The foreman’s name was John J. Burke, and the headline in the Lockport paper on February 12th, 1912 said he had met death on the barge canal work. When the dynamite blast was coming, Burke was standing somewhere safe. He left that place, led several men who were out in the open away from the danger, and got them clear.
The blast caught him, and he died of his injuries. That is nearly everything the record says about him. The accounts do not give his age, or where he came from, or who was waiting for him at home. Put his story next to another one from the same job, printed in the same paper less than three years earlier.
In October of 1909, two laborers packing holes for a blast were caught when the dynamite went off early. Neither man died, but one lost several fingers. The paper could not give their names. It said the two men worked by number, and that the subcontractor did not know what they were called.
The historian who found both stories made the point plainly: what Burke did says a great deal about how the foremen out on the work felt about their men, whether the company knew those men by name or by number. This was the price of the biggest public works project New York had ever attempted. In November of 1903, the voters of New York agreed to spend $11 million to replace the most famous canal in America, the Erie Canal, and rebuild it far bigger, cut this time by giant steam shovels. They knew what they were giving up.
That canal had turned New York City into the busiest port in the country. And they voted to push it aside anyway. The new one would be 12 feet deep, with locks for boats ten times the size of the old ones. It would be dug by steam shovels riding on rails, by floating dredges tearing through riverbeds, and by thousands of immigrant laborers.
By 1918 it was open end to end. Boats still use it today. If you have ever watched a boat rise through a lock at Waterford or Lockport, you were not looking at the hand-dug ditch. Two people carry the human cost of that work in the records.
One is a woman the state sent out to the labor camps in 1909, who found men sleeping in the mud in shifts. The other is the foreman whose death made that headline in Lockport. On this job, having your name printed in the paper when you got hurt was not something every man could count on. New York was willing to spend that kind of money because the old canal had already lost its fight, and the freight numbers showed it.
In 1869, the New York Central and the Erie Railroads together carried more freight than the canal for the first time. By 1874, each of those two railroads was hauling more tonnage on its own. The canal’s freight had peaked two years before that, at 6,673,000 tons in 1872, and it never got back there. The problem was size.
The canal had already been enlarged once, between 1836 and 1862, to 70 feet wide and 7 feet deep, and the boats working it carried a few hundred tons apiece. A railroad that needed more room just added cars. A canal boat could never get any bigger than the locks it had to squeeze through. The obvious answer was to make the canal bigger again.
And that is where the vote in 1903 gets braver than it looks, because New York had already tried a cheaper version, and it went badly. In 1895, the state started what people called the $9 million improvement, a plan to deepen the canal to 9 feet and lengthen its locks. The $9 million ran out long before the work did. The real cost turned out to be more like $15 or $16 million.
There were accusations of fraud, and when the legislature refused to put in another dollar, the work stopped with more than a third of it still undone. Picture being a taxpayer in 1903. The last canal fix had run dry partway through. Now the state wanted $11 million, about eleven times as much.
The men pushing for it had done their homework. In March of 1899, Governor Theodore Roosevelt appointed a committee on canals, and its report in January of 1900 came down on the side of a much bigger barge canal, built for barges carrying a thousand tons. State Engineer Edward Bond surveyed the route and priced out four different versions of the job. Roosevelt’s successor, Governor Benjamin Odell, pushed the final bill, and at 11:35 in the morning on April 7th, 1903, he signed it.
Then it went to the voters, and the campaign turned ugly. Opponents put out printed notices warning that the canal meant higher taxes, direct and indirect, and telling people to vote no. The campaign against it called the canal “the most stupendous graft ever suggested. ” Farm country turned against it.
In Broome County, where the nearest canal was 75 miles away, people saw no reason to pay for somebody else’s waterway. On November 3rd, 1903, about 1. 1 million New Yorkers went to the polls. New York City came out for the canal in force.
In New York County alone, 252,680 people voted yes and 28,979 voted no. The yes side had an engineering idea behind it, and a lot of old canal men thought that idea was reckless. The idea came out of Bond’s survey, and it sounds almost too simple. The old canal was a dug channel that ran alongside the rivers, because rivers are hard to live with.
