats and tourist cruises.

One of the preserved sections is at Lockport NY, just outside of Buffalo. At this point, the Canal reached the 49-foot Niagara Escarpment, a high cliff of dolomite limestone (the same geological feature which forms nearby Niagara Falls). To clear the top of the escarpment, a series of five locks were installed. It became known as the “Flight of Five”.

The Flight of Five are now preserved at the Erie Canal Discovery Center in Lockport, as well as the two locks from the 1918 canal built next to them—Numbers 34 and 35. The museum was established in 2002 to renovate and restore the deteriorating old structures, and the locks were completed in 2014. Today the site is run by the non-profit Niagara County Historical Society. There is a tourist paddle boat which carries visitors along the canal and through the locks, a walking trail along the old towpath, and the nearby Visitors Center has exhibits and films depicting the Canal's construction.

Some photos from a visit.

(PS—I had that song running through my head my entire time there: “I got a mule, her name is Sal … “)

The Discovery Center

A game which illustrates how the locks work. I managed not to crash the boat.

The Canal and towpath

The Niagara Escarpment. The same layer of dolomite that forms the Niagara Falls, the Canal had to go over these heights.

The original Canal (and the widened 1842 version) took five locks to clear the top of the Niagara Escarpment. It was known as the “Flight of Five”.

The “Erie Traveler” is a replica of an original cargo boat

When the Canal was widened again in 1918, it only took two locks (Numbers 34 and 35) to get over the Escarpment

The 1842 canal (on right) was paralleled by the 1918 updated version (on left)

The tourist paddleboat enters the lock

Water floods in to lift her to the level of the next lock

The boat moves into the next lock ...

And the watertight doors close behind her

Museum on the locks

Inside the museum

A ‘packet boat’ on display

The town of Lockport grew up around the locks

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/3/2111725/-Photo-Diary-Erie-Canal-Discovery-Center-Lockport-NY

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/