Enterprising Waters , livre ebook

ENTERPRISING
WATERS
ENTERPRISING
WATERS
The History and Art of New York’s Erie Canal

Brad L. Utter, with Ashley Hopkins-Benton and Karen E. Quinn
Foreword by Thomas X. Grasso
Back cover: New York and the Erie Canal , by William Wall, oil on canvas, 1862. Courtesy of the Arkell Museum at Canajoharie. Gift of Bartlett Arkell, 1934.
Page ii : Detail from a $5,000 canal stock certificate for the enlargement of the New York State canal system, 1869, shown on page xi . This image served as the inspiration for the signature graphic of the Enterprising Waters exhibit, shown on page x . New York State Museum, Mrs. Arnold B. Barben Canal Collection, H-1988.79.
Published by
S TATE U NIVERSITY OF N EW Y ORK P RESS , A LBANY
© 2020 New York State Education Department, Albany, NY 12230
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Utter, Brad L., author. | Hopkins-Benton, Ashley, author. | Quinn, Karen E., author.
Title: Enterprising waters : the history and art of New York’s Erie Canal / Brad L. Utter, with Ashley Hopkins-Benton, and Karen E. Quinn.
Description: Albany : Excelsior Editions, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019037879 | ISBN 9781438478265 (paperback) | ISBN 9781438478272 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Erie Canal (N.Y.)—History. | Erie Canal Region (N.Y.)—History. | Erie Canal (N.Y.)—In art.
Classification: LCC HE396.E6 U88 2020 | DDC 386/.4809747—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019037879
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
book design, Laurie D. Searl
cover graphic, based on the image on page ii, is by Christopher Havens and Ben Karis-Nix
CONTENTS
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction Enterprising Waters: New York’s Erie Canal
Introduction Art of the Erie Canal
Part I Before the Canal
Improved Waterways
Early Supporters of an Inland Canal
The War of 1812
Part II Clinton’s Ditch
The Politics and Funding of Internal Improvements
Settling the Land: Acquisition and Dispossession
An Engineering Marvel
Conquering the Niagara Escarpment
Celebrating Early Achievements
Wedding of the Waters
Early Commerce and Industry
The Windlass and H. G. Root Company
Moving Goods: The Boats That Made It Happen
Canal Stores
The Canal and the Hudson in the Age of Steam
New Ports and Boomtowns
Life on the Canal
Travel and Adventure on the Erie Canal
Winter on the Canal
Immigration Corridor
Canal Fever
Part III The Enlarged Canal
The Politics of the Enlargement
Construction and Engineering of the Enlargement
Commerce and Industry: Industrialization and Agriculture
Mother of Cities
The Rise of Railroads
The Age of Social Reform
Decline of the Canal
The $9 Million Act
Part IV The Barge Canal
The Politics of the Barge Canal
Building the Barge Canal
Barge Canallers
Commerce and Industry on the Canal in the Twentieth Century
Part V Today’s Erie Canal
The Canal’s Legacy: Art, Advertising, and Community Pride
The Erie Canal Today
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
FOREWORD
In 1956, when the Erie Canal was a venerable 139 years old, the Canal Society of New York State was formed in Buffalo. By that time the Erie Canal had undergone many of the changes that would ultimately define it, transforming it from “Clinton’s Ditch,” as it was famously, and derisively, called in its nascence in the early 1820s, to the heavily traveled commercial barge passage of the mid-twentieth century.
So why create a canal society then, in the mid-1950s? In short, the organization formed to share knowledge, serve the public good, and help preserve the canal as well as its epic story—one rich in feats of human ingenuity; in details related to New York’s natural history, geology, and geography; and in expressions of the human spirit through music, folklore, literature, and tall tales, some even rooted in reality.