They flood. They freeze. Every spring they come down full of ice and debris. Bond and his consulting engineers proposed to stop avoiding the rivers and put the canal inside them.
Plenty of experienced canal men thought that was asking for disaster. The legislature took the gamble anyway. On the finished Erie route, natural rivers and lakes carried the boats for about a third of the whole distance. The biggest of those rivers was the Mohawk.
The easiest way to picture turning a wild river into a canal is a staircase made of ponds. You build a dam across the river, and the water backs up behind it into a long, deep, quiet pool, calm enough for a loaded barge. Farther up the valley, you build another dam and get another pool. And so on, step after step.
Right beside each dam you build a lock, which is the elevator a boat rides from one step up to the next. Behind the dam at Crescent, one of those steps of water ran about ten and a half miles. That plan left two completely different kinds of digging, and the contractors brought a different machine for each. Out in the rivers, the work belonged to dredges, digging machines that float.
Some were ladder dredges, with an endless chain of steel buckets running down into the riverbed and back up again; each bucket weighed more than a ton. Some were hydraulic dredges, with a spinning cutter head that tore up the bottom so the mud could be pumped away. Some were dipper dredges, basically a steam shovel built onto a barge. They had names the way boats do: Tornado, Hurricane, Teddy, Veronica, and Kajjahari.
A dredge could run with up to fifteen men on a shift, and the big ones worked around the clock at Brewerton, on the west end of Oneida Lake. On the land cuts, where there was no river to borrow, the work belonged to the steam shovels. These were machines like the Marion model 60; the model number told you roughly what it weighed, about 60 tons. The shovel rode on railroad trucks on its own set of rails.
It bit into the cut, swung, and dropped each load into small hopper cars on a narrow gauge track, and steam locomotives hauled the trains of spoil away. Where the cut went through rock, the shovels worked beside double boom cranes that lifted the broken stones straight up out of the trench. The state’s own photographers made several thousand glass and film negatives of the work in the western part of the canal alone. In photographs from July of 1910, the old canal is still carrying boats while steam shovels and those cranes widen the cut right down to the water line.
Add up the rivers and the cuts, and the job came to something like 110 million cubic yards of earth and rock to move. J. Lawrence Lee, the historian and engineer who documented the Lockport locks for the National Park Service, sums up the change with a single word swap. In the nineteenth century, the word for construction was muscle.
By the early twentieth, it was steam. Steam did not do everything, though. Men still swung picks, set explosive charges by hand, and drove mule teams hauling scrapers to smooth the bottom of the channel. And the state did not hire those men itself.
It split the job into about 210 separate contracts. Every contractor had to bring his own machines, find his own workers, and house and feed them. That last part is where the story stops being about machines. Most contractors did not go out and recruit laborers themselves.
They used labor agents called padroni, who brought in immigrant workers, a great many of them from southern Italy, and made money off them at every step. The contractor paid the padrone a commission for every man he supplied, and the padrone could charge the man $5 just for the job. He took a cut when a laborer sent money home to Italy, and another when he bought his passage back. He often owned the shanties the men slept in and the store they bought their food from.
A man who did not buy at that store could lose his place. The prices there ran two to four times what the same food cost in town. In November of 1909, the state sent people to look. Lillian Wald went out along the line of the new canal with two other investigators for New York’s Commission of Immigration, and they brought along a photographer named Lewis Hine.
What they found, camp after camp, was a way of living the state had left entirely to the contractors. In one shanty 50 feet long and 20 feet wide, there were 52 bunks in a double tier. In other places the bunks went three high, and the day shift and the night shift took turns sleeping in the same beds. Another had 60 or 65 cots for 100 men.
In one, the windows were shut tight, and there was a single door. One sat flat on swampy ground right beside the canal, in mud so deep the investigators needed rubber boots to cross it. They found the mules had better quarters than the men. The pay for all of that was about $9 a week.
In one of those shacks, an Italian laborer took out his photographs of Rome and of his children and showed them to the visitors. Then he pointed out at the mud and the standing water around the camp and asked them, in two words: “This America? ”
Their findings ran on New Year’s Day 1910 in a magazine called The Survey, with twenty of Hine’s photographs. Wald put her finger on what made the camps possible.
She wrote that the state took great care to prevent the freezing of cement, while it did not care at all how the men who worked for it were housed. She was right, and the contract system is the reason. Under those contracts, housing the men was the contractor’s problem, and the state never made it its own. Men like that were the ones who went into the ground at the very start of the line at Waterford, where the new canal had to climb 169 feet in about a mile and a half.
On June 7th, 1905, the first shovel full of dirt for the new Erie Canal was turned there, where the Mohawk River comes down to meet the Hudson. The lock at the bottom is Lock 2. There is no Lock 1 on the Erie at all; the numbers just start at two. The canal opens with its hardest climb because of the Cohoes Falls.
The Mohawk does not ease into the Hudson. It drops over the Great Falls at Cohoes, 75 feet of rock, and a westbound boat has to get from the level of the Hudson, about 15 feet above sea level, up to the level of the Mohawk above the falls, 184 feet. The old canal made that climb with sixteen locks, and a boat could spend eight hours working its way up them. The barge canal engineers did it with five locks.
Locks 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 sit so close together that the whole flight climbs 69 feet in about a mile and a half, and each lock lifts a boat somewhere between 33 and 34½ feet. The Waterford Historical Museum calls it the highest climb in the shortest distance for canal locks anywhere in the country, and suspects it may be the steepest in the world. For a boat captain, that saved most of a working day. The trip up that had taken eight hours now took about an hour and thirty-five minutes.
The flight opened to boats in 1915, three years before the rest of the canal was finished, and it is still lifting boats today. Getting to the top of Lock 6 only solves half the problem at the east end, though. Up there, a boat is on the Mohawk itself, and the Mohawk is exactly the kind of river the old canal men were afraid of. So the engineers did to the lower Mohawk exactly what Bond had promised.
At Crescent, they built a curved concrete dam 1,922 feet long, with its crest 39 feet above the apron at its foot. The river backed up behind it into a lake that reached all the way to the next dam at Vischer Ferry. That dam was nearly 2,000 feet long, and it made a lake about eleven miles long. With two dams, a wild stretch of river had become two long, flat steps of water.
From there, the canal heads west past Schenectady, past Lock 8 at Scotia and Lock 9 at Rotterdam Junction, through Amsterdam, Fonda, and Canajoharie, toward the biggest single step on the whole canal. That step is Lock 17 at Little Falls. Work on it started in September of 1908, and the crews there had to cut through igneous rock that the 1925 history of the Mohawk Valley calls unusually hard. When it was finished, Lock 17 lifted boats 40½ feet in one step, and it opened as the highest lift lock in the world.
On the old enlarged canal, the same climb had taken four locks. Filled, the chamber holds more than six million gallons of water. The water above the new lock sat 20 feet higher than the old canal’s, and the engineers added a side pool along the south edge to save water on every lockage, a feature that was taken out in the 1950s. A column of water that tall pushes hard against whatever holds it back, so the engineers gave the downstream end a different kind of gate.
Most locks close with a pair of swinging gates that meet in a V. The lower end of Lock 17 uses a guillotine gate instead: one heavy steel gate, counterbalanced, hung from overhead chains and riding on rails, that drops down to seal the chamber and lifts up out of the way so boats can pass underneath it. Building that lock cost about $950,000. On June 30th, 1916, Little Falls threw a party.
Governor Charles Whitman came in on the Empire State Express at one in the afternoon with about twenty officials. Well over 2,000 people turned out that first day, and about 5,000 came over the two days of celebrating. More than 500 people from Little Falls, a town of about 13,000, put on a historical pageant of the Mohawk Valley. The man who chaired the committee behind all of it, Harvey Feldmeier, was the head engineer at the D.
H. Burrell Company in town, and he held 56 patents. Roughly one person in twenty-six in that town was in the pageant. You do not turn out like that for a piece of state plumbing.