To fully appreciate what an extraordinary thing the Erie Canal is, one must understand a good bit about the America that spurred its creation. The canal was built at a time when the United States was not only a young country but an entirely new idea put into practice, an unprecedented experiment in self-governance and civic participation and responsibility. Moreover, the young republic took root on the eastern edge of a vast, unspoiled continent, the realities of which—including a stunningly varied landscape abundant in natural resources—were being actively discovered.
The idea for a cross-state canal in New York came early, decades before its construction, owing to two things: the desire for better access to the rich resources of the North American interior and the unique opportunity New York’s natural landscape presented to achieve it. New York is the only state on the Eastern seaboard that touches both the Atlantic Ocean and the Great Lakes. The Hudson River, flowing from its origin in the Adirondack Mountains down through the Hudson Valley, empties into New York Harbor. The Mohawk River cuts east through a large swath of central New York, joining the Hudson at Cohoes, just north of Albany. Especially significant is the fact that the divide at Rome between the Mohawk River and Wood Creek is the lowest pass in the mountains that form the eastern backbone of North America, stretching from Birmingham, Alabama, to the St. Lawrence River. All this is to say, New York was the logical place to undertake a human-made navigable connector. Dig a channel from Albany to Buffalo and you’ve got a water route—so much easier for transport than overland hauling—between the Atlantic and Lake Erie, and beyond.
But for all this natural potential, the Erie Canal’s creation was not preordained, though its economic success was. Human effort—genius, even—was required, and like nearly all things involving humans, there was conflict. The canal’s creation required public approval and state support, and not everyone was on board. The anti-canal faction was strong and dismissed a statewide channel as implausible and therefore wasteful to attempt. Summed up in one allegory: “In the big ditch would be buried the treasury of the state, to be watered by the tears of posterity.”
But in 1810, De Witt Clinton, mayor of New York City, took up the cause. By that time, he had already served as a New York State legislator and US senator, and his political clout elevated the advocacy of earlier ardent canal proponents, leading entrepreneurs and statesmen like Jesse Hawley, Joshua Foreman, and Gouverneur Morris. Their efforts paid off, and in 1817 the state legislature passed a bill authorizing the canal’s construction.
Winning state support was one hurdle; designing an engineering miracle was another. In 1792 the New York State Legislature had passed an act to explore the development of a canal system and in the process incorporated two entities—the Western and the Northern Inland Lock Navigation companies—to survey and study the possibilities. The Northern Inland Lock Navigation Company (NILNC) set its sights toward Lake Champlain, but little was achieved; the Western Inland Lock Navigation Company (WILNC) was charged in the 1792 legislation with “opening a lock navigation from the now navigable part of Hudson’s river to be extended to Lake Ontario, and to the Seneca lake”—virtually the path that would be the Erie Canal thirty years later.
One of the most remarkable of the many remarkable facts about the creation of the Erie Canal is that its engineers were not essentially novices. Although none of the men—Benjamin Wright, James Geddes, Canvass White, John B. Jervis, and others—who contributed to the canal’s design had been formally trained, they were in every sense engineers—practical engineers. They learned on the job, acting as surveyors on the WILNC and NILNC projects plus other civil works, and independently studied the achievements of European engineers, in particular the renowned James Brindley of England. His Bridgewater Canal (1761) heavily influenced the design of the Erie Canal in that it more or less followed the natural level contours of the land, hugging the sides of the landscape’s picturesque hills and valleys.
Through the efforts of the WILNC, the Erie Canal was preceded by several successes to enable inland navigation. For example, beginning in 1792 the company made improvements to the Mohawk River between Schenectady and Rome, facilitating passage over small rifts and rapids, especially for downbound boats. But getting boats upstream remained a challenge; it was difficult but doable with enough effort and, we imagine, a great deal of profanity. The company also constructed three short canals, all under two miles long: Little Falls Canal (1795), Rome Canal (1797), and German Flatts Canal (1798). These early WILNC projects, and others, incorporated many of the essential features that would go into creating the Erie Canal. These projects also proved important because they