They knew exactly what that lock meant for a canal town. One of the most complicated places to build was at the far west end, in a city with a very unusual reason for wanting the canal builders to stay away. That city was Lockport, where the canal climbs the Niagara Escarpment, the long ridge of rock that runs across western New York, and where Locks 34 and 35, the last two locks on the Erie, were built. The trouble was that Lockport drank the canal.
Decades earlier, the city had tapped the canal as its supply of fresh water from Lake Erie, and draining the old channel would cut the city off. So in 1904, before any construction started, Lockport made a deal with the state engineer to hold off the work for two years while it found another source. Digging around Lockport did not start until 1908, and work on the locks themselves began two years after that. Lockport had been shown a wonder once before.
Under that failed $9 million plan in the 1890s, engineers designed a pneumatic lift lock for this spot: two huge chambers balanced against each other on columns of air, so that the weight of a little extra water in the chamber going down would push the other one up. It would have carried a boat over the ridge in a few minutes, where the old five-lock flight took almost two hours. The town school paper printed a drawing of it, a tower of riveted steel lattice. The money ran out, and it was never built.
What actually went up at Lockport were two enormous concrete chambers, each about 310 feet long and 45 feet wide, with walls 39 feet high, and together they lift boats 49 feet. Lockport and Seneca Falls are the only two places on the whole canal system with locks joined end to end like that. The Lockport contract was one of the biggest on the canal, a little over a million dollars. The old stone locks of the enlarged canal, built in the 1840s, had stood there as two flights side by side.
The new locks took the place of one flight. The other was left standing right beside them, and it is still there. The concrete went in section by section. Each block of wall was poured separately, with vertical slots cast into its end so the next pour would key into it, and there was no steel reinforcing bar in any of it.
Decades later, when some of those original blocks were broken up and replaced, crews found scrap wood and junk mixed right into the concrete. Lee says nobody knows whether the contractor’s managers approved of that, or even knew about it. Lockport got something unusual out of the job, too. In 1912, the new bridge carrying Main Street over the canal was extended so another street could cross on it, and the finished structure, which people in town call the Big Bridge, came out about three times wider than it was long.
It was the widest bridge in the world at the time. By the fall of 1913, the contractor at Lockport had the excavation, the concrete, and the steel all done. What the locks did not have yet was the machinery to run them. Part of what made the job so hard is that New York had to build its new canal while boats were still using the old one.
At Lockport, the crews walled off their pit with coffer dams and kept working on the new locks while the old stone flight next door carried the traffic over the ridge. The calendar made the work harder. The old canal stayed open for boats from early May until late October, and you cannot dig out the bottom of a channel while boats are floating in it. So much of the heaviest work happened in winter, from November to April.
When navigation opened again in the spring, as many as two-thirds of the workers could be laid off for the summer. In May of 1910, the Lockport paper ran the headline: “Hundreds of men laid off. ”
At about three in the morning on August 11th, 1910, roughly three miles southwest of Lockport, one of the giant machines on the job gave way. It was a cantilever dredge, the kind the men called a grab machine, about 300 feet long, built by the Brown Hoisting Engine Company of Cleveland, and it had been working around the clock to widen the channel through the ridge.
For reasons nobody could explain, it collapsed into a twisted mass in the canal. Somehow, nobody working on it that night was hurt. The contractor kept going, and the $50,000 machine went for scrap. The men on this job were not always that lucky.
At Scotia, near Schenectady, where the state was building Lock 8 and a dam across the Mohawk, test pits showed the crews would have to go a long way down for a solid foundation. They sank caissons, huge watertight boxes pushed down through the river bottom while men dug out the ground inside them, and some went 82 feet below the surface of the river. Two men lost their lives in one of those caissons. At Little Falls, in September of 1909, one of the main contractors on Lock 17 was fatally injured when a skip, a big bucket hoisting excavated stone out of the pit, broke loose.
The camps boiled over, too. At Waterford in late April of 1908, several hundred Italian laborers, fed up with the padrone’s job fees and the store they were forced to buy from, went after that store in what the Hudson River Maritime Museum’s account of the riot calls a free fight with clubs and fists. Deputy sheriffs were sent in, and the work stopped. And all the while, the money kept climbing.
The original $11 million alone swallowed about 90 percent of the money the voters had approved. The state kept adding to the job, including $7 million more in 1909 to bring the Cayuga and Seneca Canal into the system. Once people started adding it all up, the published totals for the finished canal ran from about $128 million to $170 million, depending on who was counting and what they counted. The pay on that job tells you who stood where.
Lee’s study, working from a history of the barge canal, lays it out. Engineers, foremen, and boat captains made $5 a day or more. Skilled men like stonemasons and steam shovel operators made around $4. Carpenters and deck hands made about $2.
The laborers made about a dollar and a half. The water boys made less than a dollar. The skilled men usually boarded in houses and private homes in town. The laborers lived in the shanties.
The crews around Lockport were a mix of old canal families and new arrivals: Irishmen, some of them from families that had come to western New York to work on the earlier canals, and men from Austria, Hungary, and Italy. Together, those men made up almost half the workforce. It is worth understanding how one of these locks works, because it is the reason one person at a control panel could do what took a crew of men and a team of mules on the old canal, and much of that original machinery is still moving boats at Lockport today. A lock is a box of water with gates at both ends.
A boat heading west, which at Lockport means uphill, floats into the chamber at the bottom, and the gates close behind it. Then water from the higher level is led into the chamber until the water inside matches the level above. The boat rises with it. The upper gates open, and the boat moves out about 24 feet higher than it came in.
Going downhill is the same thing in reverse. Nothing lifts the boat except water running down from the higher level into the box. A standard chamber on the Erie holds something like 2. 7 million gallons of it.
At Lockport, every part of that is big. The gates are made of steel and weigh roughly 50 or 100 tons each. The tallest ones, at both ends of Lock 34, stand 44½ feet high. When a pair of gates closes, the two leaves meet in a V pointing upstream, so the weight of the higher water pushes them shut tighter instead of forcing them open.
Where the leaves meet, and around the hinges, the seal is still made of treated white oak. Each gate leaf is moved by an electric motor of just seven horsepower, working through four stages of gears. Every stage trades speed for force, which is how a motor that small can swing a steel gate that heavy open or shut in about 45 seconds. The water comes through tunnels built right inside the lock walls, 7 feet by 9 feet, controlled by valves that hang on counterweights and take about 82 seconds to slide their full 10 feet.
It enters the chamber through 20 openings spread along the bottom of the walls, 10 on each side, down low, so the water rises gently under the boat instead of throwing it against the walls. For pulling the boats into position, each end of each lock got an electric capstan that could pull with 8,000 pounds of force, worked by a foot treadle so the operator kept both hands free for the lines. Lock 35 carries one more safeguard above it. The canal runs open all the way to Lake Erie, so its upper end has a second set of gates.
If one set ever failed, the other would still hold the lake back from the canal below. The electricity came from the canal itself. At the foot of Lock 34, the state built a small powerhouse with two water turbines, fed by water carried down through the lock wall from the upper level, generating the power that ran the whole flight. On the old canal, working a lock took hard physical effort from a crew of men, and the boats came in behind mules on the towpath.
At the new Lockport locks, one operator, sometimes two, stood at a brass panel with five rotary switches: one for each gate leaf, one for a steel beam that protects the gates from a boat coming in too fast. That brings the story back to the gap at Lockport. By the fall of 1913, the concrete and the steel were finished, but the motors, the gears, and the switches had not arrived. On November 26th, 1913, two boats locked through Locks 34 and 35 anyway.
One was Number 6 of the Empire Dredge and Derrick Company; the other was a derrick boat traveling with it. With no machinery, men did every part of the job. They pulled the boats. They winched the valves open and shut.
They moved those enormous steel gates by hand. It was slow, and it was hard, and it took a long time. The local paper called it “an event of some interest, witnessed by hundreds of people. ” Before a single motor was installed, men did all of the machines’ work to get the first boats through the newest locks on the canal.
The locks at Lockport were in service by 1915, along with the channel east to Rochester. But there was still work left at the western end, between Tonawanda and Buffalo, and it took three more years before a full-sized barge could travel the whole canal. When that day finally came, the country was at war. May 15th, 1918, is the date usually given as the first day full-sized boats and barges could travel the entire length of the barge canal.
There was no grand opening like the one in 1825. By then, the federal government had already stepped in. Early in 1918, worried that the country’s railroads and shipping lines would fall into chaos under the load of the war, Washington took direct control of most of them under William Gibbs McAdoo and the new Railroad Administration. On April 18th, 1918, McAdoo took control of shipping on the Barge Canal.
Four days later, George Ashley Tomlinson, a shipping man from Duluth who had built up his own fleet on the Great Lakes, was named its federal manager. New York kept running the locks, and Washington ran the traffic. The federal government ordered a fleet of new boats. Some were designed to carry about 2,000 tons, when the old wooden canal boats carried about 250.
Others were built out of concrete, because metal and wood were needed for the war. Those concrete barges were smaller, about 150 feet long, carrying up to 500 tons. By 1921, the federal fleet on the canal came to 73 barges, with 27 more being built, and 20 self-propelled barges. The first year’s numbers must have stung.
In 1918, the brand new canal carried about 1,159,000 tons. The old Erie in its best year, back in 1872, had carried more than six and a half million. There were reasons for that. Almost nobody had built the big new boats yet, because nobody builds an expensive boat for a canal that is not finished.
And the war had pushed up the price of everything, boats included. Even after the railroads went back to their owners in 1920, the federal government held on to its concrete fleet and its control of the canal’s traffic for about another year, until early 1921, and private shippers mostly stayed away while Washington was in charge. When the federal fleet was finally sold in June of 1921, it went for $1,400,000, and its steel boats were later sold off and taken to Cuba. Then the canal started doing what its builders had promised.
Canal men like to point out that trains were not always faster than boats. An analysis quoted in Lee’s study found a freight car took about eleven days on average to get from New York to Buffalo, when a canal boat could make the trip in as little as five. Numbers like that did not win over many shippers on their own, but the boats did come. In 1923, a new kind of motor ship, 268 feet long and able to carry 2,600 tons, made the whole run from Duluth to New York.
Big companies started building plants along the canal, and fleets of their own boats. By the middle of the 1920s, Standard Oil of New York was using the canal for all of its oil shipments along the route during the boating season, with oil stations at Schenectady, Amsterdam, Fonda, Fort Plain, Little Falls, and Utica. In 1925, a court ruled that the New York Central Railroad had to accept freight coming off the canal at the state’s terminals, starting with Buffalo. By 1928, the canal was carrying more than three million tons a year, and it stayed at or above that level in all but five years through 1969.
Its best year was 1951, at 5,211,472 tons, and almost three-quarters of that was petroleum. That best year was also where the slide began. In 1961, a committee of the state legislature studied the drop and named what was taking the canal’s business: railroads, rival waterways, particularly the St. Lawrence Seaway, pipelines, and trucks.
The same report said many shippers felt the canal would still be obsolete even after the latest round of improvements. The committee gave an example from Rochester. After a pipeline was extended to the city, only 33,000 tons of petroleum products reached Rochester by canal in 1954. After 1969, the decline never stopped.
Lee’s figures show that ten years later, the tonnage was less than 40 percent of the 1969 total, and ten years after that, it was about 9 percent. Back in the 1950s, New Yorkers had even voted to offer the canals to the federal government, so the Army Corps of Engineers could enlarge them again. The Corps could not justify the cost, and Washington turned the offer down. It would be easy to look at all that and call the rebuild a mistake.
For most of four decades, that canal moved three million tons or more a year. And when the barges finally left, a different kind of boat came onto the water. Before the Second World War, fewer than a thousand pleasure boats a year used the canals. By 1955, that number had almost tripled.
By 1958, it had doubled again. By the middle of the 1990s, more than 12,000 pleasure boat permits were going out. In 1992, the state had created a canal corporation to run and promote the system. The old canal paid a price, too.
Where the new line left the old one behind, towns voted to sell off the old channel and its land. Schenectady filled in its stretch and built a road called Erie Boulevard on top of it. In 1924, Utica voted to keep its old canal lands for streets. That is probably where people get the idea that the Erie Canal was abandoned in 1918.
What happened is that long stretches of the old line were left behind, while the canal itself was rebuilt and kept on running. If you want to see the rebuild today, the place to look is the rivers, and you can follow it west the same way the boats do. Add up every lock between the Hudson and the top of Lockport, and the Erie’s 34 locks have a total lift of 675 feet. Start at Waterford, where Locks 2 through 6 are still lifting boats up off the Hudson every season.
Above them, the Mohawk still lies in the long pools the barge canal engineers made behind the dams at Crescent and Vischer Ferry. Those two dams were built to make power too, about 8,000 horsepower each by 1925. West of Schenectady, the river runs through the movable dams, eight of them between Schenectady and Fort Plain. Each one looks like a steel bridge across the Mohawk, and hanging from it are gates that lower into the water every spring, backing the river up into pools deep enough for boats.
Every winter, the gates are hauled back up out of the water so the ice and the floods can run through. For a few months, the Mohawk gets to be a river again. Putting a canal inside a river was such a departure for New York that the state hired an expert designer, David A. Watt, for these dams.
He took an older kind of movable dam, where the frames sat on the river bottom, turned the idea upside down, and hung the frames from an overhead bridge where the ice could not smash them. Work on the first one started in 1913, at Lock 9 at Rotterdam Junction. At Amsterdam, the movable dam reaches 750 feet across the Mohawk in three spans of 250 feet each. There is a leftover from the war.
Concrete barges from the World War I years lie on the bottom near Rotterdam Junction. Through the navigation season they are underwater, but once the canal is drawn down in late fall, you can see them until the dams go back down in the spring and the river covers them again. At Little Falls, Lock 17 still lifts boats 40½ feet under that guillotine gate, and a trip through takes about 25 minutes. Five miles north of Rome, there is a reservoir that was not there before the barge canal.
Delta Dam rises about 100 feet at its highest point. To fill the reservoir behind it, 295 buildings had to be removed, and it took ten miles of road, seven old canal locks, and an aqueduct with it. That was part of the price, too, paid by the people who lived there. East of there, about 25 miles north of Herkimer on West Canada Creek, the state built a second reservoir at Hinckley, nine miles long and about a third larger than Delta’s.
At Lockport, Locks 34 and 35 are still in service, moving their gates and valves with the original gear drives and electrical controls. One of the people Lee talked with about that machinery was Joel Bayer, the chief lock operator at Lockport. The powerhouse at the foot of Lock 34 is a canal museum now. The old stone flight from the 1840s still stands right beside the new locks, its gates long gone, working as an overflow channel, and the old towpath next to it is an access road.
The Big Bridge still carries the streets over the canal at a spot the city calls Locks Plaza. Down in lower Lockport, two vertical lift bridges built for the barge canal still carry Exchange Street and Adams Street over the water, and about a dozen more like them cross the western end of the canal. Nearby, an old boatyard dry dock that the state bought and rebuilt in the late 1920s is now a shop that keeps the canal system running. Every winter, the canal is drained, and that is when crews do the heavy repairs.
Since the 1960s, old concrete blocks in the lock walls that cracked or crumbled have been replaced with new ones reinforced with steel. At Lockport, you can tell the new blocks from the old ones by eye. The riveted gates have given way to welded ones. The barge canal was built in the same years as the Panama Canal, and Lee points out that the Erie’s locks have more than four times Panama’s total lift, and the Erie cost less than a third as much.
In 2017, the New York State Barge Canal was designated a National Historic Landmark. And it is not off in some wilderness. According to the state’s canal corporation, nearly 80 percent of the people in upstate New York live within 25 miles of the Erie Canal. So go back to that November of 1903, and to a voter holding a ballot that asked him to replace the most famous canal in America.
He was voting for steam shovels on rails and dredges in the riverbeds, for dams across the Mohawk and a forty-foot lift at Little Falls, and for thousands of men who would live in the mud to build it. More than a century later, when people say the Erie Canal is still there, the canal carrying the boats is the one he voted for. As for the first one, the ditch New York dug by hand a century before that vote, that is another story entirely.
